According to a source close to 9to5Mac who’s working at Foxconn, there are a few pre-production handsets of the next iPhone, currently being called the iPhone 5, circling around. While differing in size and overall design by a bit, most of these sample handsets have one thing in common: a screen size of 4-inches or bigger, and that it has a straight body design, not a teardrop shape that tapers on one end (like the MacBook Air).

Another thing of note was that not one of the samples had the same form factor as the iPhone 4/4S, meaning that a complete redesign is in order.

She's not the source.

Going with the same lead time as the iPhone 4S, whose production started ramping up till late spring of last year, 9to5Mac assumes that there is a good possibility that the iPhone 5 will be released like the older versions, i.e. a summer/ WWDC announcement.

While this is currently still being treated as a rumor, the same source also indicated last year that the next iPhone release will be an iPhone 4S, contrary to the iPhone 5 rumors abound. Given some credibility, one can likely take this rumor with a smaller grain of salt than usual.

Apple today announced its financial results for Q4 2011 and the numbers are nothing short of record breaking. The Cupertino-giants upped their revenue from $26.74 billion from the same period in 2010, to $46.33 billion last year.

The company’s main sales hero was, of course, the iPhone, selling 37.04 million units across all the varieties. Apple also sold 15.4 million iPad tablets – a boost of 111% from last year. The iPod range continued to do well, selling 15.4 million units, with Mac computers tailing along as usual with 5.2 million unit sales.

The profits doubled as well, with the company making a cool $13.06 billion, compared to $6 billion in same quarter last year.

CEO Tim Cook is obviously pleased and has emailed his employees congratulating them for their efforts.

Team,

Tim

Unfortunately, we hardly ever get any sales or other market information about the Middle East and that’s also true for Apple. The iPhone 4S was introduced not long ago, and it’d be so interesting to know how well it has done.

Unless Apple changes its policies and practice in terms of sharing sales figures for the region, we’re left with what we can gather from other corners of the world.

If we look at some of the latest smartphone sales figures from the U.S., I think you will be surprised.

TechCrunch has published figures by research firm NPD that show that iOS came out on top in the October-November 2011 time period with a 43% market share in the U.S. Android is still ahead though with 47% share, which is down from the 60% it had in Q3.

What’s also very interesting – although not very surprising – is that smartphones are occupying an increasingly large part of the mobile handset market. In other words, we buy more smartphones and less featurephones and other mobile phones. In fact, two out of three handsets sold in October-November were smartphones, up from 50% the year before, according to NPD. Furthermore, nine out of the top ten phones sold in the period were smartphones.

That’s a lot of smartphones, no matter how you look at it.

For me the biggest surprise, however, when looking at the NPD numbers is that Apple occupies the top three slots of top models sold. The iPhone 4S is number one, followed by iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS occupies the number-three position.

Yes, that’s Apple ahead of all the Android handsets, including those from Samsung, Motorola, HTC, and LG, and that with its iPhone 3GS, a phone introduced in 2009.

That sure surprised me.

We hear so much about the Android juggernaut, that Android is outselling iPhone, and there’s no doubt that Android has come a long way in a short period of time. And even though I am an Apple fan and currently an iPhone 4S user I occasionally stray over to the Android side, mainly due to the wide range of hardware that is available.

Google executive Andy Rubin posted on Google+ that 3.7 million Android activations were carried out on December 24 – 25, 2011. That’s an amazing number, but it seems that iPhone still trumped Android for the holiday sales, as well. For in-store sales at AT&T in U.S., supposedly 66% was iPhone.

But don’t think for a second that Apple and iPhone now somehow beat Android. Sure, Apple has raked in more money to its already burgeoning war chest, and Android may not be top of all the charts, but the force that is Android will be hard to stop. Just look at all the new devices – from smartphones to tablets and beyond – all running Android, which were introduced in Las Vegas.

However, for now, let Apple bask for a second in the glow of having the top three selling mobile phones in the U.S. for the October-November 2011 period.

Photo by Yutaka Tsutano.

While Samsung’s army of lawyers are busy battling patent wars with Apple, it’s marketing division is waging it’s own little war against the Cupertino giants, although in a wholly unharmful-to-the-industry-way, and a lot more hilariously.

In this new advertisement for the Galaxy S II, a bunch of sheepy looking iPhone users are shown camping outside their local Apple store, with only the company of each other and the “first” unboxing video of the device they have been waiting for. That’s when a camper’s roommate steps in, strutting a brand new Galaxy S II. Things get Samsung’ed after that.

Check it out:

After a long, long wait, greenpois0n has finally released the untethered jailbreak for iOS 5.

Before you go ahead, hacker pod2g had some slightly worrying news on his blog, “A tool named Absinthe and developed by the Chronic Dev Team will install the untether on your device. Also the iPhone Dev Team will release a CLI (command line) tool to help diagnose issues and repair things if it goes wrong. This is a little scary I know, but the chance you break something is really small, since we made lots of tests to verify the process on different devices. But it is the first time we use the backup/restore functions of iTunes to install software, and there are maybe things we are not aware of. As you already know, different security researchers put a lot of energy to work out the different issues we had to install the untether on new devices.”

If you happen to know an iPhone 4S that runs on iOS 5.0, 5.0.1 (9A405 and 9A406 versions) or the iPad 2 WiFi/GSM/CDMA that runs oniOS 5.0.1, they should happily unwind with the aptly named Absinthe.

Currently, only the Mac version of it is online but Windows/Linux versions should appear soon. The process is quite long compared to previous jailbreaks so be sure to have a fully charged device.

You can download the jailbreak from the site, and follow these steps.

For the first, Apple has come out with a list of all their component suppliers for their entire product range. As part of their “Supplier Responsibility” report released yesterday, Apple has also disclosed various audit procedures in place for maintaining certain work policies (ethical and safety) in place.

“Apple is committed to driving the highest standards for social responsibility throughout our supply base. We require that our suppliers provide safe working conditions, treat workers with dignity and respect, and use environmentally responsible manufacturing processes wherever Apple products are made.”

In 2011 Apple conducted 229 audits, including surprise audits, an 80% increase over 2010′s 127 audits.

To see a list of all (97% actually) Apple’s suppliers worldwide, check out this report. As for the audit report itself, which covers a whole host of working conditions and safety protocols, and even the results of these audits and failures reported therein, check out this report.

2012 has the potential to become one of the best years for Apple fans. With the amount of products refreshes as well as one possible new device, there are plenty of reason for iFans to work hard and save up some cash for these devices this year:

iPad 3

Apple usually refreshes the iPad in the first quarter of the year and hopefully, this year should be no different. From what the rumor-mill is suggesting, the new iPad should have a retina display giving it the same gorgeous screen that the iPhone 4 sports. To power that high of a resolution, you also need some serious hardware so a quad-core equipped iPad doesn’t sound too out of place. Cameras should also be hopefully updated considering the number of people that actually take pictures from their iPad and how bad they currently are. Other than these visible changes, Apple will probably add Bluetooth 4.0 for low power connectivity with other expected devices.

MacBook Air & MacBook Pro

Intel is launching their Ivy bridge CPU in April so it’s a given that Apple will update their notebooks. However, the question is whether we will see a 15″ version of the Air or the MacBook Pro line slimmed down. With this new generation of CPUs, the graphics horsepower would have improved enough for the Air to start competing with the Pro so Apple will need to decide which direction to take. Remember, Steve Jobs stated that the Air is the future design direction for Apple laptops and the army of wanna-bes in the form of Ultrabooks certainly suggests that Apple will make its move.

iOS 6

Towards the summer, Apple will hold it’s annual event detailing the future of their new mobile OS. I honestly don’t know what they will show but with iOS breaking away the requirement for a computer to activate it, my guess is that Apple will try and make their new devices more computer-like. At the top of my wish list sits an accessible file system that could hopefully allow us to add attachments of any kind to email without jail breaking the device. Also, the UI of iOS is getting a bit old and now that Google has hired the WebOS design guru Matias Duarte, it might be time for Apple to show what they have been working on.

iPhone 5

Wth no change in the form factor, The iPhone 4S didn’t create much of a stir on the Internet on the design front. However, this year should be different and Apple is expected to change the design of the iPhone. Will it sport a bigger screen or do away with the home button is anybody’s guess, but do expect to see a new iPhone that also looks new this time around.

iTV

If introduced, the iTV will be the product that the tech industry will talk most about this year. My guess is that Apple will heavily involve Siri- you will probaly be able to tell your iTV to bring up an episode of Lost when Locke opens the hatch instead of remembering episode number. Or telling it to get details of the comedian/politician that is on your screen at that time. There is plenty of potential with what Apple can possibly do with iTV.

New iPods

Last and certainly not the least, we should be expecting new iPods especially since we didn’t see any new models in 2011. While the iPod touch will probably be something between an iPhone 4s and iPhone 5, what I am really interested in is the new Nano. Using the low powered Bluetooth 4.0 the Nano could easily beome the Siri enabled device on your wrist that communicates with your iPhone or iPad and get things done. It could become the window to your other, more powerful iDevice.

So there you have it- a list of potential devices that Apple might be releasing this year. What do you think? Is there one that you don’t agree with or one that you think I might have missed out on?

I remember when Apple announced the iPhone 4S some time back and how “disappointed” many of the users on my Twitter timeline were. I kept insisting that it was actually a pretty decent upgrade and even though it looks identical to the iPhone 4- the new internals justified the new iPhone. Thus, I was amongst the first people in line to pick up the new iPhone 4S when it was officially announced for the UAE market. It’s been two weeks since then and I figured that was enough time to write about the device.

Lets start with the pricing and plans for the iPhone 4S- the iPhone 4S is available in capacities of 16GB, 32GB and 64GB in black and white. You can purchase the device from either Etisalat, du or directly from Apple.  The following table lists the price of the buying the device outright from the carriers or Apple.

If you don’t want to commit to any data packages, the Apple Store deal is the cheapest, however, du gives you 1GB of free data per month for a year (as long as you spend over 100 Dirhams per month with them) while Etisalat gives you 500MB of data for the first three months with no strings attached. Other than purchasing the unit outright, Etisalat also offers a discount if you sign up for an annual commitment on a post-paid line. While du also offers something similar, it is only for business users and not the consumer so I’m not going to go into that, however you can click here and find more on that if you’re interested. The following table lists plans by Etisalat.

I chose to go with Etisalat’s plan 2 which I think offers a pretty good mix of data and voice at a decent price. Having owned the iPhone 4 in black, I chose white for iPhone 4S simply to have something a little different and while I like the white iPhone 4S, I think black still looks better- but that is just my personal opinion or maybe I need time for it to grow on me

Looks-wise, the iPhone 4S is almost identical to the iPhone 4 and you would need a really sharp eye to spot someone carrying one from the other. It has identical dimensions and is just 3 grams heavier which is something you won’t notice even if you’re holding both phones together. Apple has slightly lowered the position of the volume buttons and the mute key on the iPhone 4S while the surrounding antenna has more partitions and in different places- probably to fix the antenna-gate issue that popped up in the iPhone 4 for some. Some of my colleagues carrying the iPhone 4 are happy that Apple hasn’t change the design on the 4S as it doesn’t make their device look like last year’s model, which I think is fair to the consumer and so much better than a companies that replaces their top-of-the-line device every quarter.

Even the packaging on the iPhone 4S is identical to the previous model- with the exception of 4S written on the box instead of 4. You get the USB plug, the iPod cable and that pin to remove the micro-SIM tray from the iPhone along with the usual warranty and quickstart guides.

Intel has been behind the curve when it comes to mobile processors in smartphones and tablets. While their success in the desktop and mobile processors for laptops is undeniable, other manufacturers like ARM, Texas Instruments and Nvidia have taken up huge chunks of this incredibly growing market.

Recently Intel provided reference design smartphones and tablets to various manufacturer with their ‘Medfield’ processor powering Android Gingerbread. ”We expect products based on these to be announced in the first half of 2012,” said Stephen Smith, vice president of Intel’s architecture group to Technology Review who were lucky enough to check out the prototype in person.

“The phone was powerful and pleasing to use, on a par with the latest iPhone and Android handsets. It could play Blu-Ray-quality video and stream it to a TV if desired; Web browsing was smooth and fast. Smith says Intel has built circuits into the Medfield chip specifically to speed up Android apps and Web browsing.” Apparently the Medfield was optimized to improve the browsing experience on Android smartphones, as well as running apps faster.

As far as the Medfield powered tablet is concerned, it was seen running Android Ice Cream Sandwich. While the screen size was slightly larger than the iPad 2, it was just as thin and light. “They can use as much or as little of the reference design as they like,” says Smith.

“This is our first offering that’s truly a single chip,” says Smith. The 32nm process is smaller than the currently popular 40nm process used by ARM processors, which means the Medfield runs much cooler and with lesser energy draw than its current competitors.

We will probably start production prototypes from various manufacturers as early as next month during CES, with large scale retail units out in the next 6 to 7 months. Could, the Medfield powered Android Ice Cream Sandwich tablet be the one hinted by Eric Schmidt as Google’s tablet of choice coming out in the next 6 months?

The holiday gift giving season is usually a mad rush of people trying to figure out at the last minute what to buy their loved ones. It could be something small, or something extravagant, but whatever the cost, a gift should show always be something considerate.

In this gift guide I’ll be covering a wide range of prices, each of which is provided by different types of people. And by that, I mean that not everyone can afford to give an expensive camera, nor can just one person give a gift. Maybe family members or friends want to chip in and give something big.

As such, I have created 4 categories for each price range, where giving that gift will be financially viable. So here they are:

- Friends: Price range AED 50 to 1,000. From school kids to working adults, everyone has a price range where they can give gifts to their pals, something special for this holiday season.

- Couples: Price range AED 200 to 5,000. I’m assuming here that even if one partner is working, the other will have enough savings to buy a small gift. In any case, it’s the thought that counts.

- Family: Price range AED 1,000 to 10,000. Here I’ll be looking at gifts that can be gifted by just the parents, or even combined with older siblings who’re working. The idea is the gift can be used by the rest of the family members as well.

With that sorted out, I’d just like to mention that I have chosen gifts that can be used by both our male and female readers, hopefully catering to the interests of both audiences. And despite being a technology centric site, not all the gifts are techy gadgets.