Cheers people.

Exactly.

Even though Android app revenue grew much faster than iOS app revenue, iOS apps still earned over three and a half times the amount that Android apps brought in, according to App Annie’s Index.

Top revenue for iOS games included Clash of Clans, The Simpsons: Tapped out and Puzzle & Dragons, according to the report.

The stock market makes me want to drink… more than usual.

This is hilarious. Much respect to the BBC.

Apple has been granted a service mark in the U.S. for the design and layout of its retail store, reflecting the company’s interest to protect the design of its popular stores from copycat retailers.

Ribeiro brings up China copycat retailers, which aren’t going to be affected by this – this is a U.S. trademark, after all. But China isn’t the only place where Apple’s store design gets imitated – one of the authorized Apple resellers in my area copies the Apple Store pretty closely, right down to colored t-shirts for their employees.

According to new data shared with AllThingsD by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), the average monthly carrier bill of the typical iPhone user is the highest in the smartphone market. iPhone owners spend more on wireless fees than owners of any other handset, be they Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone.

CIRP also points out that carriers “are working hard to make their money back” because of high subsidies on the iPhone.

T-Mobile aims to buck that trend by doing away with phone subsidies this year, and other U.S. carriers are weighing their options too.

The iPad, for all its glory, suffers from one very distinct flaw: It’s very difficult to use for creation.

Bullshit.

[Editor’s note: My apologies. I didn’t look at the date on this article when I posted it. It’s very old.]

U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose yesterday declined to increase the award after she found Samsung’s infringement wasn’t willful. The ruling was one of many post-trial decisions Koh issued yesterday denying both companies’ bids for a new trial and leaving largely untouched the jury’s finding in August that Samsung infringed six mobile-device patents.

Guess Apple will have to settle for $1.05 billion.

Macworld/iWorld kicks off on Thursday and runs through Saturday. We’re not going to be there this year, unfortunately, but if you’re in San Francisco and plan to attend, have a great time.

And people think Apple doesn’t give enough information.

Amazon misses its earnings, income fell, sales missed Wall Street consensus and… the stock price goes up 6 percent.

Apple sells a gazillion of everything, reports record revenue and profit, and its stock falls.

I talked to one of the guys doing these straps at NAMM last week and he said everyone had the same look I did when told they were made of wood. He said they were very comfortable though. As you can see, Santana uses one.

I agree with Gruber. Every design decision involves some element of compromise. Microsoft seems to have compromised a lot, though.

Office 365 Home Premium, which includes such familiar programs as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Access, will be offered with a yearly subscription fee. Instead of buying Office flat-out as you did in the past, you will pay a $99.99 annual charge, which buys you automatic software updates, 20GB of extra storage on SkyDrive (Microsoft’s Cloud storage service), 60 Skype world minutes and use of all the Office programs on up to five computers or tablets.

This new apps are relegated to Windows devices specifically, but the service is available for Mac users – initiating a subscription gives you access to the Office 2011 apps which have been around for a while, and, presumably, new versions as they are released. The company continues to offer Office standalone software, as well. There’s a small business edition that costs $150 instead.

This comes almost a year after Adobe launched Creative Cloud, providing access to its Creative Suite applications via a monthly subscription fee, rather than charging a huge sum up front for a software license.

Editor’s note: Explained that the service is available for Macs, which use older software.

I had it all planned out. Inspired by Macworld contributor Joel Mathis’s recent piece on the subject, I was finally motivated and ready to cancel my cable television subscription. It didn’t work.

When I’ve haggled with Comcast about the cost of my package they’ve countered enough to make me keep my service. Plus they’re the only game in town for high-speed Internet (DSL doesn’t cut it and we’re a long way off, if ever, from getting fiber to the home in my area). So I can relate to Lex Friedman’s frustrations here.

Apple on Tuesday announced plans to introduce a new fourth-generation iPad model with 128GB of storage, twice the capacity of its previous high end model. The new version goes on sale Feburary 5, 2013 for $799 for Wi-Fi only and $929 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model.

Besides the additional storage capacity, the iPad is a standard fourth-generation model. It comes equipped with a 9.7-inch “Retina” display with 2048×1536 pixel resolution. Under the hood is Apple’s A6X dual-core microprocessor, with quad-core graphics. The iPad comes with front and rear-facing cameras and a Lightning connector.

The 128GB model will be available for $100 more than the 64GB model, which will remain in production.

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Today’s the day that your cost-free tweeting about red signals comes to end, as Virgin Media begins charging for its WiFi service on the London Underground.

Virgin Media, Vodafone, EE, T-Mobile and Orange customers can stay connected for free; everyone else pays for the privilege using daily, weekly or monthly rates.

“As soon as we closed down the earlier Mac beta, we had always planned from that moment to develop a native Mac client that would actually be able to serve the needs of Mac players. We knew it was going to take some time, but we wanted to do it right.”

Great news for Mac gamers who have envied their PC counterparts since 2009, when League of Legends first broke on the scene. League of Legends is a popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA). Riot Games, the game’s developer, now counts 12 million LoL players a day.

First, the good news. The legal shield for jailbreaking and rooting your phone remains up – it’ll protect us at least through 2015. The shield for unlocking your phone is down, but carriers probably aren’t going to start suing customers en masse, RIAA-style. And the Copyright Office’s decision, contrary to what some sensational headlines have said, doesn’t necessarily make unlocking illegal.

Mitch Stoltz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explains how legal protection has expired for U.S. citizens who unlock their own phones without their carrier’s permission; what it means going forward and how the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) affects American consumers.

Following iOS 6.1’s release to the general public on Monday, Apple said that iOS 6 is now shipping on more than 300 million devices worldwide. That includes iPhones, iPod touches and iPads. Apple’s has shipped 500 million iOS devices in total, which would indicate that more than half of all iOS devices – about 60 percent – are running iOS 6.

A recent report in the Economist penned by Glenn Fleishman says that according to Google’s own data, the same percentage of the 600 million Android devices ever made – about 360 million units – run operating system releases prior to version 4.0. Fleishman says it’s a security risk, because Google is unable to serve those older devices with patches and system updates, often by design from their manufacturers or the system carriers they’re operating through.

During Apple’s previous quarterly call in October, Cook told analysts that iOS 6 had been downloaded to more than 200 million devices, and called it “the fastest software upgrade rate in history, that we’re aware of.” In a statement, Apple senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller echoed Cook’s comments, saying that iOS 6 “may be the most popular new version of an OS in history.”

Jim and I have previously brought you news about our friend Corey Tamas’ fundraising efforts for his band Dragonfly’s album, “Amplification.” Now it’s available for download through bandcamp.com. Twelve Canadian dollars gets you 14 tracks of, as the artists describe it, “hard rock and heavy metal songs with eastern influences woven through.”

Check it out.

The Ohio Players frontman Leroy “Sugarfoot” Bonner died Saturday in his hometown near Dayton, Ohio, according to his Facebook page. He was 69. No cause of death was announced.

The Ohio Players helped define the sound of 70s funk and were hugely influential to generations of artists. “Fire” and “Love Rollercoaster” are their two best known tracks, the latter famously covered by the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the 1990s.

Some jackass wrote this review for Macworld.