Apple Trumps Android

Apple announced the financial results for fiscal 2012 first quarter, which spanned 14 weeks and ended December 31, 2011. They reported a record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share.

Apple had stellar sales too,  selling 37.04 million iPhones, 128% higher than same quarter of the previous year; 15.43 million iPads, 111% higher over the year-ago quarter; 5.2 million Macs, 26% unit increase over the year-ago quarter; and 15.4 million iPods, 21% unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

“We’re thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Apple’s momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline.”

“We are very happy to have generated over $17.5 billion in cash flow from operations during the December quarter,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the second fiscal quarter of 2012, which will span 13 weeks, we expect revenue of about $32.5 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share of about $8.50.”

Research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech stated that Apple’s share in the U.S. market doubled from a year ago to 44.9% in the October to December period, beating Google’s Android smartphones, which slipped to 44.8% from 50%.

Apple isn’t the only one celebrating, as iOS hackers, Chronic Dev Team, unveiled the GreenPois0n toolkit – a free iOS jailbreak for iPhone 4S and iPad 2.  In the celebratory blog post from the hackers, the author recalled how hard it was to crack Apple’s A5 chip and extended their deepest gratitude to everyone who helped them.

Android Comeback

Cheap Android tablets running on the much talked-about Android 4.0 a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich are said to be debuting this year.

• ViewSonic will be shipping the ViewPad E70, which features a 7-inch screen, a front-facing camera and a microSD slot for expandable storage of up to 32GB, later this quarter.  Price starts at $169.99.
• E Fun’s Nextbook Elite 10 features a 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen that can display images at a 1024-by-768-pixel resolution, Broadcom’s dual-core 1.1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 processor, 8GB of storage, 2.0-megapixel front camera, a 5.0-megapixel back camera and an HDMI port.  Priced at about $229.
• Velocity Micro’s Cruz Tablet T507 features a front camera, up to 1GB of RAM, memory up to 32GB: 4GB of storage for the 7 and 8-inch version, while the 9-inch and 10-inch models will have 8GB, 1GHz processor based on the ARM Cortex-A8 design. The tablets will ship in the first quarter.  Price starts at $179.

If you’re still wondering why there’s so  much hype surrounding ICS, you should take a look at this video.  It shows how a Kinect-hack was used to bring ICS out of the small screen and onto the wall, controlled by hand gestures to deliver real-time response.

“The inventive and involved mod, borne from hacker Recursive Penguin’s desire to demo in-development apps at business meetings, allows for gestures made on a projected interface to be deciphered by MS’ famous add-on, resulting in real-time responses,” Engadget’s Joseph Volpe wrote.

And to wrap up Android news, the Motorolla Droid Razr Maxx, which boasts of  21 hours of talk time and seven hours of video streaming on Verizon’s battery-draining 4G LTE network, will soon debut at Verizon for $300.