Going into the final two months of the year, the oldest product for sale in Apple’s mobile lineup will be the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, which has been on the market for a mere four months. Apple(s AAPL) is also selling an iPhone 5 and iPod Touch and nano that are just one month old, and November and December will bring a brand new iPad, iPad mini, iMac and Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro. It’s probably the biggest single product turnover Apple has ever done in such a short amount of time. But such a remarkable transition also has costs: Apple will, for what the company believes is a short while, make less profit on these new devices than it did on their older siblings.

Following the release of Apple’s fiscal fourth quarter earnings on Thursday, the company also forecast the results for the next quarter. While it predicted it would…

The folks behind News.me announced that they’re closing their iOS App Store(s appl) doors on Wednesday, directing attention away from their curated news app on iPhone and iPad and re-directing focus on Digg curation. They say it’s a direct result of Twitter’s increasingly stringent third-party guidelines and competition with developers in the curation space.

In other words, another Twitter app bites the dust.

“Here’s what it comes down to: we don’t want to invest time and energy into an application that competes with a platform on which it relies,” News.me wrote on its blog.

The company said it will continue to support existing apps that users have downloaded, but it will no longer be available in the App Store. It explained that new display guidelines from Twitter announced this summer meant News.me would either have to devote considerable efforts to make its app compliant, or it would have to…

Apple’s fiscal fourth quarter is somewhat of a mixed bag; as least as far as some Wall Street types are concerned.  The company today announced nearly 27 million iPhones were sold last quarter, but just 14 million iPads, which is far below what many were anticipating. In terms of the numbers, Apple announced revenues of $36 billion and $8.2 billion in profit, or $8.67 per share.

While the revenue was in line with expectations, earnings per share were slightly off: Financial analysts had been anticipating revenue between $34.28 billion and $38.04 billion, and around $8.75 earnings per share.

Here’s the product sales tally:

• 26.9 million iPhones in the quarter, up 58 percent from the same quarter a year ago.
• 14 million iPads, an increase of 26 percent.
• 4.9 million Macs, barely above the same quarter a year ago, just a 1 percent unit increase.
• 5.3 million iPods, which is a 19…

The name of the game right now for Facebook (s fb) is making money, and there’s no question that games will play a large part of that.

“We need to make sure we have a greater set of games for a greater set of people,” said Alex Schultz, who works on user growth at Facebook. “It’s from users to gamers to payers. So how do we optimize that funnel?”

And the company is getting better at getting gamers to pay up, focusing their efforts on quality games and social games, company representatives said in a discussion with reporters Thursday at its Menlo Park headquarters.

Schultz said the company looks at revenue models and user activity for individual games in three ways: “Hit-based” games are those like Farmville or members of a franchise, which require the constant production of new versions to stay profitable (much like the Batman movies, he said)…

Investors are watching Google (s goog) closely to see if the company can adapt to a world where more and more searches take place on smartphones and in apps. Today, the company rolled out an impressive sounding figure but provided few details about what it means.

On an afternoon earnings call, Google announced it had a run rate of $8 billion from its mobile business, consisting of revenue from ads, apps and content.

CEO Larry Page, still hoarse from a voice problem that silenced him for months, stated that the vast majority of that mobile revenue came from ads and that mobile is a “significant portion” compared to desktop ads. He declined, however, to provide specific figures or to disclose the margins Google is making on apps and content in the Play store.

The CEO likewise deflected a question about whether desktop ad revenue had “flat-lined,” and declined to say…

Verizon (s VZ) customers can soon pay for their Android apps as well as any media content purchased on Google (s GOOG) Play with their phone bill: Google confirmed rumors that it was rolling out carrier billing in partnership with Verizon Thursday. On Google+, the company wrote:

“Listen up Verizon Wireless customers: Pay for Google Play apps, books, movies, music, magazines and more right on your Verizon phone bill. Look for “Bill my Verizon Wireless account” as a payment option when shopping in the Google Play Store on your phone or tablet.

Rumors about a carrier billing partnership between Google and Verizon first surfaced earlier this week when Droid Life published an internal Verizon screenshot that hinted at a launch this Thursday. It now looks like most Verizon customers won’t be able to make use of the billing option that quickly. The feature will be rolled out over the next…

Some people carry tablets, some people carry phones. Asus is betting there’s a market for folks that want to carry a tablet that’s actually powered by their phone, making it seamless to get at data, apps and web services on either device. The PadFone 2 is the newest device combo from Asus that offers exactly that, and it launches in December.

The company announced the PadFone 2 on Tuesday and it improves on its predecessor in nearly every way. Yes, there was a PadFone from Asus that launched earlier this year, but the product was mainly sold in Taiwan. Reviews showed some technical glitches and a clunky phone and tablet package. PadFone 2 is sleeker and more powerful, making for a potentially good combination device.

The handset looks like most other high-end thin Android slabs these days, both inside and out.: It’s a 4.7-inch 1280 x 720 Super IPS+…

Who has more clout in spreading the news: the New York Times, the Guardian or Wired? Such questions have been the stuff of cocktail chatter but now, thanks to the rise of Twitter and big data analytics, we have some hard evidence.

In a new study, two University of Arizona researchers use Twitter’s emergence as a “serious newswire” to compare the reach and longevity of news stories tweeted by organizations like Reuters, NPR and the Washington Post. Over a three-week period last winter, the researchers looked at tweets containing story links and found that stories from the BBC and the New York Times (s nyt) were the most widely retweeted.

The study’s authors, Sudha Ram and Devi Bhattachary, also looked at metrics like articles’ half-life to determine the popularity and longevity of a news story. They found that articles from BBC, Mashable and the NYT had the longest life…

Updated: Uber, the San Francisco-based town car reservation service that has recently moved into lower-cost taxis rides, announced Tuesday that it has shut down its New York taxi hailing operation, only months after launching the service. The difficulty in breaking into New York demonstrates the hurdles that startups face working against city regulations for transportation, and especially Uber’s challenges in cities that already have strong taxi cultures.

The company wrote in a blog post that user demand far outstripped available taxis, making it hard to meet the number of requests, and the company was unable to work with the city and get more taxis on the road:

Unfortunately, as many of you have noticed, there haven’t been enough available TAXIs. Demand far out-stripped supply, making you feel pretty lucky when you got a yellow from your iPhone. We did the best we could to get more yellows on the road but New York’s…

BlackBerry developers may be losing enthusiasm for RIM’s(s rimm) newest operating system, BlackBerry 10, which has yet to make its way into a commercial smartphone, but on Tuesday RIM presented its developers with a new option: write code for the connected car.

At the SAE Convergence conference, RIM’s software subsidiary QNX unveiled the new software developer kit (SDK) for its forthcoming connected car application platform, which QNX simply calls Car 2. The platform is an extension of RIM’s BlackBerry WebWorks HTML5 framework, so a developer building an app for the BlackBerry 10 platform could use the exact same HTML and JavaScript tools to create apps for Car 2.

Emulating the smartphone development environment, QNX plans to expose connected car application programming interfaces (APIs) such as to GPS and navigation, car stereo and multimedia functions and even the climate control systems. Finally, QNX plans to launch the equivalent of…

After coming clean and admitting that I’d be flirting with an iPod touch, even though I’m in a serious relationship with Android(s goog) phones, I’ve been looking forward to the new Apple(s aapl) device. I ordered a 32 GB Black and Slate model as soon as Apple began selling them on Sept. 14 and it arrived a few hours ago. I’ve already have enough playtime to form some solid impressions; plus I owned both the prior iPod touch model and an iPhone 4S in the past, so I have a good frame of reference.

In no particular order, here are my initial thoughts on Apple’s fifth-generation iPod touch

• The display is stellar. Apple’s new technique of integrating the touch sensor with the display brings the content even higher to the screen surface. More than ever before, it appears that the icons are simply painted on the screen; they’re that…

Samsung announced a smartphone on Thursday called the Galaxy S III Mini that looks like a smaller version of the company’s flagship phone on the outside, but the internals tell quite a different story. The handset mimics Samsung’s best-selling Galaxy S III smartphone but its specifications indicate it’s clearly aimed at budget conscious consumers. Those hoping for flagship performance in a smaller package will likely be disappointed.

I’d argue that Samsung isn’t targeting performance consumers with the S III Mini. Based on the hardware specifications, I suspect the phone isn’t likely to be sold by a major carrier in the US as the configuration reminds me of phones that launched more than a year ago. Here’s an overview of some specs to illustrate the point:

• 4-inch Super AMOLED display with 800 x 480 resolution
• 1 GHz dual-core processor
• HSPA support up to 14.4 Mbps (theoretical speeds) and no LTE radio
• 5 megapixel auto…