If there’s still any doubt that the two big phone makers – Apple and Samsung – are the ones making most of the money, the latest figures now show that they together gobbled up 52 per cent of global smartphone sales in the last three months of 2012, up from 46.4 per cent three months before.

Research firm Gartner also said earlier today that more than 207 .7 million smartphones were sold in Q4 2012, up 38.3 per cent from 12 months ago. This, unfortunately, did not lift the overall mobile phone market.

Including sales of so-called “feature phones”, there were fewer phones sold in the entire 2012, compared to a year ago. The 1.75 billion phones sold represented a 1.7 per cent fall from 2011, the first decline in three years. …

Mac users who like an alternative to Apple’s Magic Trackpad now have another option in Logitech’s Rechargeable TrackPad for Mac. It is going on sale in Singapore for S$98 in mid-February.

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Apple’s latest update to the iOS, the software that powers all iDevices including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, comes with one or two nice touches, as well as some minor tweaks as well.

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Apple has seemingly become a victim of its own success, going by the pessimism going around this week after its record quarterly earnings.

Yes, despite selling more iPhones and iPads in the last three months of 2012 than before, it has disappointed investors enough for them to dump the stock afterwards. Prices fell to US$439.88 at the time of writing, after a high of more than US$700 last September. …

So, Apple sold five million iPhone 5s in the first weekend, a million more than the four million iPhone 4S devices last year. Apparently, that was below par for stock market punters, who dumped Apple stock just days after pushing it past the US$700 level.

The iPhone 5 is a well-made competitor. In the hand, it feels more solid than Samsung’s Galaxy phones and their plastic finish, and it has a great camera, as the iPhone 4S had. Yet, as we said before, Apple’s new phone just lags in several areas, like having a smaller screen and an operating system that has been playing catch-up (don’t believe me, hear the Apple gurus here).

The most apparent problem that has even the diehards at the Cult of Mac site complaining is the Maps app that is such a poor rival of Google Maps, which Apple junked in spite in iOS 6.

Still convinced you should buy yet another Apple gadget? Well, here are four other phones worth spending your precious dollars on.

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I was on the way to an Office Depot, the most boring store here in San Francisco, when I passed by the Yerba Buena area where Apple was unveiling its new iPhone 5. Past the hype, I walked on round to 3rd Street and picked up a couple of non-magical, non-revolutionary Nexus 7s.

If there’s something to be said about Apple’s event this morning in the United States, it’s that it’s underwhelming. Okay, that’s unfair, seeing that the iPhone 4S launch before that was worse in terms of new features or hardware, but hey, Apple still went on to sell millions of those.

So, warts and all, disappointments and burst bubbles aside, don’t be surprised to see Apple sell loads of the iPhone 5. There are just enough people out there who would buy an iPhone even if it’s a rebadged Blackberry or Nokia. …

One of the key selling points of OS X, ironically, has always been its ability to also run Windows and mission critical Windows programmes, either through dual-booting or virtualisation. If you prefer the latter option and use Parallels Desktop 7 (PD7) to do so, then you’re just one update away from being OS X 10.8-ready.

Parallels just pushed out an update to PD7 (version 7.0.15104.778994) which brings support for OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” and allows users to run Windows 7 and even the Windows 8 release preview side-by-side OS X. …

After months of letting users try it out, Microsoft said on Wednesday that its latest, most ambitious Windows operating system in years will ship on October 26.

The touch-based features have been well covered. But they are perhaps just the tip of the ice berg for upcoming changes in the way PCs will be used in the years ahead.

The other part of the equation is the hardware, and that’s evolving by the month as new laptops, tablets and hybrid devices come out sporting Intel’s new ultra-thin designs.

No one knows for sure how things will pan out. But here are three possible scenarios, based on what we’ve seen so far. …

After weeks of speculation that Apple could bestow its Macbook Pro with Retina displays, the Cupertino-based company finally let the cat out of the bag at its worldwide developers conference yesterday.

Besides a whopping 2880-by-1800 pixels display, the new 15.4-inch Macbook Pros also sport the latest Intel Ivy Bridge quad-core processors, up to 16GB of memory and up to 768GB of flash-based storage. With a side profile of 1.8cm that’s cutting close to Macbook Air’s, there is no room for an optical drive, which Apple has done away with.

There is no LAN port either, so hooking up the Macbook Pro to a wired network will require a Thunderbolt Gigabit Ethernet adapter that can be plugged into one of the two Thunderbolt ports. …

Tired of your MacBook-toting friends boasting about their fast Thunderbolt link that lets them hook up speedy external drives, monitors and a whole host of other stuff?

Well, here’s some good news for DIY desktop builders: Asus will now include the new interface on a number of its motherboards.

Top-end models like the Maximus V Gene will come with a header onboard, called TB_Header, that lets users hook up a connector that enables their custom-built PCs to enjoy the same connectivity.
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