Tim Conneally

At Apple's "Let's talk About iPhone" event today, CEO Tim Cook revealed the sheer size of Apple's reach by announcing the company has sold 250 million iOS-powered devices. Interestingly, though the event is dedicated to iPhone, the iPhone makes up only a small part of this total.

Naturally, the biggest segment of this comes from the iPod, which commands a 78% percent market share in the personal media player business. Cook said some 300 million iPods have been sold around the world, and 45 million of them were sold in the year that ended in June.

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Today, Apple is expected to announce its new iPhone somewhat more quietly than it has in the last couple of years, with no live webcast for the world to tune into, relying instead on the traditional press conference to get the word out.

Of course, the very existence of the press conference is enough to send the rumor mill into a frenzy, and speculation about Apple's "Let's talk iPhone" event today has conjured up quite a few fantastic stories.

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Adobe has debuted a family of six new applications it has developed for mobile tablets called Adobe Touch Apps, which mimic some of the professional creative functions of Creative Suite.

The scene-stealing app is Adobe Photoshop Touch, which gives Android tablet and iPad users the ability to apply popular edits and effects to photos just as they would in the full Photoshop. It adds a new exclusive extraction tool called "scribble selection", which lets users scribble over what they want to keep in the picture while everything else is removed.

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The Institute for Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics, a collaboration between Texas' Rice University and Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, announced on Monday that they are getting ready to produce their low-price, low-power tablet for Indian schools.

This is unrelated to the fabled "$35 tablet" that was shown off by India's Human Resource Development Minister, Kapil Sibal last year, but one that Rice University scientist Krishna Palem debuted at roughly the same time called the I-slate.

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Subscription music service Rhapsody announced on Monday that it has signed an agreement to acquire Napster from Best Buy. Though financial details were not disclosed, Rhapsody said it will acquire Napster and its subscribers and assets, which will merge into Rhapsody, and Best Buy will receive a minority stake in the service in exchange.

Best Buy purchased Napster and its 700,000 paying customers three years ago for $121 million, after the trailblazing peer-to-peer file sharing service converted into a legal, legitimate for-pay music service. One year after the acquisition, Best Buy slashed Napster's subscription price to just $5 per month to make it more attractive to consumers.

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LightSquared, which could become the newest built-from-scratch nationwide mobile broadband network if it can achieve regulatory approval, has partnered with Japanese consumer electronics maker Sharp for the network's 4G LTE consumer devices. This announcement comes one year after Lightsquared announced its first hardware partnerships with Qualcomm, Nokia, AnyData and BandRich.

“Sharp has a rich history of producing unique products that push the extremes of design and functionality, and we’re proud that they will be developing innovative devices for LightSquared’s 4G-LTE network,” said Sanjiv Ahuja, chief executive officer of LightSquared. “LightSquared’s wholesale-only business model and open network will provide Sharp with a platform from which they can aggressively expand into the U.S. wireless market with an exciting portfolio of smartphones and tablets.”

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At the close of Elements 2011, Intel's developer conference aimed at the AppUp app store community, AppUp GM Peter Biddle announced that Intel has acquired Israeli navigation and location services provider Telmap.

The acquisition is part of Intel's strategy to grow its software and services portfolio in a meaningful and (most importantly) multi-platform way, where there won't be too much market consolidation on the consumer side, and the app developer side will be given a richer set of tools to work with.

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At Samsung's Mobile Solutions Forum 2011 in Taiwan, the South Korean consumer electronics leader revealed some major new components that it will use in its next generation of smartphones and mobile tablets: a new dual-core applications processor, and a new 16 Megapixel CMOS sensor and new forward-facing camera sensor, a new 64 GB flash memory module. and a new 4 Gigabit low power DDR3 DRAM memory unit.

These components find their way into all types of mobile devices, and not just those with the Samsung brand stamped on them; so here is what will be going into new devices next year...

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By Intel's own admission, its attempt at an app store has been a flop. Even though the company supplies the processors for more than 80% of the PC market, it has barely even scratched the surface at bringing a solid method for software distribution to all those devices it powers.

Intel launched AppUp in 2010, hoping to capitalize on the popularity of netbooks, and to bring some of the success of the popular mobile app store to them.

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Online retailer Amazon on Wednesday officially launched its first Android tablet, the 7" Kindle Fire.

Taking its name from the company's already successful line of e-readers, the Kindle Fire introduces a handful of new features to the Android tablet business.

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Amazon on Wednesday unveiled the fifth generation of its dedicated Kindle e-readers: the $79 Kindle, the $99 Kindle Touch, and the $149 Kindle Touch 3G. All three go up for pre-order today and will begin shipping on November 21.

The three models each offer the latest high-contrast 6" E Ink Pearl display and an even smaller profile than previous versions, but they're not all the same. The low-end Kindle offers a much smaller chassis, and weighs only 5.95 ounces, while two flagship models, Kindle Touch, and Touch 3G, have infrared touchscreen interfaces like the Nook Simple Touch and Sony Reader and slightly larger bodies.

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Here's a quick mobile Linux primer: Intel had Moblin, Nokia had Maemo, they joined forces and formed MeeGo. After a year, Nokia dropped out because development was too slow and it allied with Microsoft.

Now, Intel is dropping MeeGo and allying with the Linux Foundation and LiMo Foundation in support of a newer mobile Linux OS called Tizen.

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Nokia officially launched the N9 today, the Finnish mobile phone maker's first (and potentially only) smartphone to be powered by mobile Linux distribution MeeGo.

The slick N9 impressed us quite a bit when it was announced back in July: 3.9" (854 x 480) AMOLED display with convex Gorilla Glass, a 1 GHz TI OMAP3630 processor, 1GB of RAM, 16 or 64GB of storage, an 8 Megapixel flash camera, and front-facing chat cam, and global wireless support. It will be available in 20 countries for €480 (16GB) or €560 (64GB).

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Following extensive leaks earlier in September, T-Mobile and HTC finally made an official announcement that provides the launch date and price for the HTC Amaze 4G, T-Mobile's latest HTC exclusive.

Going up for pre-sale on October 10th, and for regular retail on October 12th, the Amaze 4G will cost $259 after a $50 rebate and new two-year service contract with T-Mobile. Though it's a somewhat steep price; the power and feature set somewhat justify the expense.

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Monday, Amazon and Netflix, two major competitors in the video streaming space announced new content partnerships that broaden their catalogs and represent the next generation of carriage agreements that occur every three years in the cable and pay TV business.

Amazon announced it had signed a licensing deal with 20th Century Fox that would bring streaming movies and TV shows to its Amazon Prime Instant streaming service. It will join CBS, NBCUniversal, Sony, Warner Brothers, and Amazon's other current partners, who now bring a total of 11,000 movies and TV shows to the premium service.

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