Apple is now No. 4 in global handset shipments -- not smartphones, but all mobiles. The share gains also put Apple ahead of Research in Motion in third-quarter data that IDC released late yesterday (presumably while I covered Microsoft earnings). Apple's ascension pushed Sony Ericsson out of the top 5 for the first time since IDC started tabulating mobile shipments six years ago. The top 5 achievement is huge validation for Apple, which before the June 2007 release of the original iPhone had no presence in the global handset market.

However, the more significant measure is yet to come, and it might explain comments CEO Steve Jobs made during last week's Apple earnings conference call. Jobs expressed displeasure about how some analyst firms count phones. "Unfortunately there is no solid data on how many Android phones are shipped each quarter," he asserted. "We hope that manufacturers will soon start reporting the number of Android handsets that they ship each quarter. But today that just isn't the case. Gartner reported that around 10 million Android phones were shipped in the June quarter, and we await to see if iPhone or Android was the winner in this most recent quarter."

[Editor's Note: This was a live document from about 4:36 p.m. EDT to 5:50 p.m. Refresh page for updates.]

Microsoft started fiscal 2011, which first quarter closed on September 30, ahead of analyst consensus. Slower PC shipment growth didn't take the spark out of Windows revenues, and Office 2010 delivered during its first full quarter of license sales. Microsoft announced earnings after the bell, setting a record executives won't be touting: Revenues fell below Apple, by more than $4 billion, yet another sign that the aging Office-Windows-Windows Server applications stack is declining in relevance before cloud-connected mobile devices.

The Federal Communications Commission announced Thursday that Verizon Wireless will be paying a $25 million settlement to the U.S. Treasury, and a refund to some 15 million customers totaling at least $52.8 million as an answer to the "mystery fees" it has been charging its customers for the last three years.

"Today's consent decree sends a clear message to American consumers: The FCC has got your back," said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski today. "People shouldn't find mystery fees when they open their phone bills -- and they certainly shouldn't have to pay for services they didn't want and didn't use. In these rough economic times, every $1.99 counts."

Mint.com today has rolled out the beta of a new service called Mint Data that takes the tons of anonymous shopping data it receives, and turns it into a searchable database of retailers. Similar to the way Amazon's Alexa categorizes the popularity of a website by its unique visitors, total views, and inbound links, Mint Data ranks a retailer's popularity by the average purchase price and number of purchases per month.

The information comes from the anonymous spending data of the more than 4 million Mint users, and Mint breaks it down into which categories people are spending their money on (such as food, dining, entertainment, etc,) the specific businesses that they're patronizing, and the city in which they're spending their money.

Google today announced new administration controls in Google Apps to help Google Apps Premier customers securely deploy and run Android 2.2 devices in the workplace.

With the new functionality, administrators can remotely wipe all data from lost or stolen devices, lock idle devices after inactivity, and require passwords (of varying strength) on each device. This functionality can be added to either company-issued devices, or personal ones.

At the Professional Developer Conference PDC10 Today, Microsoft rolled out an updated Internet Explorer 9 platform preview and Internet Explorer Test Drive website to let Web developers test their sites with the most current technologies that may not yet be in the public beta of Internet Explorer.

Among the updates in Platform Preview 6, two new HTML5 features have been included: CSS3 2D Transforms, and recognition of HTML5 Semantic Elements as object-type HTMLElement.

Streaming video on demand service Vudu will be available on all forms of Boxee in November, the company announced Thursday. This partnership will put a Vudu client on both the D-Link Boxee Box and the Boxee media center software for PC and Mac.

The service offers 480p, 720p, and 1080p HD movie rentals, and gets many movies in conjunction with their DVD launch. Though the service first launched as a standalone set top box back in 2007, it eventually became a video solution embedded in TVs and connected Blu-ray players.

What defines a platform - any platform - in today's market, is apps. If you have apps, you're on the map. If you don't have apps, you're webOS.

Just two short years ago, it would have been unthinkable for anyone to consider the JavaScript engine of any Web browser as the basis for a genuine software platform - something you could make a living from as an apps developer, rather than just a hobbyist. For many, JavaScript was something a Web page used to determine which browser was running, and if it was Internet Explorer, to make it refrain from doing certain dangerous stuff. But in just two years' time, not only have the JS interpreters in Web browsers including IE increased their calculating and processing speed by a factor of ten, but the security of browser-based scripts has improved from almost non-existent to formidable. And all of a sudden, you begin to wonder whether Larry Ellison overpaid for Sun Microsystems.

Having all but lost the social networking war, MySpace on Wednesday decided to lean on one of the few areas where it still has a good deal of clout: entertainment. The newly redesigned MySpace focuses less on the "friends" aspect it pioneered in the space, and more on sharing videos, music, and games with friends.

The site says it wants to become a "social entertainment destination" for the Generation 'Y' crowd. CEO Mike Jones said that the move marked a complete change in strategy for the company, and focused on its existing strengths. This change may also be the last best hope for the site given how far it has fallen.

For as popular as Roku's streaming set top boxes are, they have had practically zero presence in physical retail stores. That is, until a few weeks ago.

Early in October, reports emerged of Roku set top boxes with Netgear branding being seen in Fry's, Best Buy, and Radio Shack electronics stores. Though Netgear confirmed the product's existence, it wasn't until yesterday that the company officially announced the new product.

The white iPhone 4 may never see the light of day as Apple admitted Tuesday that it would not meet its end of year goal for the model's release. When pressed on the issue by Reuters, a spokesperson said the white iPhone won't make an appearance until at least Spring 2011.

Based on the release schedules of the iPhone since its launch, Apple's admission suggests that white will not be a color option for the iPhone 4. Although the company has only offered the reasoning that the model has been more "challenging to manufacture than we originally expected," it appears the color itself is the problem.

After an arduous four years in and out of the courtroom, battling the RIAA over copyright infringement accusations, peer to peer file sharing service Limewire has finally been shut down.

The RIAA's suit against Limewire was part of a sweeping initiative to curb the trade of copyrighted materials on peer-to-peer networks. In 2005, the group sent cease and desist letters to the owners of major p2p services including Kazaa, WinMX, i2Hub, eDonkey, BearShare, and LimeWire. The orders demanded the services "immediately cease-and-desist from enabling and inducing the infringement of RIAA member sound recordings," but gave the services the option to discuss "pre-litigation resolutions." Most services complied, such as Kazaa, which offered a $115 million settlement.

The answer to the question may be a question: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is it a goose?

By analysts' criteria, the 11.6-inch MacBook Air is no netbook. Strange then that many Betanews readers regard Air to be a netbook -- and an overpriced one at that. But even if Air is classified as something else, it could easily suck away netbook sales, as analysts contend iPad has done. MacBook Air being a netbook or not is really independent of its impact on netbook sales. That said, in researching this story, I found that many readers (and real consumers) don't separate the two concepts. I wonder if they really need to.

Microsoft has rolled out the release candidates of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, the last of the beta builds before the update's final release to manufacturing.

Windows 7 SP1 constitutes a bundle of minor updates for the client version of Windows 7 and has been in beta since June (Though a version leaked two months beforehand.) The main updates to Winddows Server 2008 R2 include new features in the virtual desktop infrastructure called RemoteFX, and Dynamic Memory.

Tech blog Engadget got its hands on some photographs of a device purported to be a prototype "PlayStation Phone" from Sony Ericsson. The phone is a landscape slider that bears a strong resemblance to the PSP Go when opened, and instead of Sony's XMB interface, it will supposedly run Android 3.0.

As expected, Sony Ericsson would not comment to us on the photographs this morning, but Engadget apparently has a decent source of information, and they have been getting exclusives on the device since August.