I'm out of the office today attending Freshman orientation with my daughter. We were at San Diego State University for day-long lectures a month ago, but I saw something today either missed before or that is new (I'm convinced it's the latter). The East Commons has two Samsung charging stations that promote Galaxy S II and S3. It's simply brilliant marketing.

Think about it. Education is considered to be an Apple stronghold; some of that is reality, some perception. Two days ago, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said about fiscal Q3: "We achieved all time record Mac sales to US education institutions during the quarter. We sold more than twice as many iPads as Macs to US education institutions. We are extremely pleased with these results".

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Now here’s an interesting thing. A couple of days ago Samsung disabled the Google local search function from the international version of its Galaxy S3 handset, preventing users from being able to search their phone’s apps and contacts. It was believed to have been done as a result of a patent dispute with Apple, and followed the search-on-device disabling update that hit Galaxy Nexuses in the US.

Users were understandably up in arms because they weren’t told that installing the new stability update would remove the universal search feature, and probably a fair few of them felt compelled to join the boycott Apple movement as a result. (Fortunately I didn’t update my S3 so my opinion didn’t change. Not that it would have.)

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Today marks the day when Facebook lets everyone know of their financial state, with the company announcing their second quarter 2012 results this evening when the market closes. Perhaps not so coincidentally, a rumor of a new Facebook branded phone from HTC has surfaced right before the company's financial announcements.

HTC and Facebook have collaborated before, and the result was the HTC Status. The device is no longer available from AT&T, and let's just say it's not due to high demand. HTC is currently in a weak financial state, and their smartphones make up about 14 percent of the market in the United States. So, from the start there is a limited reach.

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Patent settlement talks between Apple and Samsung have been planned for a while, and despite the major importance they have to both companies, it wasn't until last week that executives met to discuss whether they can agree on ending the quarrel between them. So what happened? They couldn't set their differences aside as the settlement talks have hit a bump in the road, not agreeing on each other’s value when it comes to patents.

After numerous meetings in court it's clear that settlement is the best option, but the companies haven't yet arrived at a compromise, and the two companies' other legal disputes haven’t been put on hold, as Apple is still trying to resolve an issue it has with Samsung in a San Jose federal court on July 30.

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Apple shares closed down 4.32 percent today, keeping with a trend started during after-hours trading yesterday. The real question: Could matters have been much worse, if not for the big carrot that came with the little stick? Apple missed fiscal Q3 Wall Street analyst consensus for revenue and income, but announced a big dividend and promise of more to follow. Performance was by no means bad, just not as good as forecast and the dividend, $2.65 per share, is something for shareholders to smile about.

But behind the magic, I have to ask: Is Apple distracting shareholders and Wall Street analysts, making them look over there so they miss the trick going on over here? It's a question I can't answer but can only speculate about. Another quarter of results will reveal much. One thing is certain now: iPhone sales are slowing. There's no if about it, but why. Are people waiting for the new model or are Android rivals like Samsung pulling away more buyers?

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NVidia, Samsung, you can keep your Tegra 3 and Exynos. There’s a new champion in the Android world of tablets.

There are people that only settle for the best products, so if you’re after the fastest tablet running Android you’re in luck: Qualcomm has the answer for you with the Snapdragon S4 Pro Mobile Development Platform (MDP) tablet. So how fast it is? Let’s just say that there is no Exynos or Tegra 3 that can keep up with this "evil" creation from Qualcomm.

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The conjured term "death spiral" has been so overused in discussions about Blackberry-maker Research in Motion that one must ask: Are the tech pundits crying wolf too often, too soon? Do a targeted search for "Research in Motion death" on Google and you will easily see that this rush to judgement started all the way back in early 2010. Like the doomsday naysayers of yesteryear, RIM's date of decease has anything but solidified (to some pundits' shock.)

The short-term future for RIM is a rocky road indeed. With its face-saving Blackberry 10 OS release being pushed back another quarter into early 2013, the smartphone giant has little glitz to match the other big boys temporarily. Samsung's instant-hit -- aka the Galaxy S3 -- has already touched down. Google's got its latest iteration of Android, Jelly Bean, cooking for its flagship devices including the Nexus and the S3. And the iPhone 5 rumor mill just can't take a week off as of late.

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Uncertainty hung over Apple's fiscal third quarter coming into today's earnings announcement. Gulfs widened among analysts for overall revenue estimates and about how many iPads or iPhones were sold. No one expected poor performance, there was just more uncertainty about what and where than more recent quarters. Fiscal Q3 will be remembered as sea change coming, as Apple missed Street consensus for the first time in years and iPad sales surged against iPhone.

For fiscal third quarter, Apple reported $35 billion revenue and net profits of $8.8 billion, or $9.32 a share. A year earlier, the company reported revenue of $28.57 billion and $7.31 billion net quarterly profit, or $7.79 per share. Apple announced fiscal Q3 results after the market closed today.

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After a long wait, there’s good news for United Kingdom residents as local regulator Ofcom has unveiled its plans to auction off the 4G wireless spectrum to UK carriers by the end of 2012. Ofcom states that mobile broadband will cover at least 98 percent of the United Kingdom with a spectrum sale 80 percent larger than 3G while promoting a competitive market environment. As most smartphone manufacturers are offering LTE-compatible devices, that is the most likely wireless technology to be implemented, but WiMAX is not out of the question.

The auction process, despite being delayed before, is likely to come to a close at the beginning of next year; and the official rollout of the 4G network is expected to be done by middle of 2013. At least two spectrum bands will be offered for auction, and the 800 MHz and 2.6 GHz are the first confirmed bands. The UK regulator wants to make sure the process goes smoothly and that there will be no suspicions of delays, putting to rest any possible rumors over their Twitter account: "4G auction plans on track (reports today of 'delay' are way off the mark)."

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Soon after colleague Randall C. Kennedy wrote that "Piracy is killing Android", developer Madfinger Games complained that incredibly high piracy rate on Android devices is why Dead Trigger is free on Google Play, while 99 cents on Apple’s App Store. Is iOS better than Android in this regard?

After an initial price of “as little as buck”, some game developers are going free, due to the piracy rate that plagues the Android world. Madfinger Games hasn’t provided any statistic as to how many of their game installs account for pirated copies, but according to Google Play numbers their installs are in-between 100,000 to 500,000, with an exponential increase at the end of the last 30 days. The game has been free since July 20, so in just four days its popularity skyrocketed. Does this mean a high piracy rate or just the plain “it’s free, I’ll take it” thinking?

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Whenever I think about tablets v. PCs, I remember a bold prediction of old: “Son, 10 years from now everyone will drive an electric car!” When was that, 20 years ago? We’ve all read something like that from someone believing to be clairvoyant.

I read similar articles almost every day where the writer plays the same old broken record: tablets are the death of PCs, or some other flamboyant thing that’s bound to get interest -- with the hope that the reader will agree with the author. It's like almost everyone is set on sending the PC down to the gates of Hell. But why should I agree with their assertions when I actually need a PC?

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Demand ahead of the launch of Apple's iPhone 5 is "unprecedented", with a third of all potential smartphone buyers planning to purchase the device. The data comes courtesy of a new survey of 4,000 consumers carried out by research firm ChangeWave.

Fourteen percent of those polled say they are "very likely" to purchase an iPhone 5, with an additional 17 percent saying they are "somewhat likely" to do the same. Combined, that represents the highest number for those planning to purchase a new iPhone model.

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Samsung and Apple are two of the most popular smartphone and tablet manufacturers in the world right now and those top spots don’t come without responsibilities. But there's a disconnection somewhere in the corporate brains, with the companies seeing these responsibilities as green lights to be at each other’s throat in every major market over patents -- all that the cost of customer choice and satisfaction.

The latest round in the never-ending patent war between Samsung and Apple began today in Australia, where a local Judge started hearing evidence on their latest legal dispute. Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple claims patent infringement. The two companies dispute whether the touchscreen technology used by Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 violates Apple owned patents. The South Korean manufacturer's counter-claim: Apple uses 3G patents without a license, which is supposed to be available on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

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Ad network reports about mobile platforms are a dime a dozen. Many boast about iOS presence and the oodles of eyeballs. Opera has joined in, releasing their first State of Mobile Advertising report, which, for the second quarter of 2012, focuses on mobile advertising revenues. The browser maker puts all the big players -- Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Phone -- under the microscope.

Like other ad network reports, Opera's puts iOS at the top of the revenue food chain, with an average eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) of $2.85. iOS' main rival, Android, follows, with average eCPM of $2.10. On the tablets, iOS is even more profitable than on the smartphone market, with a $3.96 eCPM.

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With the roll over to LTE from WIMAX, Sprint has taken the path to have Android 4.x on all its new 4G Android devices, the first being the Google flagship Galaxy Nexus. But one of the first third-party LTE Androids is the update to the HTC EVO line. The original HTC EVO 4G became the top-selling launch-day phone on Sprint back in 2010. Minor updates to the line followed, such as the EVO 3D, as well as a Star Wars-branded White R2D2 model. So how does the new HTC EVO 4G LTE, an Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0.3) using HTC Sense 4.0 UI stack up to the family title in 2012?

The EVO 4G LTE is only 0.35 inches thick, compared to the 0.5 inches of its predecessor, with a form factor of 5.3 inches by 2.7 inches. The screen is a sharp 4.7-inch Capacitive Super-LCD 2 -- 312 dots per inch with 720 x 1280 pixel resolution at 24-bit (16.7 million) color. To watch HD video is a joy; its easy and fair to say it is impressively crystal clear.

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