Kyle Wiens of iFixit, a Web site that provides free repair manuals and advice forums, has been a reliable prognosticator of everything Apple. With the next iPad expected to come out in March, Wiens recently gazed into his crystal ball.

A new survey of 1000 Americans confirms what you always suspected: A good many of those incoming Android, iPhone and BlackBerry calls and texts are originating from bathrooms.

The district court in Mannheim, Germany, has again sided with Apple in a patent suit brought by Samsung Electronics, saying on Friday that the company had not infringed on a second patent asserted by Samsung against the iPhone and iPad.

Apple has emerged as the number one smartphone vendor worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2011, by a small margin, after losing ground to Samsung in the previous quarter, research firms Strategy Analytics and IHS iSuppli said.

Apple became the biggest buyer of semiconductors last year, ahead of Samsung Electronics and Hewlett-Packard, according to Gartner.

You soon-to-be Verizon iPhone 4 customers can learn from the experiences of others. Take it from iPhone old-timers, you're about to enter a magical world of awesome apps running on the most simplistic, addictive device on the planet.

QUESTION I've bought a number of apps for my Apple iPhone via iTunes and the App Store. To avoid draining the battery by downloading apps directly to the handset, I'd like to connect my iPhone to my Windows XP PC using USB and transfer them over. However, when I connect the phone its icon doesn't appear on the desktop (although it does charge up). I've tried updating iTunes, restarting the PC and using a different USB port, all to no avail.

Last week, a new iPhone app called Tiger Text hit the App Store. The app lets users send text messages to a server that could be read by the recipient via an app reader. The text message would then be wiped from the face of the earth (i.e. both the texter and recipient's iPhones, and the server) after a pre-determined amount of time.

They were once ubiquitous in the workplace, as much a symbol of executive status as the gold standard in enterprise mobile communications. Research in Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry devices held all the corporate aces and with unrivalled high-end security features, their appeal to and grip on the enterprise sector seemed impregnable.

In June 2007, Apple released the iPhone, and the device quickly took off to become a major brand in the smartphone market. Yet when the iPhone shipped, security on the mobile operating system was nearly nonexistent. Missing from the initial iOS (then called iPhone OS) were many of the security features that modern-day desktop software has as a matter of course, such as data-execution protection (DEP) and address-space layout randomization (ASLR). Apple's cachet lured security researchers to test the platform, and in less than a month, a trio had released details on the first vulnerability: an exploitable flaw in the mobile Safari browser.

The past year has been a remarkable one for smartphones, with the meteoric rise of Google's Android OS, the restart of Microsoft's mobile strategy with its much-ballyhooed release of Windows Phone 7 and the continuing success of Apple's iPhone, buoyed by its new availability to Verizon subscribers. Never has there been so much choice in the smartphone market. As a result, hype and overstatement have been the order of the day.

The last week has brought nothing but good news for Microsoft and Windows Phone 7. Between Nokia's hardware commitment, Angry Birds on the way and Microsoft's own announcement of a roadmap for vital features such as multitasking, Windows Phone 7 seems to be catching a second wind in 2011.

Kyle Wiens and his team at iFixit, a Web site that provides free repair manuals and advice forums, are some of the smartest Apple geeks around. They've taken apart countless iPhones, Macs and iPads to see what makes them tick-and, of course, to find out how to repair them.