iOS

Report: Americans spend 2:38 hours a day glued to their tablets and smartphones

Only 31 minutes is spent surfing the Web. Apps take up the rest of that time.

FORTUNE -- The iPhone was barely a year old and Apple (AAPL) had not yet launched the App Store when Flurry Analytics began measuring mobile usage and helping developers sell ads.

Today Flurry measures the activity of more than 1 billion active mobile iOS and Android devices a month, and to celebrate its fifth anniversary Wednesday MORE

Apple's growing dominance of the mobile Web

Against all odds, Apple's iOS is outpacing Google's Android in Web usage.

FORTUNE -- Two data points that counter the prevailing wisdom on Wall Street -- at least as reflected in its valuation -- that Apple (AAPL) is toast.

The latest report from NetApplications, posted Monday, shows Safari's browser share of the mobile Web growing to 61.79% in March, up from 55.41% one month earlier.
The chart below from Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster MORE

Pictures from the smartphone wars: And then there were two

Apple's iOS and Google's Android now control 90% of the global smartphone market

FORTUNE: Hard on the heels of Gartner's Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales report Wednesday, IDC and comScore both released colorful bar graphs Thursday representing their view of the current state of the smartphone wars -- the world war (top) from IDC, and U.S. war (bottom) from comScore.

A few observations:

The extent to which the smartphone wars have become a two-man MORE

The long knives at Apple: What the experts are saying

Forstall and Browett are out. Ive, Cue, Mansfield and Federighi pick up the slack

FORTUNE: While the fourth estate was preoccupied with a hurricane and Wall Street was closed due to flooding, Apple (AAPL) announced a major shuffling of its executive team Monday.

Here's how some leading Apple watchers told the story overnight:

Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster: Apple Consolidates Management Around Core Players. "Yesterday Apple announced top level management changes, most notably Scott Forstall head of MORE

Did Apple's war on Android just draw its first Google blood?

Shareholders paid Thursday for Google's $12 billion acquisition of Motorola last May

FORTUNE -- We may never know for certain whether Google (GOOG) spent $12.5 billion on Motorola Mobility last May primarily because Sergey Brin and Larry Page wanted to get into the cellphone and set-top box manufacturing business or if they thought Motorola's 17,000 patents would give them some IP armor to fend off Apple's (AAPL) "thermonuclear" assault on the MORE

Today in Tech: How Verizon is tracking your mobile behavior

Also: Microsoft's Surface gets priced; Apple to unveil the iPad mini Oct. 23? 

Apple event set for Oct. 23. Investors await the iPad mini [FORTUNE]

If the price were right, a smaller tablet that could run 700,000 iOS apps -- 250,000 of them customized for the iPad -- would be, in the words of Sterne Agee's Shaw Wu, the "competition's worst nightmare."

UberTAXI in NYC shutting down for now [UBER BLOG]

Unfortunately, as many MORE

Google loses Apple 'rubber-banding' case in Germany

Could be forced to recall or destroy all infringing Motorola smartphones and tablets

FORTUNE -- A German court has handed Apple (AAPL) a significant victory in a patent infringement case against Google's (GOOG) Motorola division, according to a report posted early Friday by FOSS Patents' Florian Mueller.

A regional court in Munich ruled that Motorola's smartphones and tablets violate the European equivalent of Apple's U.S. Patent No. 7,469,381, which came to be known MORE

Apple closes at a new high, despite Amazon, Nokia, Google

A wave of product launches fails to steal the thunder of next week's special event

FORTUNE -- "When is the worst time to launch a phone?" Topeka's Brian White asked in a note to clients Wednesday.

His answer: "When Apple does."

Sure enough, although Nokia (NOK) and Google's (GOOG) Motorola division launched new smartphones Wednesday and Amazon (AMZN) introduced a new Kindle Fire tablet Thursday, none of them managed to overshadow investors' rising MORE

Today in Tech: PayPal trumps Square, partners with Discover

For AT&T users, FaceTime over cellular Mobile Share plans online; the 10 top startups from YCombinator's Demo Day.

PayPal trumps Square's deal with Starbucks by partnering with Discover [ALL THINGS D]

Under a new partnership being announced with Discover, PayPal is super-sizing the number of U.S. merchant locations it will be accepted at — more than seven million. ...  Just two weeks ago, Square made a huge splash after announcing that Starbucks would use the MORE

Team Coco spoof: Samsung denies that it ripped off Apple

Tagline: "Samsapple. Think Slightly Different."

FORTUNE -- Conan O'Brien is an equal opportunity satirist. He loves to puncture Apple's (AAPL) hype and pomposity (see here). But on Tuesday night Team Coco lampooned Samsung's claim -- made in all seriousness in court earlier that day -- that no consumer could mistake a Galaxy smartphone or tablet for an iPhone or iPad.