Ben Lovejoy

While talk of flatline growth dominated media responses to Apple's financial results yesterday, the massive growth of Apple's cloud-based services appeared to go largely unnoticed. In 2012, reports iPodNN, the number of iCloud users grew from 85 million to over 250 million. iTunes subscribers have topped 500 million, generating a record $2.1 billion profit for the quarter. iMessage has...

Apple is running a Valentine's Day promotion on its online store, drawing attention to its free engraving offer and signature gift-wrapping service. The campaign features the iPad and iPad mini as ideal gifts for the holiday, with the iPod touch and iPod nano also being highlighted. Apple has also posted a specific webpage with ordering deadlines to ensure delivery by Valentine's Day....

Orchestra, Inc. has announced a reservation system for Mailbox, its task-orientated email app which we reported on earlier and which has received many pre-launch accolades from tech sites. Mailbox, which will initially be compatible only with Gmail, aims to keep your inbox clean by allowing you to use swipe gestures to quickly move each email out of your inbox by deleting it, archiving it,...

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today officially granted Apple a patent (via AppleInsider) describing methods for automatically adjusting screen brightness to suit the content being displayed. The patent, which was originally filed for in mid-2006 and can actually be traced back to a separate 2002 application, addresses techniques for saving battery life on portable devices.The improved...

Research firm Kantar Worldpanel today issued a report indicating that Apple continued to maintain its position as the best-selling smartphone platform in the United States during the fourth quarter of 2012. Kantar Worldpanel, which releases its rolling quarterly data on a monthly basis, indicated that Apple retook the lead from Android in the August-October period and gathered a majority share...