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The Fourth Quarter was Apple's most profitable quarter ever. Yesterday's earnings call was about two things. One, the iPhone Platform continues to deliver the goods. Two, the continued impressive growth of the Mac, especially MacBooks. As such, it was about the power of the platform as much as it was about the device itself.

Yesterday, Apple announced that they are now allowing In-App Purchasing within free apps. I think that this is a big deal, an entree into what I refer to as 'land and expand,' and yet another reason that Apple remains the gold standard of mobile computing.

Apple's iPhone Platform is a runaway success relative to just about any metric that you can throw at it, save for one. Where are the breakout successful developers for whom the platform is a 'True Wealth' inducing moment? On the one hand, it is humorous to listen to the woes of 'aspiring' millionaires quibble. On the other, there is a valid argument that Apple's push to drive volume and ubiquity via "cheap" comes at the potential cost of cultivating breakout, transformational apps that cost more, require a longer sales cycle, and thus, more evangelizing to find their beachhead.

Project Bar-B-Q is a great place to discover tomorrow's audio technology, so I was intrigued when someone on the mailing list mentioned the new Kerchoonz K-box portable speaker. Could "gel audio technology" really deliver unprecedented bass from a tiny box? The short answer is yes.

The mobile network has created unprecedented opportunity for the world. It truly is pervasive - spanning out across geographies and socio-economic boundaries to enable sustainable participation, growth and potential prosperity on a previously unimaginable scale.

The iPhone is the first truly 'personal' computer; more personal to its owners than the PC ever was. Talk to iPhone owners (not to mention, the 20M iPod Touch owners), and this truth bubbles to the top again and again.

People buy new gadgets for every imaginable reason. In J.D. Biersdorfer's case, an apartment renovation prompted her to purchase one. "I wanted to have an extremely portable PC with me when I was living out of a duffel bag and sleeping on people's couches while my own place was unlivable," explains the author of O'Reilly's Netbooks: The Missing Manual. "It turned out to be a great solution because many of my friends have wireless networks (or neighbors that have unsecured wireless networks), so I could stay linked to the Internet even while couch surfing all over the city." Based on her personal experiences and research for the book, J.D. offers five important things to consider when buying a netbook.

The folks at Verizon Wireless and Weber Shandwick Worldwide sent me a review unit of the Verizon Mi-Fi2200 Intelligent Mobile Hotspot. It's a great device that combines the broad coverage of EV-DO (the 3G cellular data system used by Verizon...

As Schwartz touts the massive market penetration of Java on "Billions of PCs and Mobile Devices". Sun introduces a Java-centric App Store to bring the advantages of this distribution to Java application developers. Scott McNealy invites Larry Ellison to the stage to talk about the future of Java, how JavaFX is better than AJAX, and how he intends to compete with Google's Android.

Apple crushed it (earnings in the most recent quarter). So much for the recession prompting consumers to stampede away from Apple's "high-end" products, as the prognosticators predicted (and the stock market priced into Apple's stock). So what's the moral of the story? Read on...

Taking a look back at a Steve Wozniak interview is a window into a time when the industry was completely and utterly dependent upon hardware innovation; before it became such a commodity at the hardware layer that the software could only be so differentiated. That is, until iPod and iPhone. The iPod accessory business itself is already a $2B market, and there has really been no such thing as "software value-add" to the hardware accessory itself. With iPhone 3.0, this changes.

Today's iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview was what I call a "block the kick" announcement. What's a block the kick? It is an effort to do such a good job of persuading your core constituency that any perceived momentum of the competition pales in comparison to your own that you block the competition's nascent momentum in its infancy. With 30M units sold across the iPhone + iPod touch line of multi-touch handhelds, and 800M downloads across 25K developer apps, today's event is about running up the score BEFORE the competition finds its footing with developers.

On Tuesday, Apple is previewing its iPhone OS 3.0 to developers. While I have no idea what they will present, I will say this. The fact that Apple is stepping on the gas pedal and pushing 3.0, while the new kids on the block (read: Android and Palm Pre) are barely 1.0 suggests that they have learned the lessons taught them oh so painfully by Microsoft in the PC wars; namely, that he who wins the hearts and minds of developers, wins the war.

Daniel Appelquist talks about Mobile 2.0, a one-day event scheduled for the Monday before the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Appelquist discusses the event and why he prefers to the more open, standards-based approach of the Mobile Web over the development of native applications for mobile devices.

Have you ever put your iPhone (or other phone) near a clock radio or answering machine, and heard a loud staccato buzzing? If so, you're not alone. Reports of iPhones making consumer electronics buzz and click are common, but why does it happen? We talked to a couple of RF experts to learn what's going wrong, and what you can do about it.

The Obama for America iPhone application is probably the coolest campaign tool I have seen... EVER! Whoever thought this thing up is a genius.