After dominating the larger tablet market it popularized, Apple has turned its attention to the slightly smaller screen. The 7.9-inch iPad Mini has Apple's attention to style and detail behind it, but it certainly isn't the only slate of this stature that's worth considering, especially with the Mini's stepped-down processor and screen resolution.

Android and Apple continue to bite bigger hunks out of the U.S. smartphone market. As of the three months ended July, Google's mobile OS held a 52.2 percent share of the market, a gain of 1.4 points from the prior three months. In second place, Apple's iOS grabbed 33.4 percent of the market, up 2 points from the prior period. That left the rest of the top five platforms still spinning down the drain.

YouTube will now let people viewing clips on the site by way of their mobile devices skip video ads after 5 seconds, the same way they can when watching clips on a desktop or laptop computer. The TrueView ads - launched for PCs in December of 2010 - are heading to smartphones and tablets. Under TrueView, advertisers pay only when someone chooses to watch a complete ad. But does this ever happen? According to YouTube it does. Google unit noted late last year that 15 percent to 45 percent of viewers on desktops and laptops were indeed opting to let ads play out.

SoftBank's recently-launched AXGP 4G network is capable of speeds up to 110Mbps, but so far we've only seen the release of a 76Mbps mobile router. That's set to change at some point after September courtesy of the Ultra Wi-Fi 102HW, a Huawei-made router that SoftBank is calling the "fastest ever." It'll allow for theoretical maximum download speeds of 110Mbps and uploads of 10Mbps, and has a 3,000 mAh battery.

It was clear that Samsung was dipping a toe in the music market, and now it's officially landed. Music Hub will launch with the GSIII in the UK, France and Germany. It's fair to say the electronics giant will be trampling on a fair number of toes, with Music Hub offering both streaming - from 7 Digital's catalog of 19 million - as well as recommendations, and a 100GB iTunes Match-esque cloud service.

Samsung's smartphone shipments soared over the same period last to easily grab the lion's share of the global market, a market researcher said yesterday. While another market researcher put Samsung No.1 in the overall cell phone market. The South Korean electronics giant's share went from 12.2 percent in the first quarter of 2011 to a whopping 30.6 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Strategy Analytics.

This is why companies have to be careful in their external communication: if a spokesperson reveals relevant details about an anticipated product, the news is going to be reported. Such a situation happened just three days ago, when Microsoft employee Nuno Silva went on the record.

Google's Android has bitten off a 50 percent chunk of the U.S. smartphone market, according to the latest stats from ComScore. Over the three months from December through February, Android carved out an average 50.1 percent share, a leap of 17 points from the same period in 2011 and 3.2 points from the prior three-month period. In second place, Apple's iOS grabbed a 30.2 percent share, inching up 1.5 points from the previous three months. Combined, those numbers gave iOS and Android a collective share of more than 80 percent.

Android 4.x "Ice Cream Sandwich" is making gains, though Gingerbread still takes the lion's share, according to a snapshot of data provided to Android developers. Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) had about a 2.9 percent share and Honeycomb had more than a 3 percent share, according to Android Developers, which describes the data as "the relative number of active devices running a given version of the Android platform."

According to a new study, most people who have access to Apple's Siri voice assistant think she's just fine - they just don't want her around all that much. As part of its quarterly "Market Focus" report, Parks Associates today said that in a polling of 482 iPhone 4S owners in the U.S., more than 50 percent of respondents said they were "very satisfied" with Siri. About a fifth of the group said that they were simply "satisfied," and some 9 percent said they were "unsatisfied."