Weekly News Roundup – 8 February 2013

Once again the week is coming to an end and that means it’s time for a roundup of the past weeks news!

iPhone 5 helps Apple capture 22% of global smartphone market in Q4 2012 – High demand for the iPhone 5 grew Apple’s share of worldwide smartphone shipments to 22 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, which represented 11 percent of the entire mobile phone market.

Apple Issues Statement About Returning Cash to Shareholders – Apple has issued a press release reiterating its commitment to return some of its extremely large cash pile to shareholders, saying that Apple management and the Board of Directors are in “active discussions” about how to return cash to shareholders.

EA targets Mac gamers with launch of Origin digital distribution service – Video game publisher Electronic Arts announced on Thursday the launch of Origin for Mac, a new built-for-platform version of EA’s video game download service that will bring some of the company’s biggest titles to Apple desktops and laptops.

Evasi0n Jailbreak Installed on 1.7 Million Devices Since Monday Release – In a discussion with Forbes, Cydia appstore administrator Jay Freeman revealed that the evasi0n jailbreak had been installed 800,000 times within six hours of its Monday release.

Apple Co-Founder Says The iPhone Is ‘Somewhat Behind’ Android – Steve Wozniak says the darnest things. Even though he’s the co-founder of Apple, and was one of Steve Jobs’ best friends, he’s not afraid to say what’s on his mind when he’s thinking something negative about Apple.

Mailbox for iPhone goes live – Mailbox, a mail client that delivers your Gmail messages to your iPhone, went live in the iTunes story today, but not everyone is going to have access right away — the service is filling reservations on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Apple’s ‘disappointing’ quarter still outperforms the most profitable US companies – Even after a quarter widely panned on Wall Street as “flat” or “disappointing,” Apple holds the top spot among the most profitable U.S. companies by a significant margin.

Sprint sells record 2.2M iPhones in the holiday quarter, 38 percent to new customers – Sprint’s numbers are out, and it is another record quarter for iPhone sales with the No. 3 U.S. carrier announcing sales of 2.2 million units. Perhaps more importantly for the carrier: 38 percent of those purchases were to customers new to Sprint, which also counted a small loss for the quarter due to costs associated with Hurricane Sandy.

Springtomize 2 Update Brings Support For The iPhone 5, Plenty Of Bug Fixes [Jailbreak] – Springtomize 2 from Filippo Bigarella is one of the easiest and most effective ways to customize your iOS device after jailbreaking; it’s so good that we recently chose it as one of the best tweaks to install after jailbreaking with evasi0n. And now its even better, thanks to its latest update — which introduces support for the iPhone 5’s larger display, and fixes a whole host of bugs.

Apple’s iTunes Store sells 25 billionth song – Apple on Wednesday announced a newly achieved milestone for its iTunes Store, with the music outlet surpassing the 25 billion song mark.