With their familiar creative elements -- white background, innocuous piano music and hands-on demos -- Apple's iPhone ads have over the years become an easy target for parody, such as Verizon's "There's A Map For That" ads That hasn't stopped Apple from rolling out the same motif again in a new trio of iPhone 4 ads separately highlighting iBooks, iTunes and the App Store.

Apple just seems to have a knack for making money. A new study from U.K.-based research firm Strategy Analytics shows that the company led the way in smartphone revenue in 2010, even though the iPhone accounted for only 16% of the global market. But from that base, it collected 29% of the $99 billion in overall smartphone revenues -- the biggest share of any phone manufacturer.

Game sensations like "Angry Birds" aside, it's become accepted wisdom mobile users go through most apps faster than Kleenex at an allergy sufferers' convention. A study released by mobile analytics firm Localytics in late January found more than a quarter (26%) of smartphone and tablet owners never used a given app more than once. But today the company released new findings showing the same percentage of people become loyal customers, using a new app more than 10 times.

The iPad 2 is living up to the hype, and surpassing the original Apple tablet when it comes to initial sales. Analysts have estimated the upgraded iPad sold 400,000 to 600,000 units over the weekend, with the device selling out at stores in major cities on Friday only hours after hitting shelves.

With a massive $42 million first-round funding, mobile gaming phenomenon "Angry Birds" is poised to soar to new heights of franchise-building and merchandising. One might almost say the Finnish company behind the hugely popular title -- Rovio Inc. -- is being buoyed on a bubble of high investor expectations for the digital gaming space.

There's been a bunch of forecasts lately about how many apps will be downloaded this year, next year or in the next five years. And projections of how much revenue they'll generate. But ABI Research today released actual app download totals for the major smartphone platforms. While Android has come on strong in the last year, Apple still dominates the category.

With the rollout of the latest version of its location-based service, Foursquare has clearly taken steps to address widespread laments about check-in fatigue -- and show it's more than a one-trick pony.

Coverage of the latest comScore mobile data released yesterday naturally focused on Android surging past BlackBerry to become the most popular smartphone platform in the U.S., with 31.2% market share as of January.

No wonder Skype is getting into advertising. The company's updated IPO registration filed last Friday shows it still has only 8.8 million paying customers out of a total of 663 million users for its for its Web calling and video chat service. That's just over 1%--well below the roughly 10% of paying users considered a standard level for the freemium model Skype's business is based on.

In response to reports this week of malware-infecting, innocuous-sounding Android applications like Chess and Bowling Time, Google has taken down 55 such apps from its Android Marketplace.