Stories by Matt Peckham

Apple's iPhone 4S may be top sales dog at AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, but the company is still expected to lag significantly behind rival Samsung in first-quarter smartphone sales. Samsung will sell an estimated 41 million units this quarter, compared with 32.6 million for Apple and 12.6 million units for Nokia, according to Canaccord Genuity analyst Mike Walkley.

More independent business owners use tablets than either laptops or desktops according to a recent poll that measured the computing tastes of over 1100 respondents. Furthermore, 55 per cent of business owners expect to use a "tablet or other device" in the future.

PCWorld's Damon Brown says yesterday's Office for iPad tease by The Daily is probably just hype, and he's in good company -- Microsoft itself said in a recent New York Times story that the purported screenshot was bunkum.

Apple's next-generation MacBook Air could launch soon, though that's if you're bending over backward to interpret DigiTimes' latest report in the most optimistic light. The Asian news site reports notebook manufacturers are expected to see February shipments grow about 10 per cent after a lackluster January, and that Apple is "set to launch a new MacBook Air model", bolstering Taiwan-based supplier Quanta Computer's revenues.

"Atlantis," reads my copy of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, "a vast island-continent submerged under the waters of the Atlantic towards the year 9560 BC; parts of it are still inhabited and can be visited."

You win some, you lose some: Apple's attempt to secure a preliminary ban on Samsung's Galaxy 10.1N and Galaxy Nexus in Germany has apparently failed. A regional court in Munich gave Apple's motion to block sales of Samsung's tablet and smartphone the big thumbs down. The reason, says the court: Apple patents for touch screen tablet and smartphone tech aren't long for this world.

Modern Warfare 3 officially has the top grossing movie in movie history, James Cameron's Avatar, in its rearview mirror: Activision's eighth Call of Duty shooter just made a cool $1 billion dollars in 16 days. Avatar, by comparison, took 17 to reach that figure.

Hey Nintendo, you've been served, and I don't mean in terms of swinging a virtual racket with your Wii Remote (though the latter's surely related). Noticed by Gamasutra, it seems a company called UltimatePointer has the famous Japanese game maker in its crosshairs over patent claims relating to the Wii's wireless master controller.

Rioters in London apparently set Sony's Enfield-based DADC (Digital Audio Disc Corporation) facility ablaze last night, reducing the massive disc distribution center to flames and smoke. The massive multi-story, 20,000 square meter building would have likely contained stock tied to multiple mediums, ranging from music labels to video games to movies and more.

The PlayStation Network wasn't hacked so much as threatened yesterday when a password exploit accessible through its PSN web page login page came to light, claims Sony.

Now that the PlayStation Network’s back, Sony’s trotting out something it's calling a "PlayStation Network and Qriocity Customer Appreciation Program," prompting cries of "too much" or "too little" in certain press channels.

Not quite out of the frying pan, but into the fire anyway: Sony just acknowledged another network breach related to the first one.

Sony Japan’s explanation for the PSN’s takedown yesterday didn’t tell us much, but -- nearly a week and a half on -- at least the company apologized. Sony’s deputy president Kazuo Hirai took the stage, bent forward as if to touch his toes in a deep and held bow, then apologized “for the great anxiety and inconvenience” caused by the ongoing PSN and Qriocity outages.

The fleeting hour I was able to devote to Portal 2 last night, dashing through the remainder of its suddenly capacious middle chapters, proved a little better than the dull, shallow preliminary five.

If you're waiting for Microsoft's official do-it-yourself motion-sensing PC kit, you won't have to wait much longer. Microsoft says the Kinect for Windows software development kit (beta) will ship this spring, and they've put up a research page to prove it.