With the rising popularity of social media platforms, it should come as no surprise that some of the most downloaded applications on handheld devices are both the official and unofficial mobile versions of the social networking sites. Popular services such as Facebook and Twitter have countless third party applications in the App Store, and when it comes to Twitter; the third party iterations are generally favored over the official offering due to their more intuitive interfaces and extended functionality.

The December holiday period is arguably the busiest and most manic shopping time frame across the globe. Historically, millions of people around the world have taken to local high streets, outlets and shopping malls to buy gifts for family and loved ones.

Apple is celebrating holiday season with its annual 12 Days of Christmas event in which they will be giving away loads of great apps, songs, movies, music and TV shows. Details after the jump! Apple’s offers for 12 Days of Christmas formally starts today on December 26th and ends on January 6th. Each of their offers will be available for a 24 hour period only and, keeping that in mind, Apple has released an app for the event so that folks with an iPod touch, iPhone or iPad and access their gifts on the go.

Developer frigid over on XDA has put together an awesomely powerful program which puts together functions like unlocking bootloader, gaining root access and achieving S-OFF (among others). The tool, which is called HTC Super Tool v2 and you can check out which devices it supports and how you can unlock the bootloader of, gain root access and achieve S-OFF on your HTC smartphone after the jump! News of the tool comes from the XDA-Developers – a forum where the most dedicated Android developers and hackers – in the form of a blog post in which frigid ’s tool is discussed.

Israeli newspaper Calcalist reports [ Google translation ] that Apple has finalized its previously-rumored acquisition of flash memory firm Anobit, with company executives having gathered employees to share the news. According to the report, Apple is paying $400-500 million for the Israeli firm.