Sprint today became the last of the three major U.S. iPhone carriers to report earnings for the fourth quarter of 2011, disclosing that it sold a total of 1.8 million iPhones during the quarter. While well below the 7.6 million activations reported by AT&T and the 4.3 million activations reported by Verizon , Sprint's iPhone surge helped it achieve a new record high subscriber base of 55 million customers.

CNET reports on a new research note from analyst Linley Gwennap, who believes that custom circuitry in Apple's A5 system-on-a-chip including "earSmart" noise cancellation technology from Audience is the reason why Siri is currently an iPhone 4S-only feature.

After a couple of issues with some software updates, Apple has made some quiet revisions to address the problems. The first was a Snow Leopard security update which inadvertently caused problems with Apple's PowerPC emulation layer Rosetta. Macworld notes that Apple has since released Security Update 2012-001, version 1.1 for Snow Leopard.

Over the New Year's weekend, I was reminded of an old comedy record called The First Family , a hilarious and enormously popular spoof of the Kennedy administration from the early 1960s, pulled from circulation after JFK's assassination in 1963. A friend in my age demographic had never heard of it

With adaptive optics, ground-based telescopes are able to compensate for atmospheric distortions to bring their views of the universe up to par with space-based telescopes like Hubble. An absolutely monstrous new telescope is currently under construction, with a 28-foot mirror starting to be spun just this week.

Sure, we scoff at the idea of triangular gadgets , but in an alternate universe, every iPhone, Xbox, PlayStation and Android would have three primary corners. This concept design for a Dreamcast 2 looks stunning as a triangle!

We're two days away from dropping in on Las Vegas for the start of CES 2012 .

We're two days away from dropping in on Las Vegas for the start of CES 2012 . Before we get started on all the crazy new stuff that'll get shown off in a convention center full of bloggers, journalists and business folk, let's hop in our time machine and take a trip back to CES 2011 . Was last year's CES just smoke and mirrors, or did the companies that promised their gadgetry deliver?

This new holographic display from Microsoft, called Vermeer, is certainly not the first "touchable" hologram that we've seen. But every other system places the holograms themselves behind glass, while with Vermeer, it's hanging out right there in the open, Princess Leia style.

There's a reason that we're all still carrying physical keys around with us: they're simple, they're reliable, and while you might forget the key itself somewhere, you don't need to remember anything else besides how to put the key in a lock. A recently-spotted patent from Apple suggests that it's trying to make laptop chargers work the exact same way.