Usage of Apple’s iPhone slid more than 4 percent in December despite what analysts estimate will have been a huge month in Apple’s biggest-ever quarter of sales.

As Samsung reported record preliminary results on Friday, rival HTC revealed a sharp drop in profit for the fourth quarter that the company foreshadowed this past November . The Taiwan-based phone vendor reported unaudited operating income of NT$11.02 billion, down 26% from the same quarter a year prior, and down year-over-year for the first time in two years.

Last May, HTC’s chief executive officer Peter Chou responded to customer feedback and announced that the company would no longer be locking the bootloaders on its devices . HTC later introduced the

HTC and Samsung are both preparing to announce new Windows Phone devices with 4G LTE support, and a few details on the phones were leaked Thursday. HTC’s device is currently codenamed “Radiant” while Samsung’s is codenamed “Mandel,” The Verge

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.

Sprint announced Thursday that it is releasing the Android 3.2.1 (Honeycomb) update for irs HTC EVO View 4G tablet. The slate originally launched running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), an operating system designed for smartphones

HTC’s chief executive officer Peter Chou recently said his company has already developed a solution to dodge an ITC injunction, which was issued after a ruling that found HTC guilty of infringing two of Apple’s patents . “It’s actually quite rarely used,” Chou said of the feature that violates Apple’s patents, suggesting that the company isn’t afraid of the ban that is set to take effect on April 19th.

HTC on Monday responded to a ruling from the United States International Trade Commission that will ban the import of several HTC devices beginning April 19th, 2012. “We are gratified that the commission affirmed the judge’s determination on the ‘721 and ‘983 patents, and reversed its decision on the ‘263 patent and partially on the ‘647 patent,” HTC said in a statement sent to BGR via email. “We are very pleased with the determination and we respect it

A judge with the United States

The United States International Trade Commission recently said that it would review a judge’s decision from earlier this year, which cleared Apple of violating four HTC patents.