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Audiobooks.com, the popular destination for audio books, has started an unlimited subscription package.

For $25 per month, the company will give you unlimited access to 11,000 audio books either through the website or an HTML5 mobile app.

The company's more popular rival, Audible, has a monthly membership, but users pay a certain fee for "credits" to access a certain amount of books.

Despite being the first company to offer an unlimited package for audio books, there are certainly tradeoffs if you are a current Audible member. Audible has 100,000 titles and only "three of the top five New York Times bestselling non-fiction books and two of the five bestselling fiction books are available on" Audiobooks, compared to all 10 on Audible, says Mash.

Additionally, Audible books are downloadable and kept while Audiobooks expire when you stop paying.

Apple has crushed their fourth quarter earnings report this afternoon, selling a record amount of iPhones, iPads and Mac computers.

The company brought in $46.3 billion in revenue, another record, with $13 billion profit, yet another record. For the year, sales were up 73 percent, and profit was up 105 percent year-over-year.

Smashing their previous record for iPhone sales, the company sold 37 million units during the quarter. Analysts had expected a number closer to 32 million. iPhone sales were up 128 percent from the same quarter in 2010.

CEO Tim Cook noted that there were still shortages in some nations as demand remains strong: "We made a very bold bet in the quarter about what demand would be, and we were [still] short of supply throughout the quarter. The situation has improved some from the end of the quarter until now, but we are still short in some key geographic areas."

Even in the U.S., iPhone 4S devices still take five days to ship.

For iPads, Apple sold 15.4 million of the tablets, up 111 percent from the Q4 in 2010. Apple also sold 5.2 million Macs, breaking the record set last quarter.

Samsung has notched another victory against Apple in the continuing saga of lawsuits over mobile device patents. A Dutch court has upheld last year's denial of a preliminary injunction against sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1.

This is not a final ruling in the patent suit, but it does allow Samsung to sell their tablets while the lawsuit continues. The Dutch ruling runs counter to a German ruling in Apple's favor.

Germany and the Netherlands were chosen for Apple's European lawsuits because that's where Samsung's distribution centers are located. If they are banned in those two countries, they would effectively be unavailable throughout the EU.

In a post on his FOSS Patents blog, Florian Mueller explained the difference between the two decisions, which are both based on the same patents, and also explained why this may be a sign the German decision could be overturned. He also included some analysis of a similar decision in the US:

Today Boxee 1.5 has been released for their set-top box and pre-orders of TV tuners for the Boxee Box began shipping.

The combination of the new software and USB TV tuner stick allow Boxee Boxes to be used for watching live TV. As of now, there is no DVR functionality, but the company is looking into the possibility of adding it in the future.

Boxee 1.5 for Windows, OS X, and Linux was released late last year, but doesn't include all the features in the set-top box version. Most notably, it doesn't include tuner support. In fact, at the end of this month they are discontinuing it completely to concentrate on the Boxee Box.

So why should you use a Boxee Box for watching TV? In his announcement today, Boxee's Andrew Kippen laid out some reasons:

One of the major reasons some people favor Android over iOS is Google's generally lax standards for Android Market submissions.

Which isn't to say there aren't any standards at all. In fact, one of the provisions of the Android Market developer agreement forbids any app which allows the user to bypass carrier restrictions. That includes apps for rooting or unauthorized tethering.

Koushik Dutta, a CyanogenMod developer and creator of the widely used ClockworkMod and ROM Manager, has floated the idea of a new store for apps which are disallowed by this provision. In a post to Google+, he threw out some suggestions for discussion.

He began by explaining his personal motivation. Primarily, he is unhappy with Google's policy of bowing to carrier demands:

Western Digital executives expect hard drive production, which took a hit thanks to flooding in Thailand last year, to return to normal levels in the second quarter of 2012, reaching retailers some time in the following quarter.

Prior to the floods, Thailand was home to multiple hard drive manufacturing plants, including the single largest drive spindle manufacturing facility in the world.

The comments, from Western Digital CEO John Coyne and COO Timothy Leyden, came during the company's quarterly earnings call with analysts yesterday. Coyne indicated the company doesn't expect retailers to reach pre-flood inventory levels until some time in 2013.

During this time he sees demand outpacing supply in reaction to current shortages. This mirrors the thoughts of Seagate CEO Stephen Luczo from last November.

Leyden provided additional details. He said that while Western Digital's assembly capacity has returned to normal, they are limited by the availability of crucial components. Specifically, he said, there is a shortage of sliders, which are an essential part of the read/write head assembly in a hard drive.

One of the hallmarks of the iPhone app environment is Apple's review process. In part, this process is used to maintain a unified look and feel between apps, which is generally good for their customers.

A unified interface makes it easier for the average user to start using a new app because certain design elements are universally consistent. But sometimes this control has a down side as well. It is impossible, to distinguish between poor design and innovation based purely on a simple set of rules.

Take, for example, the Air Dictate app from Avatron. Air Dictate allows iPhone 4S users to utilitze Siri's voice recognition as a text entry tool for Mac applications via Wi-Fi. It uses one of the simplest and most intuitive interfaces you will find in any app - for any OS.

Now, thanks to Apple's review process, Avatron has decided to discontinue development of Air Dictate. According to an email sent to The Unofficial Apple Weblog by Avatron CEO Dave Howell, Apple didn't like Avatron's use of the keyboard in a non-standard way.

Howell explained:

Asus has confirmed today that the original Transformer will get the highly-anticipated Ice Cream Sandwich update in February.

Responding to a question on Facebook, which read, "Asus, i know Google is in the process of approving the tf101 ICS update, but how long does that process usually take?," the company said "You should be receiving your update in mid-February."

The tablet currently runs on Android 3.2 Honeycomb. The update will be OTA, and Wi-Fi-only.

Asus' new Prime tablet, which is very similar but packing a quad-core processor, received the update last week.

Two days ago, the iOS jailbreaking "dream team" of the iPhone Dev Team, Chronic Dev Team and pod2G began offering a jailbreak solution for iPhone 4S and iPad 2 users.

Unfortunately for those with A5 iOS devices, the untethered jailbreak tools required OS X.

Today, the "Absinthe" tool is available for Windows users. Additionally, "the iPhone Dev Team has announced its command-line interface tool is now ready for download. The tool uses the same system as Absinthe to jailbreak, but allows users to go through the motions step-by-step, with the aim being to isolate any bugs that occur during the process. The team intends to update its GUI-based application, redsn0w "once all the bugs in the flow are worked out,'" explains Verge.

Users who want to jailbreak their iPhone 4S or iPad 2 can use Absinthe which will rely on the Chronic Dev Team's servers via a VPN tunnel. Because of this, there is no guarantees your jailbreaking will be successful the first time.

Developer BioWare has revealed the specs necessary for the new Mass Effect 3 PC game (or at least for the first demo).

The minimum specs:

CPU - 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (equivalent AMD CPU)

RAM - 1GB for XP / 2GB RAM for Vista/Win 7

Disc Drive - 1x speed

Hard Drive - 15 GB of free space

Video - 256 MB* (with Pixel Shader 3.0 support)

Sound - DirectX 9.0c compatible

DirectX - DirectX 9.0c August 2009 (included)

OS - Windows XP SP3/Vista SP1, Win 7

CPU - 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (equivalent AMD CPU)

RAM - 2GB for XP / 4GB RAM for Vista/Win 7

Disc Drive - 1x speed

Hard Drive - 15 GB of free space

Video - AMD/ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB or greater, NVidia GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB or greater

Back in November, YouTube VP of global sales Lucas Watson noted that the global video site was serving up 3.5 billion videos every day.

Today, the site is now streaming 4 billion videos per day, huge growth for such a short period. Overall, the site has seen massive 25 percent growth since May.

Additionally, the site says 60 hours of video are uploaded every minute, compared with 48 hours worth in May.

Google acquired YouTube back in 2006 for $1.65 billion, and is finally on the verge of being profitable. Graphical display ads that run in YouTube videos now generate "$5 billion in revenue on an annualized run rate basis."

While that number is large, only 3 billion YouTube videos are monetized every week, while the rest make no money or have little to no viewership.

The Pirate Bay has been cited by the MPAA and RIAA as one of the biggest reasons new anti-piracy laws are needed, along with the recently taken down MegaUpload.

During last week's blackout to protest SOPA and PIPA, they made a protest of their own via a blog post titled, "That pipe of trash that someone smoked." It contains a press release which compares the legal issues surrounding file sharing with the early days of Hollywood.

They point out the reason movie studios first re-located to California from New York was to avoid patent litigation from a patent holding company formed by Thomas Edison. In fact, the company established to control the movie industry via Edison's patents was eventually found guilty of antitrust violations in 1915.

Here is the full text of their press release:

US based Consumer Watchdog is lobbying EU regulators to block Google's proposed buyout of Motorola Mobility.

Consumer Watchdog is a nonprofit advocacy group who investigates allegations of corporate misconduct and corruption. They have been engaged in a campaign against Google over their data collection and search practices for several years.

In a letter to the European Commission, the body who must ok the deal in Europe, Consumer Watchdog's John Simpson claims Google's purchase of Motorola Mobility, combined with their dominance in mobile search and advertising, would create "a virtually unstoppable juggernaut."

Most of their allegations about Google's practices are based on claims from numerous companies who consider Google a competitor. These claims have already resulted in antitrust investigations by the European Commission in Europe and FTC in the US. In addition, Simpson claims Google is pressuring handset vendors to favor Google applications, but fails to cite any evidence in the letter.

He further goes on to suggest a number of other measures he believes are appropriate to reduce Google's power over Internet users around the world:

With all the emphasis on processing and network speed, perhaps the biggest challenge in smartphone design today is energy efficiency.

Multitasking operating systems running on Multi-core processors, combined with 4G data connections, can severely limit the usefulness of a phone if you don't have access to a computer, wall outlet, or car battery to charge it in the middle of the day.

Some mobile operating systems, use scaled back multitasking and lower power processors to address the issue. The iPhone 4S is notable for underclocking its processor to increase batter life at the expense of performance. Android phones, on the other hand, tend to sacrifice battery life in favor of performance.

Now researchers at the Cambridge Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics are experimenting with harnessing wasted light from OLED panels as a secondary power source. They have accomplished this through the use of solar cells built into the display panel, which are used to charge a capacitor.

In the time since Google+ left beta status last year, numerous signs have emerged that it is not the Facebook killer proponents, primarily within Google, have suggested.

Despite significant interest in Google+ when the beta started, it seemed to have levelled off by the time it opened to the public in September. There was another spike in activity at that point, but once again it was short lived.

Google appeared to be looking for ways to drive interest when they announced plans to support pseudonyms in addition to real names, and later implemented the ability to create brand accounts for companies and organizations. Even the public launch of Google Music, which features Google+ integration, looks like it may have been rushed to spark interest in Google+.

But evidence continued to mount suggesting most people just aren't using Google+, which made it a little surprising when Ancestry.com's Paul Allen pointed out, in December, there were already 62 million Google+ users. Last week, Google made an equally astonishing announcement in their fiscal year 2011 earnings announcement, saying there are now 90 million Google+ users.