Apple’s announced its third-quarter results, and they make for grim reading. Apple only managed to post revenue of $15.7 billion and a net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion. This came in part from Apple selling a mere 3.47 million Macs during the quarter, which in itself represented a pitiful 33 per cent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. With certifiable, deranged analysts expecting Apple to post profits of $900 trillion, the company’s all-time record revenue and earnings increase of just 78 per cent looks miniscule by comparison.

Additionally, Apple reports that 3.27 million iPads were sold during the quarter. “iPad is off to a terrific start,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, ignoring the fact that crazed, deluded, stupid analysts had predicted Apple would sell 3.27 million iPads per day and is therefore well behind targets set by these self-important idiots who don’t have a clue and yet get paid huge sums of money to write all sorts of garbage about Apple that never comes to pass.

Elsewhere, since analysts also predicted iPad would be a failure and that Apple would only sell eight units in total, the 3.27 million figure is extremely worrying, since it means eight people now somehow own over 400,000 iPads each and likely won’t have the money or space for any more, which will therefore impact Apple’s Q4 results.

AAPL was up 2.57% today, on the back of the results, but Lenovo was up more at 2.66%, proving that Apple doesn’t know what it’s doing and should really learn from the Chinese company who [SUB: PLEASE ADD SOMETHING ON LENOVO HERE—WHO THE HELL ARE THOSE GUYS ANYWAY?]

In April, Steve Jobs was asked about multitasking in iOS 4. “In multitasking, if you see a task manager… they blew it. Users shouldn’t ever have to think about it” was the Apple CEO’s reply.

Unfortunately, I’m increasingly thinking Apple blew it. I’m actually coming round to iOS multitasking in terms of a concept—I really like being able to flick between Safari and Twitter, and especially between Photos and the excellent Pastebot—but I now often enter the task manager and have to think about multitasking.

I suspect the problems are RAM-based, stemming from me having an iPhone 3GS, and playing games. Videogames push iOS hardware like nothing else and are notoriously RAM-hungry. On my iPhone, I’ve noticed performance issues after installing iOS 4, with many games becoming jerky. Sadly, other apps are randomly affected too. Instapaper almost entirely froze last night, and it took about three minutes to get back to the home screen and open the multitasking tray. On removing a few ‘frozen’ apps, everything returned to normal.

This would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact I can’t always do this. I’m getting about one freeze per day on my iPhone 3GS right now, which means in the past week it’s frozen more times than it did over the first six months of usage. I would do a full system restore, but Apple provides no reliable means to restore app data, and I don’t want to lose progress in my installed games.

I’m hoping iOS 4.0.1 is on the way soon and will fix this problem (perhaps by closing long-inactive apps), because it’s a pity that the most robust ‘computer’ I’ve owned is now behaving like a somewhat flaky PC.

Engadget reports on HP rattling on about flexible display Palm devices. Phil McKinney talks about the great display technology that will “change what we think of in form factors, both in products from Palm with flexible displays, and with HP”. That’s great, so where are these devices? Oh, they don’t exist yet, except as a concept in people’s heads, or perhaps as devices sitting in a lab.

People moan about Apple’s secrecy, but here’s the thing: when Steve Jobs goes on stage and starts talking about something, it’s almost always because he has something to show. He’ll talk about something revolutionary, then he’ll show it to you, say how much it costs and when pre-orders are going to start.

If only others would follow suit.

I waited longer than many to upgrade my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4, because I was on holiday when it was released, and also Drop7 hadn’t been updated (it has now). The experience has so far been variable—while Camera is now insanely fast, Angry Birds regularly judders; I enjoy Apple’s implementation of multitasking but it’s clear it’s been responsible for totally freezing the iPhone for the first time; and folders are a joy, but moving icons around is now even more of a finicky process.

It’s Mail, though, that truly offers the best and worst updates. On the plus side, the absurd dance back and forth to access accounts has been banished via the ‘All Mailboxes’ view (although it often freezes while downloading email from multiple accounts), but the way Apple has implemented automated threading is bonkers.

The way things work is fine until you actually bother to read something. Emails that are part of a thread are gathered together and flagged by a number denoting the messages in the thread. Tap it and you see the overviews of the thread’s messages, in reverse chronological order, so the latest one is at the top. This is all fine, but in the mailbox the thread’s overview is shown not by the most recent message, but by the earliest available one—and this changes depending on how many messages Mail is allowed to store.

The net result of this is that when threading is turned on, you see several new messages and then a very old one, followed by more new ones. To see an overview of the latest reply to a thread, you have to enter it, which is absolutely horrid from a usability standpoint. Not only should this action not be forced, but users shouldn’t see an overview and then jump to an entirely different message—it’s confusing.

Apple should make Mail threads show an overview of the latest email within the thread—something that would be logical and helpful. At the very least there should be a setting for this.

The quote of the day that forms the title of this post comes from MacRumors, as part of its link-bait iPhone 4 Drop Test with Bumper Case Shows Little Protection. Reporting on iFixyouri’s iPhone-with-Bumper drop test, the site notes: “The iPhone 4 with bumper lasted only 3 drops before the front glass cracked. This was the same number of drops that it took to break an unprotected iPhone 4.”

Oh noes! Apple is clearly evil for pushing those bumpers on everyone! BUT WAIT! It turns out that “the iPhone 4 hit the concrete face down for the last fall, so how it falls likely affects the chances of the glass breaking“. Wow, a serious revelation there, folks!

In other LATE-BREAKING NEWS, MacRumors will almost certainly soon reveal that if you repeatedly smash your brand-new MacBook Pro with a hammer, it will get damaged more easily than if you repeatedly beat it with the very feathery bit of a feather duster. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!