Apple Q3 results:

• Record quarterly revenue of $28.57 billion, up 82%
• Record quarterly net profit of $7.31 billion, up 125%
• 20.34 million iPhones sold, up 142%

Nokia Q2 results:

• Sales of €9.275 billion, down 7%
• Operating loss of €487 million (operating profit of EUR 295 million, down 41%)
• 16.7 million smartphone sales, down 34%

I wonder how many people are still deluding themselves that Apple isn’t now a major player in the smartphone industry.

Damn You, Auto Correct (DYAC), if you’ve not seen it, is a site that showcases amusing typos in text messages. These mostly occur due to the auto-correct functionality in iOS, which aims to guess what you’re writing, replacing misspellings accordingly. It’s pretty clear that a good number of the submissions to the site are set-up, but some are unintentional errors.

With DYAC having been in my RSS feed for a while now, I’ve started to notice a number of patterns. A good number of the replacements are down to user error. There’s a trend, especially in the US, to add a bunch of letters to the end of words, for emphasis. This is illustrated in the entry Learn From Your Fail:

There are also many examples on the site of people who simply do not know how to spell certain words, and so iOS makes its best guess, often to comical effect. However, Father And Son shows another side of auto-correct:

This post’s contributor said his mother was trying to remind him to drop his dad off, not, er, something else entirely. There are quite a few posts along these lines on the site, often from older users. People claim their phone (typically their iPhone) is ‘changing’ their words. I therefore wonder if there’s a discoverability problem here, in people not noticing when iOS offers an alternate spelling; either that or there’s a usability issue in people not knowing how to pick a word when iOS isn’t sure what you meant to type.

It’s also pretty infuriating that iOS still denies you access to its custom dictionary, yet is insanely over-zealous about storing and offering back your more bizarre words. Type a long string in caps and deny iOS changing it to a string of its own devising and you’ll find it subsequently popping up time and time again. While you can nuke your entire custom dictionary in Settings, it’s absurd that Apple doesn’t enable finer control over custom words and mappings, although I suspect DYAC is pretty happy about that, as are its followers.

I just had a quick look at my stats and about 80 per cent of my search traffic is now coming in for variations of “Lion” and “A newer version of this app is already installed on this computer”. Presumably, people who’ve used beta versions of OS X Lion are now having installation problems. I had a similar experience with Reeder.

If you have the error, unmount any disks—including back-up volumes and internal partitions—that may have a copy of Lion installed. You should then be able to install the latest version. If not, hold Option (Alt) while clicking the ‘Buy app’ button and the download will begin.

Should you have this problem with another app, you may also need to trash the beta version of the app from /Applications.

The Apple Store just came online with some new bits and bobs, most notably Lion, but also updated MacBook Airs and Mac minis. The former now take the low-end slots in Apple’s portable line-up, and the white MacBook has gone the way of the dodo. More interestingly, here’s the spec list for the new Mac mini:

• 2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5
• 2GB memory
• 500GB hard drive
• Intel HD Graphics 3000
• OS X Lion

One thing you won’t spot in there an optical drive—and that’s because the new Mac mini doesn’t have one. So if you wanted a Mac mini for a media centre and you have a pile of DVDs and CDs that you regularly play, you’d best snap up an old Mac mini, because the new one’s a closed box, unless you add on an external drive.

Looks like hell froze over last night. Adobe Photoshop Elements is finally on the Mac App Store. To be fair to Adobe, it’s great to see the company release this product in this manner, because it’s useful, affordable and therefore certain to be useful for a large number of Mac App Store browsers. And while Apple hasn’t pushed the Mac App Store as the only way to install software (unlike in iOS), you can bet it will become a de-facto default for anyone but tinkerers over the next year. In other words, where the future of Mac software sales is concerned, you’re on the App Store or you’re nowhere. Before today, Adobe was nowhere. Today it isn’t.

So, how about Office, Microsoft? Or are you prepared to just let the iWork apps RONCH your Mac marketshare?