Fresh off NPD's latest Mobile Phone Track report claiming that Android has leapfrogged the iPhone in US sales, Apple is commenting on the numbers -- and as you might expect, they're not exactly taking a congratulatory tone with Google. Speaking to AllThingsD's John Paczkowski, Cupertino had this to say:

"This is a very limited report on 150,000 US consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide. IDC figures show that iPhone has 16.1 percent of the smartphone market and growing, far outselling Android on a worldwide basis. We had a record quarter with iPhone sales growing by 131 percent and with our new iPhone OS 4.0 software coming this summer, we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon."

The factual accuracy of Apple's words here can't really be disputed, but as Paczkowski notes, the context can: lumping the iPod touch into this equation isn't really fair, since NPD's report is about smartphones, not mobile operating systems (which would've let devices like non-phone Android MIDs into the picture). Besides, this is about the US market in the first quarter of 2010, not global sales, nor is it about Apple's development pipeline. In other words, Apple's not disputing NPD's report here -- rather, they're simply trying to change the subject, as any properly-trained PR department would. There's no question Android still has an uphill battle to dominate market (and mind) share the world over, but the odds that it outsold the iPhone in the US in Q1 remain very real.

Details and pics of Sapphire's new Pure CrossfireX 890GX motherboard have surfaced. The board is full ATX sized and uses the 890GX+SB850 combination.

It's interesting that Sapphire has done away with its iconic white PCB this time around.

The AM3 socket is given 10-phase VRM power and is wired to four DDR3 slots. The integrated Radeon HD 4290 IGP is given 128MB of Sideport memory alongside the ability to share system memory.

RunCore has just brought to market a new series of enterprise level SSDs that use the tried and true SandForce SF-1500 controller and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface.

RunCore calls the new series Kylin II, of which comes in both 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch form factors. There are both Single Level Cell and Multi Level Cell variants of this series available. Other attributes inlude native ECC data protection, on-board temperature sensor and a power consumption of about 2.6W.

Despite the ECC inclusion, read and write rates are still very respectable at about 270MB/sec read and 260MB write. Capacities in the series go from as small as 50GB up to 400GB.

Although Apple's next iPhone operating system is at least a month away from release, Wired.com got a hands-on peek at the latest beta and found some interesting goodies that have not been officially announced.

Most notably, the iPhone OS 4 beta 3 software includes a brand new iPod widget and a file-sharing feature that was previously exclusive to the iPad. (These features were previously reported by Boy Genius Report.)

Other new features we tested were those on display during Apple's recent iPhone event: multitasking, folders, universal e-mail, wallpaper and camera zoom. Taken together, they paint a picture of an operating system that is well on its way to a major upgrade, one that will greatly increase the usability of Apple's growing family of iPhone OS-based devices.

Google's Android operating system edged out Apple's iPhone operating system for the No. 2 spot in the U.S. consumer smartphone market in the first quarter, research firm NPD Group reported Monday.

According to NPD, devices running Android accounted for 28 percent of the units sold to U.S. consumers in the first quarter of 2010. BlackBerry devices made by Research In Motion, which use RIM's homegrown operating system, took the top spot with 36 percent of the U.S. market. Apple's iPhone, which had been in the No. 2 spot previously, fell to third place with 21 percent of the market.

NPD's figures are based on self-reported consumer surveys and they estimate the number of devices sold to consumers. The figures do not include sales of devices to business customers through enterprise contracts.

Goodbye, Slate, hello, Hurricane! HP is expected to release a webOS-running tablet called the Hurricane, as soon as the third quarter of this year. While a challenge to the iPad, the Hurricane could be more of a threat to Microsoft.

Hewlett-Packard could be releasing a tablet running the Palm's webOS operating system as soon as the third quarter of 2010, according to a report from The Examiner, which attributes the information to "an insider at HP."

The tablet, according to the report, would be called the HP "Hurricane."

Wouldn't it be nice if you could access files on your computer when your away from your home or office? LogMeIn Ignition for Android in now in Beta and free for beta testers who will be able to control and contact their home or office computers.

Ignition gives you access to your work and home computers from your Android smartphone such as your Droid, Droid Incredible, Droid Eris, Nexus One, T-Mobile G1, T-Mobile myTouch 3G Motorola Cliq, Samsung Behold II, Samsung Moment, Motorola Devour, BlackFlip and HTC Hero.

Ignition lets users use the distant computer as if they were sitting in front of it. You can download the beta version for free and let LogMeIn know how you like so that they can optimize the final product before the big launch.

A hotly discussed on-going topic is Flash and the lack of support on mobile devices and the ability to playback HD video using Flash on power efficient devices such as netbooks and tablets.

Earlier today we attended an Opera Software press briefing here in Taipei to discuss Opera's future plans for HTML5, web standards and how they affect consumer electronics and OEMs in Taiwan. The get together was designed to be an early look of what the Norwegian software company intends to show at Computex Taipei 2010 early next month. Håkon Wium Lie, Opera CTO and the 'father of CSS' was there to discuss these topics and for us it was most interesting to hear what Opera thought about Adobe Flash and where it fits in now and in the future.

Jon S. von Tetzchner, Opera Co-founder and he had some interesting thoughts on Flash as well. During the presentation, we were shown the new video tag (created by Opera) which is part of CSS3, a W3C style sheet language web standard that will soon be supported by many web browsers. This new video tag allows you to write a very simple line of code to add a video to your website. It will come down to the individual browser makers to add support for CSS3 powered video playback, but clearly Opera is behind it in a big way. It remains to be seen how much other browser makers will embrace it, but Opera is eagerly optimistic that it will be embraced heavily as they are fully behind open web standards and this one in particular in a big way - at least that was the impression that we got today.

Looking out for the cream of the crop when it comes to choosing an 890FX powered motherboard for your new six-core Phenom II? - ASUS have quite the candidate in store with the Crosshair IV Extreme which the folks at Slashgear managed to get a bunch of pictures and info about.

In case you're a little confused in thinking this board was already released last month, that was the Formula; the Extreme is similar in many aspects, but it gives one main advantage. This board sports LucidLogix's Hydra chip which gives much more flexible multi-GPU support and does away with cross-vendor restrictions.

There are no less than five PCIe x16 slots on this board to further add to the multi-GPU flexibility this board provides and it comes with a stack of other overclocking and enthusiast oriented trinkets. These include support for ASUS RoG Connect (with Bluetooth remote control), hardware buttons on the motherboard to control BIOS settings on the fly, one touch automatic overclocking with Turbo Key II and of course, ASUS' Core Unlocker feature that will unlock more cores on dual, triple and quad core processors.

GALAXY is one of several companies looking to bring out modified versions of the GTX 400 series cards from NVIDIA and below you can see the worlds first 100% modified GTX 470 which GALAXY has been working on.

GALAXY calls this the GTX 470 GC and not only is the aftermarket cooling solution a standout, but the PCB itself has also been modified by GALAXY; a blue PCB which is 0.5" shorter than the reference design and re-locates the two 6-pin PCIe power connectors to the rear section of the card.

The cooler itself is unique to other aftermarket coolng solutions not only aesthetically, but by design with an innovative detachable fan setup that allows one to easily remove it for cleaning along with easier access to clean the heatsink under it. The large aluminum fin array spans across the entire card.