Like your news more social? Vern Seward point out 3 iOS apps that should fit the bill in this week's Free on iTunes. News Republic, Thirst, and Rockmelt. Check it out.

Everyone knows that Android has all the market share in smartphones and has achieved near parity or parity with Apple's iPad in tablets. Bryan Chaffin want to know what the heck people are doing with those devices, because they clearly don't use them to surf the Web or use Internet-connected apps.

Apple doesn't like the idea of Judge Lucy Koh potentially delaying its second U.S. patent infringement lawsuit against, so the company filed an objection earlier this week. Judge Koh asked both Apple and Samsung for their thoughts on the potential delay while waiting for the appeal process to complete in the first trial between the two companies.

Apple released updates for Pages, Keynote, and Numbers for the iPhone and iPad on Thursday, letting users know they haven't forgotten about their productivity apps for iOS. The updates are minor and the release notes only say they include "stability improvements and bug fixes."

Apple is reportedly estimating sales of 33 million iPads and 55 million iPad minis, according to DigiTimes. Citing unnamed sources in Apple's supply chain, the Taiwan news outlet reported that the new internal projections replace previous plans for selling 60 million iPads and 40 million iPad minis.

Sometimes an iOS app is so nicely done for a particular discipline that it becomes, perhaps, the quintessential app of its kind.  Nav Clock is one of those. No pilot, astronomer, photographer, journalist, hiker or anyone interested in location coordinates, time and weather should be without it.

Sometimes I'm surprised when someone asks me a tech question that I just assumed everyone knew the answer to, like recently when I was asked about changing the default Internet search engine on the iPhone. It's an easy switch, and as I was reminded, if you don't ask you won't learn.

iBooks users in Japan have been dealing with a hobbled experience compared to other countries since they've been limited to public domain titles up until now. As of Tuesday, that changed and now users have access to to thousands of commercially available titles.

Emoji are the smiley-face characters you can add to text and chat messages, and those symbols are included with OS X and iOS. All you need to know is where to look. All we ask is that you use your Emoji responsibly.

Apple is apparently ramping up for an iPad and iPad mini refresh as early as April, and has plans to release the iPhone 5S in August. Word of the unannounced plans comes from anonymous sources claiming to know Apple's road map, and once again the tech news world is trying to recreate the company's big picture from anonymous sources and news fragments.