Hasta La Gadget!

Apple’s iPhone made up some ground in the most recent comScore smartphone OEM market share numbers, covering the three-month period ending in January 2013. Apple’s share rose from 34.3 percent curing the previous quarter to 37.8 percent, a point change of 3.5. Samsung’s share also rose, going from 19.5 percent to 21.4 percent, growth of 1.9 percentage points. HTC and Motorola shed share, maintaining their third and fourth-place spots but each losing nearly as much share Samsung gained.

ComScore also measured smartphone platform share, and found that Google’s Android accounted for 52.3 percent of overall U.S. smartphone subscribers aged 13 or older, a drop of 1.3 percentage points vs. the previous quarter. Apple’s iOS gained ground, adding 3.5 percentage points to its share, going from 34.3 percent share in the quarter ending October 2012, to 37.8 percent in the one that just ended in January.

In other words, according to comScore’s number, Apple was the big winner for the holiday season. Which makes a lot of sense, given that it released the iPhone 5 in September, and the device continued to see supply constraints through October and November leading into the holiday sales season. Samsung’s flagship device, the Galaxy S III, had been on the market since June 2012.

In terms of platforms vying for third place, BlackBerry shed nearly 2 percentage points of its share during the quarter, but a lot of that was likely due to the imminent release of BB10. The first BB10 devices didn’t go on sale anywhere in the world until the end of the month, and they have yet to arrive officially at any U.S. carriers. Next quarter results should be a better indicator of how BlackBerry will fare alongside Microsoft in the U.S. in the war for a third modern smartphone platform.

Apple’s share of the smartphone market was also up from the three-month period ending in December, when comScore pegged it at 36.3 percent, with Samsung up to 21.0 percent, representing growth of 2.0 and 2.3 percentage points respectively. These two continue to slug it out at the top, but the most recent numbers show Apple pulling ahead at a faster rate. We’ll see if the Galaxy S IV launch, likely coming sometime next week, has any influence on consumer buying choices when it comes to the U.S. smartphone market.

The Galaxy S IV leaks are coming fast, from a number of sources including the company itself, and this morning brings two in rapid succession. First, as Matt reported earlier, shots depicting the addition of new Smart screen settings from a version of Android 4.2.1 for the Galaxy S III surfaced, and now another source is claiming to have received images of the same thing from a U.S. model Galaxy S IV.

The Galaxy S IV screenshots come from GSM Israel, a blog with a pretty solid track record in reporting early leak information. This time around, the blog say it’s very confident that these screenshots are legit, as they come from a “very reliable” source. Another reason to believe these are the real thing? They match up pretty closely to the earlier GS III screen leaks depicting similar changes to that device’s settings screens, as you can see in the side-by-side image below.

Alongside a screen that seems to confirm Samsung will indeed be including “Smart scroll” in the new version of its Galaxy S smartphone, along with features that change screen orientation, pause media playback and disable screen timeout based on head positioning, these leaks also indicate we’ll see the rumored 1.8GHz quad-core processor powering this phone. Data from the Quick System Info Pro app also suggest rumors about the GS IV’s 1920×1080 pixel screen, with Retina-busting 440 ppi pixel density and an approximately 5-inch display, are also accurate.

There’s also a screen of the device’s camera options, which indicate it’ll be able to max out at 13 megapixels, another oft-rumored spec for the still-unannounced device. Samsung likely won’t have many surprises left to deliver on stage when it unveils the Galaxy S IV next Thursday, March 14 at a presentation in New York City, but this still looks like a phone that will help Samsung continue its Android device sales dominance. And we’ll still be on hand to make sure you get the news and confirmations of these features live as they happen.

Hungry for a blue Raspberry Pi, anyone? RS Components has just that. With a blue board, blue casing, and a certificate of authenticity, this limited Model B Revision 2 is a great way to celebrate the Pi’s 1st birthday. Too bad you can’t just buy it.

These anniversary boards are not for sale. RS Components is issuing them to a variety of developer, enthusiast and non-profit channels. But since the Raspberry Pi is aimed at these markets anyway, this is a noble move. No doubt several will show up for sale on eBay and fan boards anyway, where they’ll fetch crazy prices from diehard fans.

RS Components is also giving several away on twitter. DesignSpark has all the details.

The Raspberry Pi had an incredible first year. More than a million boards were sold and new models are in the works. Thanks to its low price and versatility, the Raspberry Pi is introducing (and in some cases, reintroducing) legions of computer users to the magic of raw computing.

“I remember when Raspberry Pis were rare enough that I had a spreadsheet that told me where they were in the world,” founder Eben Upton previously told John Biggs. “Now we’re a million Pis in.”

The Kinect is arguably Microsoft’s most important innovation of the past decade, and has done more for changing the nature of computer interaction than pretty much any other recently created input devices. Today, Microsoft Research has demoed how it’s about to get even better, with the addition of hand recognition complete with refined gesture support.

Microsoft is showing off the new features at its TechFest even this week at Redmond HQ, and The Verge has a video of the new capabilities in action. As you can see from the video, you can use pinch-to-zoom, as well as hand gripping motions that allow for panning and scrolling too. The technique employs machine learning to recognize the difference between an open and closed hand, which is then integrated into Windows games and apps.

The video shows navigating maps, as well as playing Jetpack Joyride in Windows 8, and shows how a simple close finger gesture can be recognized as a mouse click essentially, which would be a very handy tool to add to Kinect’s Windows-based powers. The upgraded features are destined for Windows soon (though no specific timeline was given), though sadly there’s nothing to announce yet for bringing the enhanced gesture detection powers to Xbox.

The Kinect will soon have its own fair share of competitors when it comes to gesture-based input for desktop computing. The Leap Motion Controller ships May 13 to pre-order customers, and promises to deliver extremely fine gesture detection on both Windows and OS X, to the point where it should work for virtual painting and drawing applications, with a module much smaller and without the same physical space requirements as the Kinect. The MYO armband from Thalmic labs is also attracting a lot of early attention for its own, body sensor-based gesture control powers.

Microsoft did some terrific ground breaking in this space, but now the company has keep pace with a number of hungry young startups eager to blow it wide open. These new feature additions for Kinect for Windows should help Microsoft keep the competition interesting.

Public school systems are cheerfully decorated dictatorships: discipline, standards, and testing are the driving concepts of modern k-12 education. The very reason why districts purchase bundles of the same textbooks is so they can keep classrooms in lockstep alignment as teachers meticulous meet timely instructional goals. Amplify, NewsCorp’s new education division, finally revealed its long-awaited flagship product: a sophisticated tablet designed specifically for schools, which many finally be the perfect bureaucratic blend of classroom management, assessment, and monitoring that schools need to adopt technology en mass.

But what in the sam hill is News Corp. doing messing around in education? Well, it’s true that Rupert Murdoch is one of the more well-known (and polarizing) figures in the media landscape; his reputation precedes him, and it’s not one that’s typically been associated with education reform. While the News Corp. founder’s sudden transformation into an education reform advocate may seem a head-scratcher, the motivation becomes clear when, in Murdoch’s terms, one considers that K-12 education is a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone — and one that remains relatively untouched by corporations like News Corp.

A little over two years ago, Murdoch set out leverage the News Corp. brand to help fix a public education system that, in his words, has “lower standards than American Idol,” hiring one of the more prominent figures in American education, former chancellor of New York schools, Joel Klein, to pursue opportunities in EdTech. With Klein as his new education guru, the pair quickly made their first big strategic move, acquiring New York-based software, assessment and data services startup, Wireless Generation, for a whopping $360 million.

However, News Corp.’s plans for education were quickly derailed by the infamous phone-hacking scandal that forced Klein leave his position to lead the company’s internal investigation. After two years of investigations, trials and more, News Corp. rebranded its education unit last summer as “Amplify,” revealing some of the basic tenets that would shape its digital strategy, which include “assessment via mobile tools, curriculum design and the online distribution of resources via AT&T-powered tablets,” as Greg wrote at the time.

Klein and company are convinced that, for public education reform to be successful, the private sector needs to get more involved — as does the role of technology in the classroom to help both teachers teach more effectively and help students learn. Amplify attempts to put those ideas into practice, by allowing the company to not only sell its curriculum on any tablet makes its way into schools, but by betting that schools will be willing to fork over a pretty penny to access blended learning tools (and an infrastructure to store learning data) all through a custom tablet.

Of course, Ammplify isn’t the first to offer these types of learning tools on mobile devices, as many startups (and even bigs like Pearson) already have similar cross-platform, web-based tools on the market. However, no particular device or platform has emerged as the clear leader, and by offering classroom management tools and features that one would expect from News Corp, like a kill switch that allows teachers to limit students’ access to apps on the tablet, Amplify hopes to get a leg up.

As to those features: Amplify’s Android-based 10″ tablet comes preloaded with all the basic learning software that teachers need to dole out information on any given subject: textbooks, multimedia lessons, Encyclopedia Britannica, and a graphing calculator. It even includes the widely popular Khan Academy suite of YouTube-based lectures, which were recently converted to an off-line textbook-style format.

More importantly, Amplify’s tablet suite is a managerial dream: teachers can carefully monitor students behavior, administrators can deploy content across an entire grade-level, and districts can evaluate schools with custom standardized tests.

Amplify gives teachers, as both disciplinarian and educator, impressive control. They can selectively enable or disable apps to direct student learning; distracted students get an “eyes on teacher” alert if their usage behavior indicates an inattentive mind. Impromptu polls and tests individually evaluates each student and gives them customized refreshers.

The very cost-structure of the tablet system is designed for administration. Even with a two-year subscription at $99 per year, the wifi-enabled tablet is still a pricey $299 (a 4G version is $349 with a $179/year contract). But, it’s meant to be purchased by whole schools, districts or states, and comes with 24-hour live technical support to ensure students are meeting goals in a timely fashion. If schools could replace some of their textbooks and IT overhead, the cost appears less daunting. But, it’s still high.

Just as important, Amplify has been built around the Common Core, a new national curriculum guideline emphasizing career and college readiness. Yet, since the federal government can’t set national standards, schools have been left to fend for themselves and develop their own tests. Amplify’s evaluation wing aims to ease the confusion and develop a reliable set of measures that can easily be distributed school-wide with the click of a button.

During Greg’s interview with Amplify CEO Joel Klein at Techcrunch’s Disrupt San Francisco, he made it clear that all of the wonderful hardware in the world won’t make a difference unless it’s built for the schools and teachers. There’s already a crowded market of education technology, from classroom management software ClassDojo, to tablet software from textbook giants McGraw-Hill and Pearson.

Successful players in the education space knew that schools need scale, structure, and support. When Google entered the market, they got buy-in from state-level officials and now have over 20 million users.

Klein, knows that education is a game of Monopoly: provide a school everything and ye shall receive everything. The result, in this case, may be the push that the education system needs to enter the 21st century.