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We told you that today’s earnings would be thin on iPhone details and that is definitely the case. Apple’s just posted their 3rd quarter results and the results are: dizzang!

Dig the full results (minus the legal speak) after the break. Here’s the short version: a record number of Macs were sold, just shy of 2.5 million, which works out to about 41% growth year over year, 43% revenue growth. That’s ALottaMacs, friends, and it helped Apple hit a quarterly profit of over a billion dollars on $7.46 billion in revenue — both significant increases over the same quarter last year. Margins were down a hair, but whatev — Apple’s selling Macs, dig?

We can’t wait to see what the financial results are for iPhone sales (they’ll come next quarter), but we have a sneaking suspicion that numbers like these mean that the just-dandy sales for iPhones 2 quarters ago have translated into quite a few people getting interested in replacing a PC with a Mac. As Mac-users ourselves, we welcome you folks to the fold. Are you a recent switcher? Was it the Halo effect? Is your new iPhone 3G spotting a shiny halo that has you thinking Mac for your next purchase?

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My iPhone 3G, 16gb in the white flavor, has hardware issues. As I reported in our forums, it started with the volume-down button not working, and then the issue seemed to spread to volume up, the ringer switch, and the sleep button. A full restore from iTunes didn’t save it — confirmed hardware. Having no Apple Store nearby, I decided to give Apple’s phone support a try. Twenty minutes on hold and a few questions later, they sent me a box. The procedure is very simple, read on for the mini-gallery and return process details.

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MacRumors is reporting that tonight’s financial results from Apple aren’t going to contain a whole lot of crunchy iPhone goodness. The news is based on a Bloomberg report that points out that Apple’s last quarter ended before the iPhone 2.0 software update was available, Apple doesn’t count those sales towards revenue. Likely if they had, they might have had to go all Sarbanes-Oxley on us and charge for that update. That might be fine for iPod owners, but iPhone owners have had enough of hidden costs lately.

The lack of iPhone info doesn’t look to put much of a damper on the earning call, though, as the high-margin Mac has been selling quite well (especially in laptop form). If you still want to listen in for that, Apple has a webcast set up for 5pm Eastern.

Interested in knowing what apps are being bought at the App Store? Well, lucky you, Medialets has estimates for your viewing pleasure. To determine demand, Medialets uses the number of ratings each app has and also takes into account the average rating of an app as well. So though it may not be the most accurate measurement, it’s still a fairly good barometer in determining app popularity.

So what rules the App Store? FREE. According to Medialets, 9 out of the top 10 most rated apps are FREE with the one exception being Super Monkey Ball. The usual suspects populate the top 10 list with the Remote, AIM, Facebook, etc. having the most ratings and more importantly, all entirely free.

Also, it looks like the best-selling apps are games which further proves that there is a market for iPhone gaming. Simple math concludes that Sega has already hit $5 million in sales for the first weekend. Though iPhone users tend to want free apps, it looks like they have no problem laying down the cash for good games.

Feel free to click over to Medialets to see the list for yourself. Do you think it’s accurate? Are apps on the top 10 all on your iPhone? Let us know!

ReadVia

A few posts back we got into a few App Store early growing pains/gripes, including that some less-scrupulous — or more marketing-savvy, depending on your point of view — developers were prepending spaces and symbols to their App names in order to get them to sort higher in the alphabetical listings. Well according to MacUser (via Ars), seems like Apple called shenanigans on that one and has put an end to the practice.

Visiting the App Store now, I see that Jirbo’s titles, as well as quite a few others, still have a space in front of them, but are simply alphabetized by the following letter.

Nicely done. Would that all App Store problems were so easily solved…

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Pardon us while we forget how civilized, non-misogynistic, and enlightened owning an iPhone has made us. The iPhone gets to our caveman brain — we’re as helpless staring at the iPhone as a neanderthal staring at fire. Other things that get us in that same primitive gadget zone: Star Wars and that recent Transformers move (which, except for that Shia guy, was good times).

What we’re getting at here is that while we may not have as many celeb sightings as our CrackBerry.com friends, when we get one we make it count, friends, we make it count Tri-Fecta style. Megan Fox of Transformers fame + iPhone + retro Star Wars T-Shirt is worth five hundred janky Paris Hilton CrackBerry sightings.

Let’s do this some more — send in your Celeb iPhone sightings to news@theiphoneblog.com

[original source, slightly NSFW]

You’ve got your uber-cool new iPhone 3G or you’re rocking the new 2.0 update on your iPhone 2G or iPod Touch, and you want to try out this Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync all the kids suits are yabbering about. One problem — you don’t have an Exchange server. You’re not part of some big megacorp with a massive IT department, you’re not a developer with MSDC licenses for the “testing”, and you’re not even small-business’y enough to pick up a cheap (for Microsoft!) ActionPack with a couple of licenses (or even if you did, you don’t have the geek in you to set ‘em up and administer the high-maintenance little beasties).

What to do, what to do?

Hosted Exchange.

Yup, just like ISP’s offer regular old email, and we services offer Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, etc. for POP and IMAP mail, some companies will provide you with similar email accounts hosted on Exchange, ready for to get your ActiveSync iPhone nirvana on. Ranging in price, some even do it cheaply and some… for FREE!

The inimitable Lifehacker points us towards Mail2Web, which offers a FREE Microsoft Exchange based email solution, and provides handy-dandy setup and usage tips (though it looks like you might need the $4.45 a month version if you want to use it directly with Outlook on the PC).

TiPb’s own cross-platformer-in-chief also points us towards some for-pay, but potentially better fitting solutions from some users, with Sherweb at the top of his list, 1and1 hitting okay, and 4smartphone serving up equal parts popularity and unreliability (lately).

Of course, Microsoft itself is also entering the subscription space, for anyone who might want an ActiveSync addy straight out of Redmond…

Any options we’re missing?

Now that we’ve successfully giving away over a thousand dollars in iTunes Gift Cards and an iPhone 3G, it’s time for us to take a breather. Thing is, the way we take a breather here at TiPb is to start up another way for you to get what you want for your iPhone. Here’s the deal:

Head on over to our new “iPhone App Lightning Reviews” forum and, you know, post a review of an iPhone app. It can be native or web, legit or jailbroken. Be sure to include some screenshots as attachments — on iPhone 2.0, you can just hold down the home and powerbutton briefly and the screenshot will get saved to your camera album. Keep it around 500ish words, be fair, and try not to all review the same apps — though reviews after major updates are always a good idea. Give it a rating out of 5 stars and a couple pros and cons at the end too, for those crazy skimmers.

…Why would you do all that? Every so often the TiPb staff will be picking our favorites and promoting them to the front page. We’ll thank you by giving back to you. More after the break!

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The fine folks at iphone-dev want to make it clear: they’ve jailbroken the iPhone and they have the video above to prove it. Now all we need is a release announcement …and maybe confirmation that it will work on that rumored 2.01 release. On the first score, they let us know they’re hard at work. They must be — it’s clearly fried their taste in music — check the video above out for proof of both.

Thanks to Cherryhead25 for the tip!. [via]

We had sort of been expecting that the iPhone 3G would be more difficult to unlock because it would be impossible to walk out of a store without signing a contract and activating the iPhone. We all know how that worked out on launch day — iPhones were flying about unactivated anyway. Honestly, given that the 2.0 software has already been fully pwned (read: opened up, jailbroken, made to serve the whims of hackers everywhere), the early unlocking really should be no surprise.

Fernando writes in:

I just saw this today. A brazilian team seems to be the first one in the world to have a fully unlocked 3g iPhone. It’s using brazilian operator TIM, that does not support iPhones here in Brazil; actually the iPhone did not even start selling here, and when it does it will be Claro and maybe Vivo.

The video is in Portuguese, so it might not be clear exactly what’s happening to most readers. The method here, as Gizmodo notes, is

a special card that piggybacks to your SIM card, fooling the phone into thinking it’s using an official carrier. While this is not the software unlock being developed by the usual suspects, the video clearly shows that it works fine.

We know a lot of folks are waiting for a clear path to unlocking and jailbreaking to get the iPhone 3G — it looks like that wait isn’t going to be much longer than an Apple store line.