Gadgetory

it's Tuesday January 3rd 2012 Happy New Year I'm Bridget Carey on Sina comm and it's time to get loaded the Consumer Electronics Show is next week but Apple rumors are dominating the tech buzz at least for the moment Apple will reportedly hold a press conference in New York sometime this month and early speculations say it has something to do with electronic books and publishing sorry kids we're not going to hear anything about an iPad 3 or Apple TV just yet and speaking of e-books you might be able to do some reading on the new Nintendo Wii U game console which is expected to come out later this year the Wii U has a touchscreen tablet like controller and not only will the controller have standalone games available on an app store but reports this morning say there will also be an e-book store so if you're stuck in a game you can pull up the how-to players guide right from the controller this was a huge holiday for smartphones according to flurry a mobile application analytics firm a record 6.8 million iOS and Android devices were activated on Christmas Day and more than 242 million apps were downloaded if you take a step back to look at the whole last week of December 1.2 billion apps were downloaded it was also a big holiday for Mario Nintendo sold 4 million in Tendo 3ds systems and 4.5 million Wii consoles overall for the year Nintendo sold more than twelve million gaming systems in the United States and it's hit that number for five years in a row according to the company and it isn't just devices that can have a good holiday season the social network Google+ saw its usage in the United States rise 55 percent from November to December according to the firm Experian Hitwise that means Google+ had 49 million visits but Google's keeping mum on the official numbers one analyst and self-proclaimed Google statistician the founder of ancestry.com believes Google has 62 million users of course it's a ways away from Facebook's count of 800 million users with election day nine months away you can follow the campaign trail on Google's new election hub at google.com slash elections you can see which candidate is trending and searches or go on the ground to get elections stories pinned across a map and see what's going on in a particular location of course if you go on now all the news is around Iowa today is the Iowa caucus the first major electoral event in nominating the President of the United States but if you rather go by Facebook stats than Iowa polls to determine the Republican presidential candidate well then Mitt Romney's in the lead with more than 1.2 million fans according to the social media statisticians at social backers he's followed by Ron pop who has more than 600,000 Facebook fans paul also has the greatest percentage of interactions with bands between likes and currents but if you just look at fan growth in the past month rick santorum has the lead those are your headlines for today I'm Bridget Carey proceed calm and you just been loaded