Monday, for the first time in two years, Steve Jobs "couldn't help dropping by for our (Apple's) first US$20 billion quarter" and commenting during the Apple earnings call.
Apple had a 91 percent growth in iPhone sales with 14.1 million units sold as compared to 12.1 million BlackBerry smartphones sold by RIM. Apple also sold 4.19 million iPads during the quarter, higher than the 3.27 million it sold during the tablet's first quarter of sales.
Jobs first bashed BlackBerry saying that "we've now passed RIM, and I don't see them catching up." Then he added it would be "a challenge for them to create a competitive platform and to convince developers to create apps for yet a third software platform" after Apple's iOS and Google's open-platform Android mobile operating systems.
Jobs then took on Android that has 200,000 acitivations a day, which is of course surpassed by iPhones with 275,000 activations a day. He called the Android market fragmented and noted that 7-inch Android tablets don't compare to iPad. The smaller size "isn't sufficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion. Given that all users will already have a smartphone in their pockets, giving up precious display area to fit a tablet in our pocket is clearly the wrong tradeoff."
Apple reported record revenue of US$20.34 billion and net quarterly profit of US$4.31 billion in the fourth quarter.
What does Jobs have up his black turtle-neck sleeve? "We still have a few surprises left for the remainder of this calendar year."