iOS devices out-sells Android by nearly 2-1 over the Christmas period

The big news this week was numbers from last week's Christmas holiday. A research report from Flurry Analytics glommed together Android and iOS devices activated on Christmas day, noting that the combined number of 6.8 million devices was up 353 percent from the rest of the month, and up 140 percent from the same day last year.Making matters more interesting was a tweet a few days later from Andy Rubin, Google's senior VP of mobile, putting the company's own internal activation numbers at 3.7 million devices for the entire Christmas weekend. Crunching the numbers for that single day, Fortune columnist Philip Elmer-DeWitt then suggested Apple may have bested Google by about 1.6 million devices.All was not so great for Apple this week, though. The company was slapped with a 900,000 euro fine by the Italian government, who said that Apple wrongly encouraged customers in the country to purchase its AppleCare warranty service to extend support on their gadgets, despite the fact that Apple is required to provide two years of complimentary support as per Italy's local laws.