A few days ago, I read Nilay Patel’s review of the Pebble smartwatch for The Verge. Like many others, I bought a Pebble on Kickstarter, and I can’t wait to try it out myself. But one part of Patel’s review stuck out at me in particular:

Any incoming notification will quietly buzz the Pebble and light up the screen. Frankly, it’s great — being able to see who’s texting, emailing, or calling you without looking at your phone changes the entire dynamic of being connected. The upside is obvious: only reaching for your phone when it’s something important means you reach for your phone much less often. (I particularly enjoy screening calls from my wrist.)

When the iPhone launched in 2007, Jobs proclaimed when it came to phones, Apple was likely, at that time, five years ahead of the competition. Well, those five years are up, and all of a sudden, as if on cue, many of the Valley’s smartest technology minds and observers have begun to slowly split up their attention between their primary mobile devices (iPhones) and the most recent Samsung lines of Android phones. How will the growth of Android affect the priorities of developers, which mobile platforms they chose to launch on, and the monetization formula for hardware (with Samsung’s ability to capture value) and software (apps) in a state of flux?

“The middle class is being hollowed out,” says James Altucher. “Economists are shifting their attention toward a [...] crisis in the United States: the significant increase in income inequality,” reports the New York Times.

Think all those job losses over the last five years were just caused by the recession? No: “Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market,” according to an AP report on how technology is killing middle-class jobs.

When I was growing up in Canada, I was taught that income distribution should and did look like a bell curve, with the middle class being the bulge in the middle. Oh, how naïve my teachers were. This is how income distribution looks in America today:

Facebook used to build the future, but since the mobile era began it’s been chasing what’s next — Buying Instagram, reskinning acquisition Beluga as Messenger, copying Snapchat as Poke, and now getting beat to animated photos by Twitter’s Vine and Cinemagram. If Facebook doesn’t bust out its crystal ball, it could get picked apart by visionary competitors, or lose its reputation for innovation.

You know the drill, Apple posts a record $54.5 billion in revenue…

…and the stock tanks 10 percent in after-hours trading.

I mean. Fifty four and a half billion dollars. I went ahead and did the math: that’s an annual run-rate of $218 billion dollars (yes, I know Q1 is the holiday quarter, so it tends to be much larger than the others — but don’t underestimate the possibility of a new iPhone earlier in the year pushing Apple towards the $200 billion mark). Apple generated more revenue in one quarter than Google did in all of 2012. Hell, Apple is getting close to generating as much revenue in one quarter as Microsoft does in an entire year.

Smartphones are the single-fastest-growing consumer electronics segment in the world, and Google and Apple are the most formidable players in the arena, especially in terms of software. iOS and Android together hold a vast majority of the global market, and both Apple and Google have their own hardware ventures (the iPhone/iPad and the Nexus tablet/smartphone family).

But once we move past the battle for mobile souls, there is little else that these two giants have in common. In fact, even a layman could list the differences between Apple and Google all day long. But rarely does the CEO of Google.

The latest rumors out of the DigiTimes (a hit-or-miss Chinese blog focused on Apple supply-chain news) claims that Apple is not working on a larger, cheaper version of the iPhone for this year, but rather that it will debut two new 4-inch models of the smartphone.

One is expected to be the iPhone 5S, an upgraded version of the iPhone 5, and the other is expected to be a lower-cost version of the iPhone, perhaps with a plastic cover as opposed to anodized aluminum.

But before we delve any further, let’s remember that this is simply the retraction of one rumor for another, and we know very little until Apple unveils its new products officially. However, it never hurt anyone to speculate a bit.