In an SEC filing on Wednesday, Verizon reported that it sold 9.8 million smartphones during the fourth quarter, which includes the all-important holiday season. The company specifically noted it saw a “higher mix of Apple smartphones” — meaning a greater percentage of the smartphones it sold were iPhones compared to the same quarter a year ago. Verizon also reported that even after two years of availability, its share of smartphones with LTE subscriptions shot up from 16 percent to 23 percent during the fourth quarter– a good indication that the LTE-capable iPhone 5 is popular among its subscribers.

Wells Fargo analyst Maynard Um did the math and found that the 9.8 million “compares to 7.7mm smartphones sold in Q4 2011 (an increase of 27% yr/yr).” By way of comparison, he wrote in a note to clients Wednesday, “Verizon’s Q4 2011 iPhone activations as a percentage of smartphones sales were ~56% or 4.3mm. We see the higher smartphone activations and higher iPhone mix as positive for Apple.”

AT&T reported Tuesday that it sold 10 million smartphones during the holiday quarter, the most ever in its history. And, the carrier confirmed, “most” of those were iPhones and Android phones. Both carriers will report their full earnings figures in two weeks.

AT&T has been offering the iPhone since the beginning and Verizon since 2010. That those two can still attract new iPhone buyers in large numbers is a good sign for the iPhone’s continued demand. When it comes to Apple’s ability to beat last year’s holiday sales, U.S. carriers are just one part of the equation. But other indications — like early sales figures from the iPhone 5′s launch — indicate a good level of demand for it in other countries as well.

The holiday quarter has become hugely important for Apple. Apple devices, particularly small mobile ones, have been a hallmark of gift giving during December since the iPod was the company’s hottest gadget. The fourth quarter of 2011 was Apple’s biggest holiday quarter ever. A downturn in sales in 2012 could send a message that Apple devices are no longer as desirable or cool. Apple’s decision to introduce its most important product refreshes (most of Apple’s revenues are derived from the iPhone and iPad) right before the holiday, encourages not only gift-giving but buying yourself a present during the quarter too.

The company reports earnings Jan. 23. A good or bad quarter will end up setting the tone for the year. And this year, with Apple’s stock slumping and investors wondering if Apple’s glow is wearing off, assuring them with a blockbuster earnings report isn’t a bonus: it’s basically a requirement at this point.

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Last year’s fourth quarter is the current record holder at AT&T. Then Ma Bell activated 9.4 million devices. All of the same factors that drove such huge sales last year are again in place. Most notably Apple kept with its adjusted iPhone launch schedule, which with the iPhone 4S was moved from the early summer to fall. That means AT&T will reap the benefits of a new iPhone release and the traditional Christmas sales boom both in the same three-month period.

There may be incentives for consumers to invest even more heavily in the iPhone this year as opposed to last. The new iPhone 5 not only has a new design and new iOS 6 features, but it is the first Apple smartphone with LTE capabilities. AT&T could also an uptick across its LTE device portfolio due to the huge expansion of its network. At the end of 2011 AT&T had a meager 15-city footprint, but today it offers its new 4G service in 109 markets covering 150 million people.

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For most of us, Thanksgiving is about football, beer and arguing politics with Uncle Mike. But for the cook in kitchen, it can be an extremely stressful ordeal. Preparing a huge meal for a dozen people on a tight timeline is hard enough as it is, but doing so under the critical gaze of your mother-in-law and with kids are scurrying underfoot, it can be impossible.

Luckily there’s help on the other side of your PC, tablet or smartphone screen. Here are three apps that can help ease the stress of creating a holiday meal and might even help you avert a Thanksgiving culinary catastrophe.

Food52 Hotline

Last November, hundreds of home cooks gave thanks to Amanda Hesser, Merrill Stubbs and the gaggle of dedicated cooks at Food52. Together the group saved a lot of holiday meals from disaster with a service called Hotline, which you can think of as digital version of the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line, except its scope isn’t limited to the preparation of oversized poultry.

You can ask Hotline a question by posting on the Food52 website, via its iPhone app or by tweeting directly at the @food52hotline Twitter account. The format allows you to ask detailed questions about general cooking topics or specific recipes. Food52 editors will parse the questions and forward them to the site’s contributors based on fields of expertise. Chances are, one of Food52’s 50,000 crowdsourced contributors will get back to you within the half hour. If you mark the question as urgent (i.e. you’re eyeing the fire extinguisher), you may hear back within minutes.

Anyone looking for a little extra help may want to invest in Food52 Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide, an iPad cookbook app that pretty much breaks down every aspect of hosting a holiday party and cooking dinner into all of its component parts. The recipes are not only detailed, but the techniques are illustrated with photos, diagrams and often how-to videos. What’s more, if you run into a problem, you can access Hotline right from the app.

CookingPlanit

So you’re a neophyte in the kitchen, but for some reason you agreed to host Thanksgiving this year. You don’t just need recipes and advice, you need someone holding your hand in the kitchen. You might be the ideal candidate for Cooking Planit, a new culinary app available for the iOS devices that is pretty much the closest thing you can get to a digital cooking assistant.

CookingPlanit guides you through every aspect of meal planning from shopping for groceries and prep work to timing your roast’s stay in the oven. It doesn’t matter how inept or careless or distracted you are, Cooking Planit doesn’t leave anything to chance. It even tells you when to take breaks.

The Austin-based startup launched only this summer so it’s building up its recipe library and features. Right now, its biggest drawback for holiday meal planning is it can only scale recipes to six servings, so if you’re planning on hosting a big dinner, you might want to give Cooking Planit some time to mature.

That said, if you’re looking to start out small and simple, CookingPlanit’s in-house chef Emily Wilson has prepared two simple Thanksgiving menus (though neither includes a whole roast turkey). The app allows you to mix and match recipes to create your own menus. The cooking assistant then crunches the ingredients and instructions to create a detailed shopping list and dinner-day game plan. You just need to show up and do what your iPad tells you to do.

BigOven RecipeScan

Meals don’t get any more traditional than Thanksgiving dinner, and that means a lot of us are cooking from old family recipes that are hand-printed on index cards, jotted down in notebooks or scrawled in the margins of cookbooks. BigOven’s RecipeScan service can’t improve upon those recipes, but it can produce digital versions, making the Thanksgiving grocery shopping, meal planning and cooking a lot easier.

BigOven does this not through fancy algorithms or handwriting-deciphering software; rather it uses Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s crowdsourced internet labor marketplace. Basically BigOven is hiring people to translate your chicken scratch handwriting into digital text as well as into semantic food data that Big Oven’s recipe aggregation and meal-planning engine can parse. BigOven will convert any recipe you capture with its iPhone, Android or Windows Phone app, even if you snap a photo out of a magazine or cookbook. You can then combine your recipes with other digital recipes from BigOven’s libraries and those you “clip” from Websites into a universal recipe box.

The first three scans are free, after which customers can buy scans in bundles or at 59 cents a pop. Since human labor is involved, the process takes a few days, so it’s bit late to digitize this year’s Thanksgiving menu, but it’s never too early to start planning next year’s.

Poultry image courtesy of Shutterstock user koya979

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Flexible office space company Regus asked 12,000 workers in 85 countries about their intentions to work during the end-of-year holidays and found a few of the year’s biggest occasions aren’t enough to keep Americans away from the office (or their smartphones). The company found:

• 64 percent of U.S. business people will work during the last week of the year.
• 56 percent of those working during this time will travel into the office to do so.
• Yet a hefty percentage of American respondents – 39 percent — believe workers will get very little done in this work time.

These numbers come on top of an another poll from RingCentral showing 70.4 percent of U.S. business owners, executives and independent pros surveyed expect to work more this holiday season than last year. Only 14 percent plan to take a real vacation, meaning a complete break from work, including work-related emails or phone calls. Filling in this dismal picture of vacation starvation is the annual doom and gloom from Mercer’s 2011 Worldwide Benefit & Employment Guidelines, which shocked exactly no one by showing workers in the U.S. have among the least generous statutory employee holiday entitlements (entitlements they don’t even take full advantage of).

What does this have to do with connectivity and the future of work? Simple: Constant connectivity and eroding work-life boundaries may be making it even more difficult for vacation-starved Americans (and even those in more vacation-friendly countries) to really get away. Just take the tiny percentage of workers RingCentral revealed will be taking a real vacation by severing their connection to work entirely as exhibit A. Add to these difficulties the seemingly endless pressure of a dire economic climate and the vacation complications caused by our increasingly international teams, which creates the need to decide which holidays, if any, remote employees are entitled to and you have a recipe for increasing levels of holiday deprivation-induced burnout.

Do you get the sense that our Americans vacation starvation is getting worse due to larger workforce trends?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon.

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Apple has long used the fall to introduce new iPod models, which to date has made much sense, since the iPod business all but turned Apple into the consumer electronics industry force that it is today. But iPod sales have either been stagnant or dropping, in sales measured year-over-year, as standalone digital audio players have been cannibalized by smartphones. During Apple’s last fiscal quarter results, iPod sales were revealed to have dropped the most since their introduction, with a 17 percent dip.

The iPod touch continues to show positive growth, and accounts for a growing piece of iPod sales overall, but neither the iPod touch or even the whole iPod category can hold a candle to Apple’s iPhone business. Last quarter, it sold 18.65 million handsets, beating the previous year by more than double. iPhone sales for the quarter also doubled the year before that.

What’s the bottom line? Increasingly, iPods are less important to Apple’s business. They still represent a considerable revenue stream, but the trend indicates that iPhones and iPads will probably occupy a more privileged place in Apple’s future business.

With the update schedule we saw last year, the iPad was introduced in April, and the iPhone 4 came out in June. That’s relatively little time between two major releases. This year, Apple held off on unveiling a new iPhone device, and the iPad could be a big part of why, since a lopsided annual revenue picture isn’t good for investors confidence, nor is having the development timelines for two core hardware products with many similarities so minimally spaced an ideal situation for Apple’s mobile device engineering team.

If Apple’s sales trends continue, in a few years time, you’d have the iPod holding on to a much smaller fraction of Apple’s mobile business, while the iPhone and the iPad make up for a much better piece of the overall picture. The iPod just wouldn’t be able to carry the September time-period nearly as well as it has in the past. Plus, Apple’s more interesting products would both have lost a lot of steam, in terms of novelty value, press coverage and buzz by the time holiday buyers are preparing their shopping lists and news outlets are looking for shiny new tech to recommend.

It’s not quite at the point where iPod releases are uninteresting to buyers, but Apple wouldn’t want to wait for that to happen, and the strong sales success of the iPhone 4, coupled with the expansion of its availability to Verizon customers, and the late addition of the white model, all meant that if there was a year where Apple could afford to miss its fairly rigorous annual refresh, 2011 was it.

Last year, Jon Gruber of Daring Fireball suggested that Apple was planning to release another new iPad incarnation in the fall, which could have been intended in part to put a marquee mobile release closer to the holidays. I think he got the idea right, but the device wrong. Apple does need a new fall star, and that star will be the iPhone.

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Whitmore’s checks covered more than 50 Apple retail stores, and stores belonging to retail partners like Best Buy. His inquiries found that demand was very high, but Apple was well-prepared for said demand, and few stores experienced complete sell-outs of any product.

The iPad was a strong seller, so much so that Whitmore increased his estimate for quarterly sales for the device from 6.0 to 6.5 million. The best-selling model of iPad according to the channel checks was the 32 GB 3G + Wi-Fi iPad: the most expensive one available.

Whitmore also increased his iPhone and Mac sales estimates. iPhone sales are projected to be around 16 million (in keeping with earlier estimates, since Whitmore isn’t counting on a Verizon iPhone), while Macs (the lowest selling category) should see around 14.2 million, according to the analyst’s calculations. iPods were the only device category whose sales estimates Whitmore did not increase.

Holiday sales estimates for Apple products, and the iPad especially, have been all over the place, but a recent roundup of various analyst predictions by Fortune found the average of iPad sales estimates to be around 6.53 million sold during the quarter including December, which is very much in line with Whitmore’s figures.

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• Get it done. Yes, I know you have a million things to do and you are trying very hard to get them done, but now is the time to power through that task list. Having a big pile of unfinished tasks looming over me is a big contributor to my increased stress around the holidays. In addition to all of the regular work, holiday tasks like shopping and cooking can make an already overwhelming workload seem even more daunting. I could either procrastinate, which only increases my stress, or suck it up and devote some extra time to completing my task list. I suggesting spending some extra time this weekend to make a big dent in that task list with a focus on those things that you dread doing, but that must be done before the holidays. Getting the most unpleasant tasks out of the way now helps reduce stress in the long run by making the remaining tasks seem easy by comparison.
• Put it off. Now is a good time to focus on the work that really matters and the urgent tasks that must be completed during the holidays. Everything else can wait until after the first of the year. Take a really hard look at that task list and find the “nice to have” tasks that aren’t urgent and likely won’t be completed before 2011 anyway. Make a conscious effort to just move those items out of your active task list and defer them until after the holidays. Having better focus and putting off a few of the less urgent tasks can make the existing task list more manageable and less stressful for the holidays.
• Stay fit. During times of increased stress and less free time, it can be too easy to neglect our health and let our regular fitness activities slide, but this is when you really need those workouts. Hitting the gym or the running trail is a great way to reduce stress and improve your mood, especially during a time when most of us tend to overindulge a bit on all of those delicious holiday treats. If you are really pressed for time, try to combine activities with a little extra walking during that shopping trip, or turn a family gathering into a healthy after dinner stroll around the neighborhood. You can reduce your stress and burn off some of those extra cookies at the same time.
• Have fun. When we are at our busiest, it can be hard to take time out to have some fun and relax. Find a few non-holiday hobbies and make sure that you leave at least a few minutes a day to do something you enjoy that helps reduce your stress. Have lunch or coffee with a good friend or take an evening off to go to the movies. Even just spending 30 minutes with a great book to relax before bed can help you unwind and reduce your stress, which will help you sleep better and make you even more productive and less stressed the following day.
• Escape.If all else fails, have an escape plan. Maybe this is taking the easy way out, but I love to go on relaxing vacations over the holidays. I escaped the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday with a trip to Hawaii where I spent 6 days sitting in a beach chair, having fruity drinks and reading science fiction. I came back relaxed and ready to take on the rest of the holiday season. Don’t feel obligated to always have a traditional or expected holiday. If you want to do something different, interesting and less stressful, go for it!

What are your favorite tips for reducing holiday stress?

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Walmart confirmed the news Monday evening, following rumors circulating last week that it would start carrying the iPad sometime this week. All six iPad configurations, including both Wi-Fi and 3G + Wi-Fi models, will be on sale at the Arkansas-based big box retailer.

You don’t have to wait until this Friday to make a purchase at Walmart, though. According to some sources, the iPad is already appearing on shelves in some stores next to the iPods that are already there. Also, you can order a few models of the iPad online through Walmart’s online store, though the only shipping option available is site-to-store. At the present time, only the 64GB iPad with Wi-Fi, and the 32 and 64GB iPad with Wi-Fi + 3G are available for online order, with the rest showing “Out of Stock.” It’s likely the cheaper models are being reserved for in-store sales, since they’re much more likely to be bought off the shelf.

Walmart joins Target and Best Buy, both of which began selling the iPad as major national third-party chains to offer the iPad for sale. Apple is clearly keen on making sure that it has as wide a retail base as possible going into the holiday shopping season, especially now that it seems to have resolved the supply chain limitations that kept its popular tablet sold out at many locations following its launch.

The iPhone first went on sale at Walmart in December of 2008. Apple reported its best quarterly revenue and earnings ever for the quarter ending Dec. 27, 2008, including quarterly iPhone sales of 4,363,000, which marked 88 percent growth compared to the same period the previous year. Obviously, Walmart wasn’t the only reason for the spike in sales, as the iPhone was steadily growing in popularity before it became available there, but increased retail presence at one of the largest chains in the U.S. couldn’t have hurt those numbers.

Availability at Walmart, even in limited quantities (sources report only five per store at launch) will help ensure there’s an iPad under as many trees as is realistically possible this holiday season.

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The good news is that with a simple strategy in place, it won’t take much effort to return to your normal productivity level. Here are a few tips:

Pre-plan your schedule. Plan your post-holiday work schedule even before the holiday reunions, celebrations and other activities take over. This is the primary reason why I easily got back to my regular workload. As soon as Jan. 3 hit, all I had to do was look at the schedule I prepared two weeks earlier to see what I needed to do. Without it, I would’ve probably spent a day or two regrouping.

Work a little during your downtime. In a previous post, Darrell talked about how he uses the holidays to work. I have to admit that I agree with him. In fact, I found myself working harder than usual for a few days. If you feel that’s being too much of a killjoy, choose to work on light tasks — perhaps checking your mail or brainstorming. The point is to avoid work being overwhelming after the holidays.

Now, this doesn’t mean you’ll get up in the middle of a family gathering and start typing away in your laptop.  I waited for my family to be asleep or for the activity to die down before I started working. This allowed me to be part of the festivities, while getting some work done during times when less was happening.

Stick with your normal body clock. I know that this is easier said than done, but one of the reasons that many people feel sluggish post-holidays is that their body clocks have adjusted to a later waking-up time. If this has happened to you, make sure to try and reset your body clock back to suit your ideal sleeping hours before the regular workweek starts.

Don’t forget to relax. As Dawn recommended before, it’s important to relax. I know some people who actually spend the holidays being completely stressed out preparing gifts and celebrations. The irony is, they don’t end up enjoying their supposed “vacation time” from work. Avoid falling into that trap and catch up on your sleep.

How easy is it for you to work after a long holiday? What techniques do you use to get your productivity back to normal?

Image by abcdz2000 from sxc.hu

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