Megaupload users' data to be kept another two weeks

Megaupload's digital doors may have been closed due to the presence of pirated materials, but there's still the matter of all that legal content residing on its servers. Naturally, folks want their files back, but now that the government's gotten what it needs, the hosting companies no longer need to keep the data around because Megaupload's no longer paying them to do so. Carpathia Hosting and Cogent Communications, however, have decided to preserve the data for another two weeks while a deal is brokered with the DOJ for its release. In the meantime, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has teamed up with Carpathia to create a website that puts folks in touch with EFF attorneys so users can try to retrieve their data. No word as to what legal wrangling the EFF can do to make it happen, but those affected can get the wheels of justice started at the source below.

Amazon's announced its earnings for the fourth quarter of the year

Amazon's just announced its earnings for the fourth quarter of the year, and it's a bit of a mixed bag. While net sales were up 35 percent year-over-year to $17.43 billion, net income dropped a hefty 58 percent to $177 million, or 38 cents a share -- that's off analysts' expectations, who were looking for sales in the neighborhood of $18.3 billion and earnings of 17 cents a share. As always, the company is remaining mum on any specific Kindle sales figures, but it says that sales of all Kindle devices nearly tripled over the holiday shopping season, and that the Kindle Fire remains the bestselling item across all of the products it offers; of course, the loss it's taking on each one is also one of the big reasons for that drop in profits.

Specific figures are equally hard to come by for some of Amazon's other services, but the company says the number of Appstore for Android customers has nearly tripled from the previous quarter (with them downloading more apps in Q4

Google Search app gets new look on iPad

Google's search app just got a big update on the iPad. The interface has been overhauled, and the app has added enough new features that it's finally replaced Mobile Safari's built-in search feature as my go-to source for internet info.

The differences in the interface may seem subtle at first, but Google has added many powerful new features in this latest update. The app now supports Google Instant, making searches faster than ever before, but it also offers Instant Preview, a means of visually browsing through search results in a carousel-style interface without having to fully load the page.

Search results appear in a slide-in pane from the right side of the screen; in landscape view this pane can be partially pinned to the right side, giving you a preview of pages as they load when you tap on search results in the main window. Using a similar interface to Instant Preview, search history now presents you with a visual representation of your search history, very much like the way History view works in Safari on the Mac.

World Computing at Macworld iWorld 2012

n the Mac realm, OWC is about to release two new versions of the venerable miniStack external drives for the Mac mini. The miniStack Max and miniStack have the same footprint as the post-2010 Mac minis, and features FW 400/800, USB 2.0/3.0 and eSATA (optional) ports, as well as an optical drive (Max only) and USB hub.

When it comes to enterprise storage, OWC has announced and was demonstrating their new Jupiter mini-SAS storage solutions. Jupiter features input/output speeds three times faster than fibre channel and twice as fast as Thunderbolt, all with an infrastructure cost much less than you'd pay for fibre channel storage.

Companies deploying iPads will like the new GripStand Station, which charges and secures up to eight iPads at a time. There's more to come in this short video from the show floor

Windows Phone 7.5 gets google Calendar sync

Google's improved how its calendar and email services interact with Windows Phones running the Mango update. Users can now cram up to 25 different calendars into the Metro OS's built-in calendar app. The setup's not exactly seamless; you need to navigate your Windows Phone to the Google Sync page, login and check the boxes found there. While testing on our phones, although one device was able to immediately sync, the other couldn't pick up on our multiple calendars. We had to delete and re-assign our Google account to the phone in order to get it working. However, once we did, the Metro styling lent itself well to multiple calendar listings, with the ability (like the web-based Google Calendar) to assign colors to each.

At the same Google Sync page, you can now choose to enable the "send mail as" feature if you're using multiple addresses, with the option to delete unwanted emails instead of archiving. However, aside from replying from the same address that you received emails to, we haven't discovered a way to assign new mails to our multiple guises. We were able to send messages through our own Engadget mail account, although that's then used on all future missives.

Nokia tops global handset shipments

Fresh off the publication of its latest tablet report, Strategy Analytics has come out with a new batch of statistics on the global mobile market. In a report published yesterday, the research firm crowned Apple as the world's largest smartphone vendor by volume, on the strength of the 37 million iPhones it shipped during Q4 2011 -- good for 23.9 percent of the market. Samsung wasn't too far behind, though, with 36.5 million smartphones shipped during the quarter, comprising 23.5 percent of the market. Nokia finished in third place, with 19.6 million smartphones and a 12.6 percent market share, though it fared notably better among handset makers on a global (i.e., smartphone and feature phone) level. According to Strategy Analytics, the Finnish manufacturer shipped 417.1 million handsets for the full year, 113.5 million of which were shipped during the fourth quarter of last year. For the year, Nokia accounted for 26.9 percent of the market, followed by Samsung, which shipped 327.4 million units shipped during 2011 and finished with a 23.1 percent market share.

HTC Titan II works

What's that? An HTC PI86100 Windows Phone with AT&T-specific LTE (bands 4 and 17) showing up in the hallowed halls of the FCC? Why, this must be the Titan II, announced a tad over a fortnight ago. Docs show that a production unit of the device, sporting the aforementioned LTE bands as well as 850 / 1900 3G (also AT&T compatible), is ready to take on its new Windows Phone competition sometime soon. Is it a guarantee that the phone is nigh at hand? Not quite, but at least it signifies that the 16 megapixel beast is one step closer to showing up in our hands.