E-reader and tablet ownership nearly doubled over the 2011 holiday season, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. The percentage of people who reported owning a tablet jumped to 19 percent from December 2011 to January 2012—the same percentage as those who own an e-reader. Now, 29 percent of Americans own at least one of those devices, up from 18 percent in December.

In a pre-holiday survey running up to December 21, ten percent of respondents reported owning a tablet, and the same percentage reported owning an e-reader. Two more surveys taken in the first half of January showed that in the intervening time, the percentages of people who owned one of the gadgets had gone up significantly, to 19 percent for both tablets and e-readers. Pew cites the sea change in device pricing, including the introduction of the relatively inexpensive Nook Tablet and Kindle Fire as well as cheaper e-readers, as the primary cause of the jump in ownership.

The percentage of male and female tablet owners have tracked closely with one another: 11 percent of males and 10 percent of females reported owning a tablet in December, and in January the genders evened up to 19 percent each. But Pew found that e-reader owners are still predominantly female, and the gap has widened a bit: 16 percent of males and 21 percent of females reported e-reader ownership, up from 9 percent and 11 percent in December, respectively.

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Blackberry vendor Research in Motion (RIM) is changing up its top leadership. Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, who have served jointly as the company's Chief Executive Officers, stepped down on Sunday evening. They have also given up their positions as co-chairmen of RIM's board of directors. RIM's Chief Operating Officer, Thorsten Heins, will take over as CEO.

RIM has seen its position in the smartphone market crumble over the past few years as rivals Apple and Google reshaped the mobile technology landscape. RIM has struggled to modernize its operating system and deliver competitive products. Although RIM acquired embedded systems vendor QNX in 2010 with the hope of improving Blackberry software, it has taken too long for the company to overhaul its mobile platform.

Rumors about leadership changes at RIM began circulating earlier this month. Former Royal Bank of Canada executive Barbara Stymiest has taken over as chairman, vindicating the reports which named her as the most likely candidate for that role. Lazaridis, who originally founded RIM and is said to be one of the wealthiest men in Canada, will become the vice-chairman. Balsillie will retain a set on the board, but no leadership position.

Heins will face many challenges as the new CEO of a company in decline. RIM prospects for restoring its relevance in the smartphone market are possibly weak, but the company has a robust patent portfolio that could make it a valuable acquisition target--especially in light of the current litigious climate that afflicts the mobile industry. Reports that emerged last week indicated that several companies, including Samsung and HTC, are in talks to acquire RIM. Samsung categorically denied interest.

Heins took an optimistic tone in a video that RIM has posted on YouTube Sunday night, saying that he thinks RIM still has the potential to be one of the top three players in the smartphone industry. Heins says that he wants the company to boost its emphasis on prototyping and innovation while improving its relationship with consumers.

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Google CEO Larry Page trotted out an impressive statistic during last week's quarterly earnings call: Google+ now has 90 million users, double what it had three months ago. Even better, 60 percent of those users are engaged daily, and 80 percent weekly.

But those users aren't necessarily engaging with Google+. Any action taken during a logged-in Google session—whether it be searching the Internet, checking Gmail or using Google Docs—counts as engagement under the statistic Page used. Google has refused requests from journalists and interested bystanders to reveal exactly what percentage of those 90 million signed-up Google+ users actually view Plus content each day, week or month. Instead, Google is arguing that it doesn't matter: Google+ is so integrated into the overall experience that what matters is the number of users interacting with any Google site. Combined with other steps Google has taken to integrate Plus into search results and other Google properties, the message is clear: Eventually, Google Plus will just be there whether you want it or not.

When Apple first showed off the Apple TV to the world in January of 2007—then nicknamed the "iTV" and introduced alongside the original iPhone—its functionality was quite limited compared to the Apple TV we have today. The set-top box came with a built-in hard drive and the ability to purchase video content from iTunes and… well, that's pretty much it. Over the years, Apple has continued to iterate on its "hobby" device by adding and subtracting various features; the company eventually removed the hard drive, opting to make it possible to stream iTunes purchases directly from Apple's servers, and added numerous other on-demand streaming services like Netflix, MLB, NBA, Wall Street Journal TV, and more.

But this week, the US Patent and Trademark Office granted Apple a patent (hat tip to Patently Apple) that appears to address the possibility of the Apple TV gaining DVR capabilities. This would mean, in a DVR user's fantasy world, that the Apple TV would gain the ability to look up TV listings and allow the user to choose which shows to record that are coming over broadcast or cable. The specific patent in question is more related to the organization of episodic TV shows, but it does describe menu items that would "correspond to television shows that have either been recorded from a broadcast or purchased from a content provider."

It's that line that has spurred Apple watchers to speculate that Apple may, in fact, add DVR capabilities to the Apple TV sometime in the near future. But aside from the fact that many concepts patented by Apple never see the light of day, we wondered: does it even make sense at this point in time to consider adding this feature?

Ultrabooks were the fashionable product to launch at CES this year. But the new Ultrabooks, meant to be PC competitors to the MacBook Air, seemed suspiciously fat. And heavy. And lacking in solid-state drives. Despite the dimensional and internal differences that place many of these notebooks a cut below the MacBook Air in portability, performance, and quality, they still qualify as Ultrabooks according to Intel's guidelines, suggesting to us that the guidelines need an overhaul.

Intel's official requirements for Ultrabooks are as follows: each model must have a configuration that falls below a $1,000 price point, notebooks with screens smaller than 14 inches must be thinner than 18 millimeters (14-inch-plus screen notebooks can be as thick as 21 millimeters), they must wake from hibernation in no more than 7 seconds, and they must have a minimum 5 hours of battery life, as measured by MobileMark 2007. An obvious flaw with these guidelines: there are no weight requirements, in spite of the importance of light weight to portability. Unsurprisingly, weight is a problem for several models.

By taking Megaupload offline and charging its leaders with criminal activity, the feds are hoping to drive purveyors of illegally distributed copyrighted content out of business. But in doing so, they've also eliminated a service that was used by many to share files acquired and distributed in a perfectly legal manner.

Megaupload is most well known for the distribution of pirated movies, games, software and the like, but a certain percentage of the site's usage—how much, we don't know—was legitimate. We reached out to readers today to find out how and why they used Megaupload to distribute and acquire content that didn't infringe anyone's copyright, and what they plan to do now that the site is off the Internet.

In today's earnings call, Google CEO Larry Page said Google Plus now has 90 million users, and that the vast majority are active either daily or weekly.

"There are over 90 million Google+ users, well over double what I announced just a quarter ago," Page said. "Plus users are very engaged with our products. Over 60 percent of them engaged daily and 80 percent engaged weekly." The increase in usage, no doubt, is due in large part to Google making Plus links a prominent part of search results, and integrating the social network into Google Apps, Gmail, Picasa, and, well, just about everything Google makes. Google+ is apparently growing fast, but still lagging behind Facebook's 800 million active users and Twitter's 100 million active users.

Page also touted growth of Android, Chrome and Gmail while announcing that Google hit more than $10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time. Revenue for the full fiscal year ending Dec. 31, 2011 was up 29 percent and quarterly revenues were up 25 percent year over year. Net income for the quarter was $2.71 billion on overall revenue of $10.58 billion, up 6.7 percent over the previous year's $2.54 billion. Full-year net income was $9.74 billion on revenue of $37.91 billion. The quarterly numbers fell short of financial analysts' expectations.

Page boasted that Google is signing up many new enterprise customers for its Google Apps suite, including 110,000 employees at BBVA, Google's largest business productivity deal that has been publicly disclosed. But advertising, as usual, is still Google's biggest cash cow, accounting for 96 percent of quarterly revenue, compared to 97 percent in the previous year's fourth quarter. Google said mobile advertising is a growing part of total revenue, but didn't specify how much it accounts for.

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iOS and Android were nearly neck-and-neck in winning the favor of new smartphone buyers during December 2011, according to a recent report by Nielsen. While Android still dominated in overall market share both in current and new smartphone owners for the quarter, iOS was able to raise its share of new smartphone sales from 25.1 percent in October to 44.5 percent in December, nearly meeting Android's 46.9 percent.

Nielsen suspects that the October launch of the iPhone 4S contributed to the closing gap, though surprisingly, only 57 percent of new iPhone owners surveyed in December got an iPhone 4S.

Android captured 46.3 percent of the total smartphone market in the fourth quarter of 2011, and 51.7 percent of "3-month recent acquirers," or people who had gotten their device within the last three months. By contrast, 30 percent of smartphone owners in the fourth quarter and 37 percent of recent acquirers had iOS devices.

Other platforms did not fare so well: while BlackBerry-powered phones were owned by 14.9 percent of all smartphone users, only 6 percent of recent acquirers picked one up. Windows Phone's overall share was small in both segments: 1.3 percent of all users, and 1.4 percent of recent acquirers.

Android's increasing share was no doubt helped by the US launch of the Samsung Galaxy S II and the Motorola Droid Razr, but the Android 4 flagship Samsung Galaxy Nexus likely arrived too late to help much in the Q4 market share charge.