Week in Tech: Nokia and Apple smash records

Week in Tech: The record breakers

It's been a good week for records: we've seen some firms smash good records, some people win pointless ones, and still others do things that we've had to invent new kinds of awards for.

Apple was in the first camp, unveiling best-ever sales figures that, according to Gary Marshall, mean that "Apple now has all of the money in the known universe." With around $97 billion in the bank,

"Tim Cook could commission a helicopter made of cheese, a robot army and a selection of intercontinental ballistic missiles to point at Samsung without making the tiniest dent in Apple's cash mountain."

Contrast that with Nokia, who announced a staggering profit drop of €1.4 billion in 2011. However, in another column Marshall doesn't think it's all over for the Finnish mobile giant, arguing that the sale of a million Windows Phone-powered Lumia handsets over the last few months is big progress.

While the world at large wondered what Nokia and Apple's contrasting results mean, other apparently respectable journalists fought playground-style over their suggestions for the iPad 3.

Gareth Beavis says that despite its success, iOS needs a rethink: "unless something changes soon the Cupertino brand could begin slipping backwards quickly," he argues, suggesting that his dad is bigger than your dad - er, that Apple needs to learn from Android's customisation options.

What tosh, says Kate Solomon. There's a reason why iPads massively outsell Androids, and that reason is because your mum is fat - er, because Android is too keen on being all things to all men and women.

"Adding new and inevitably more complicated options will only make this already-advanced tech seem even more intimidating to the tech-illiterate." Who wins the award? To be honest, they're still fighting, and we don't really care, so we've left them to it.

Then there's O2

When he wasn't battling for shiny medals the good Mr Beavis was worried about more serious issues: O2, we discovered this week, was trying to win the "data breach of the week" award by sharing users' mobile phone numbers with the websites they visited.

"Most people have no idea what info is being unveiled when browsing the web and it can, on occasion, be exploited," he warned. "Always read the terms and conditions of any service you'll be using regularly (even if it does take a while) if you don't want any surprises over what happens to your info."

Elsewhere, Microsoft made an early bid for the consumer champion award by apparently mulling ways to stop you buying second-hand games on its next console, currently known as the Xbox 720. Chris Smith isn't sure that's a good idea.

"Gamers have come to rely on selling their old titles in order to fund new games," he says, "while renting from companies like LOVEFiLM offers a nice try-before-you-splurge-£45 option." Would Microsoft really take the risk of jeopardising full-price sales and alienating rental customers? "We're struggling to envisage this one," Smith says.

And then there's us

Last, and some might say very much least, we have a record of our own to report: TechRadar has achieved a Guinness World Record.

Was it for our astonishing popularity, the breadth of our tech coverage or the hilarity of our in-jokes? Of course it wasn't: it was for being really, really, really good at something utterly pointless.

Thanks to the astonishing skills of Mr Gareth Beavis and Mr John McCann, TechRadar proudly holds the Guinness Word Record for "the Highest Score on Super Mario Bros (team of two) using a giant NES controller."

And by giant, we mean giant: the controller was 30 times the size of a normal NES one.

It's just as well we're not the gloating kind, because if we were we'd be saying "ner ner ner ner ner" to the would-be record breakers at Gizmodo and T3, doing that L thing with our hands and possibly claiming that their mum is fat.

But of course, we're above such things. Classy. That's us.