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The tablet revolution. The post-PC era. The smartphone explosion. Whatever label you want to apply to it, personal computing is changing. People are spending more time with smaller devices like tablets and smartphones and less time on desktops and laptops. This been evident for awhile, but the trend is still relatively young and the data points are only just beginning to trickle in.

For evidence of this shift, look no further than Apple. The company just reported an absolutely bonkers financial quarter, in which it sold 37 million iPhones and 15.4 million iPads. The two products now make up 72% of Apple's quarterly revenue and the consumer demand shows no sign of letting up.

2012 started with a flourish of new apps across iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The holiday season is the busiest time of year for app publishers but the follow up in January was equally impressive. That is a testament to the growing app ecosystem and the number of developers starting to program for mobile platforms. We take a look at some of our favorite new apps from last month below.

The app update section returns for the its fifth month and we found that fewer of our existing apps issued updates for new features or bug fixes than in months past. We also have a new treat in the Apps of the Month: a limited Staff Picks section where some of ReadWriteWeb's writers picked the apps they found most interesting during the month.

The list, as always, is a bit subjective so please let us know in the comments if we missed an app or you have found one that you cannot live without.

Apple really does not like it when you mess with its finely tuned systems. Especially when it is the company's cash cow iOS platform. In a short statement yesterday, Apple warned developers not to game the rankings system in its App Store, threatening the loss of Apple Developer Program membership to those who are found using services intended to artificially raise the profiles of their apps in Apple's store.

The first untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 dropped two weeks ago, much to the excitement of the hundreds of thousands of people who rushed to download it.

Despite its recent growth in popularity, jailbreaking is still not a mainstream activity among iPhone and iPad owners generally. It's more for the tinkering type and those who want to customize their device's functionality and UI design. Whether it's done to download unauthorized (yet often quite useful) apps from Cydia or customize the look and feel of the OS, there are a lot of reasons why people jailbreak their devices. For iPhone 4S owners, that list is made all the more compelling by one thing: hacking Siri.

It's only been three months since Apple unveiled Siri, the voice-controlled personal assistant built into the iPhone 4S. Although the product is technically in beta, it has already spawned imitations and Web video parodies. What is perhaps most exciting about Siri is not what it does now, but in its potential future uses.

The latest clues about that future come from a newly-published patent, which hints at some of the things Siri may be able to do after its first iteration.

Whether or not jailbreaking or rooting one's smartphone is a legal act isn't something most of us in the U.S. have had to think about for some time. That's because, in 2010, the U.S. Copyright Office declared that jailbreaking devices is not a violation of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Fine, said Apple, but it will still void your warranty and we bet it will screw up your phone.

Despite the company's official disapproval, jailbreaking iOS is still big among a certain subset of users, as evidenced by the popularity of the A5 Absinthe tool that was released last Friday. But should people in the jailbreak community continue to rest easy, assured that freeing their devices will forever remain legal? Probably not.

Apple just blew everybody out of the water. It is astonishing, really. Revenue of $46.33 billion? Yeah, Greece called. It is looking for a bailout. Anyway, there is one number that is making mobile developers across the world salivate: $700 million.

That is the amount that Apple paid out to iOS developers in the last quarter. Apple has paid out $4 billion cumulatively to iOS developers through the App Store. If we extrapolate those numbers considering Apple's 30% take of App Store purchases, the company did $1 billion in gross sales through the App Store in the quarter. Mobile developers: this is the carrot you are chasing.

People sure do love jailbreaking their iOS devices. In fact, after Friday's launch of the Absinthe A5 tool, jailbreaking iOS 5 on A5-powered devices was almost as popular as the iPhone 4S itself when it first launched.

Nearly 1 million people jailbroke their iPhone 4S or iPad 2 between Friday and Monday, according a blog post from the Chronic-Dev Team, who took the lead in developing the untethered solution for jailbreaking iOS 5 on Apple's newest gadgets.

These days, the smartphone wars are typically viewed as a competition between the platforms of two companies: Apple and Google. Despite its years-long dominance of the desktop, Windows has hardly been a blip on the smartphone marketshare radar, where it clocks in at just under 2% of the market.

That's all set to change within three years, according to a growing chorus of analysts. The latest to vouch for the impending growth of Windows Phone is iSuppli, who last week predicted that the platform could outperform Apple's iOS by 2015.

The great thing about being a Wall Street analyst is few people ever go back to check and see if the bold predictions you made months or even years ahead of time actually come true.

Still, a report released by IHS in the wake of Microsoft's earnings announcement last week is worth a closer look.