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Having already turned the markets for personal music players, smartphones and tablets on their heads, Apple now appears poised to move even further into another area of consumers' lives: their living rooms.

The Apple TV has been around for years and analysts have been predicting Apple's takeover of the living room for just as long, but a few recent developments suggest a more serious foray is imminent.

Apple today opened iCloud.com beta to members of the iOS and Mac developer programs. 9to5Mac was the first to report the opening, and also noticed that Apple may be including a Google Docs/Microsoft Office 365 style Web-based document editing service. The page contains a teaser for iCloud iWork, which says "iCloud stores your documents and keeps them up to date on your devices and the web. To get started, launch Pages on your iOS device and turn on iCloud."

The iPad isn't just a hot new consumer device, it's also an increasingly popular tool for business. Each week we take a look at the new or updated business apps for the iPad, and highlight trends in how tablets are being used in the enterprise.

This week we take a look at a new document viewer, and an updated app for giving giving presentations on mobile devices.

Today Nielsen is reporting that Google's mobile operating system Android now has the largest smartphone operating system (OS) market share here in the U.S. The top three mobile operating systems, according to this new data, are Android (39%), Apple's iOS (28%) and RIM (20%).

However, Apple is the top manufacturer of smartphones. This claim is mainly due to the fact that Apple ships its own phones, while Android is spread out across a number of OEM's, including leading manufacturers like HTC, Motorola and Samsung.

All the way back in January, we speculated that Apple would introduce its then recently acquired facial recognition technology into the upcoming iPhone 5. Now, it seems that prediction has come true - and not just for the iPhone 5, but for any iPhone capable of upgrading to the new mobile operating system iOS 5.

"Everybody loses" with the enforcement of Apple's new in-app payment rules, argues The Atlantic Wire's Rebecca Greenfield in a post chronicling how consumers, e-reader companies and perhaps even Apple might suffer. As we wrote about yesterday, Apple made the move over the weekend to enforce e-reader apps' compliance with its new in-app payment rules, prompting Kindle, Nook, Kobo and the like to all remove links to their associated e-bookstores so as to avoid giving Apple a 30% cut of sales.

But if there's a winner to be had in the fallout, it may be the Web itself as Apple's new rules are now prompting more and more publishers to build HTML5 apps rather than rely solely on native (iOS) apps.

New rules governing how iOS apps handle in-app purchases went into effect on June 30, and the date passed without much fanfare and seemingly without much compliance from many apps that continued to offer content for sale. These apps included e-reader apps with links to their associated online bookstores, as well as a variety of others that offered users the ability to subscribe or make purchases.

But over the weekend, updates were issued for many e-reader apps, removing links to their bookstores in order to comply with Apple's new rules. These stipulate that Apple receive a 30% cut from in-app purchases and subscriptions, something that many publishers balked at, contending that that cut was too high.

Apple's acquisition of mobile assistant Siri and its partnership with speech recognition leader Nuance Communications (the latter confirmed by references found in code), appear to be coming together in the launch of a new feature called "Assistant," to appear in the forthcoming update to iOS 5, Apple's mobile operating system.

According to leaked information, it appears that the smart technology found in the Siri iPhone application will now be fully baked into the operating system itself. With Nuance's ability to understand natural language queries, iOS 5 will have it all - voice navigation, voice control and voice assistance - allowing users to go beyond simple search and basic actions. When Siri's technology is fully integrated, users will be able to direct their iPhone to actually "do" things, too.

This week the firm Strategy Analytics released research indicating that although Apple shipped nearly three times as many iPads in Q2 2011 as it did in Q2 2010, the company has fallen from a marketshare of 94% to one of 61%. That's because Android shipments have surged to 30.1% marketshare. Microsoft has a 4.6% share and RIM has 3.3%.

However: 1) Shipments don't necessarily equal sales and 2) Consumers may be adopting Android tablets not, but according to data released (PDF) by Good Technology, Enterprises were still activating iOS devices at a much faster rate than Android devices in Q2.

OS X Lion, Apple's newest version of the Mac operating system, launching today, represents a first effort at blending Apple's mobile platform made popular by the ubiquitous iPhone with that of the desktop. Several features found in Lion seem inspired by the mobile experience, from full-screen apps to multi-touch gestures, both now commonplace on mobile devices.

But can the mobile and desktop platforms ever truly merge? That's a question that neither Apple nor its competitors have yet to answer.