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"I finally cracked it," Steve Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson just months before his death. He was referring to the design and functionality of television, something Jobs had long wanted his company to reimagine.

In the official biography of the late Apple founder that came out today, one of the last topics discussed before Isaacson touches on Jobs' summer 2011 resignation is how he had hoped to revolutionize the television set.

Hulu Plus, the paid subscription offering from the premium video streaming site Hulu, will be available on the Nintendo Wii console and 3DS handheld system by the end of the year, the company announced. Hulu Plus joins Netflix as the second video streaming service available on Nintendo gaming consoles. Both are already available on competing gaming systems like Microsoft's XBox 360 and Sony's Playstation 3.

But the real threat, as Nintendo of America's own president has admitted, is not the traditional gaming console manufacturers. It's Apple.

It was an interesting quarter for Google. The search giant moved into uncharted territory with the launch of Google Plus, bringing its data-driven business squarely into the social realm. The branding of "Google+" is hard to ignore; how do you read that? It's "Google," but it's more. But to make the social network a + instead of a -, Google has to tie it into its core business - advertising targeted to searches - and use the social data to improve it.

Google can't do that without its mobile vehicle, Android, the most popular smartphone OS in the world. Mobile computing is becoming the most important kind. Its use surpassed desktop computing this year, and mobile ad revenue is exploding. Location-powered search is the key to the business, and Apple - Google's mobile competitor - is revving its engines in that space. Google Plus, the big Q3 experiment, is tailor-made for Android use. So where is Google's mobile vision in its Q3 earnings results announced yesterday? Good question. It isn't there.

Google just launched a more streamlined process for updating small business listings on Google Places, but it asks forgiveness instead of permission. Instead of requiring owners to manually update the listing, Google Places will now automatically update with user-submitted info or updates to another source on the Web that Google identifies. When a listing is updated, the system will notify the business owner of the change by email.

Google touts this as a convenience and points out that a business owner can quickly log in from the email and correct any erroneous changes. But this is sort of a strange update. Google Places listings are an important way for businesses to be discovered from Web search, and business owners might not be partial to those listings updating without their expressed consent. Then again, some might feel that maintaining Google listings is a hassle, and this update will save them the effort.

The release of one of Apple's biggest updates to its mobile operating system yesterday was not without issues. As iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch owners flocked to their computers to upgrade their devices to the new OS, Apple's servers were apparently caught off guard.

The first snag many noticed was the estimated download time for the software. As more people downloaded iOS 5, some began to see prolonged wait times, sometimes up to a few hours. The problems only got worse from there.

Just in time to hit the new iOS 5 Newsstand, The Guardian has launched a swanky new iPad edition. The app delivers content mirroring The Guardian's Monday through Saturday papers, but the design is all digital. Pages swing smoothly between portrait and landscape modes, the ads are interactive, and photos and videos abound.

The app is only available for iPad users running the newly released iOS 5. To promote the launch, the first 87 issues of the iPad edition are free. After that trial period, the cost of a weekly subscription is £9.99 or $13.99 per month.

New data from Experian Hitwise show that Google continued to widen its lead in the U.S. search market last month. Google accounted for 66% of searches in September, gaining by 2%, while Bing and Yahoo lost ground by 3% and 2% respectively. The remaining 66 search engines analyzed by Hitwise powered 5.8% of U.S. searches.

But for how long will this kind of search query dominate the way we find things on the Web? With today's release of iOS 5, Apple - Google's mobile rival - sets the stage for Siri, an artificially intelligent voice search assistant that goes out of its way not to use Google to find results. Google is winning the search game, but Apple is about to change it.

However underwhelmed the initial response to its launch may have seemed, the iPhone 4S just broke Apple's sales records. The company's latest smartphone, which was unveiled last week, sold over 1 million units in its first 24 hours of being available to pre-order.

To put things in perspective, when the iPhone 4 launched last year, it set a record for Apple by racking up 600,000 pre-orders in a single day. Even though it's not the dramatically overhauled iPhone 5 many were hoping for, Apple's latest gadget has smashed the company's previous single day sales record by more than 66 percent. In terms of first day pre-orders, the iPhone 4S is the most successful product Apple has ever released.

Focus has pulled together an infographic on the most disruptive companies in tech. It should come as little surprise that many of the innovations are cloud-powered, or cloud-dependent.

Consider the iPad, for instance. Apple's the clear leader in the tablet market, and eating away at the traditional computing market. Apple owns more than 68% of the tablet market, and is replacing laptops, e-readers and handheld games.

In our continuing tradition of rounding up new mobile application releases we found interesting and/or exciting over the past month, we present you with this new list of apps for September 2011. There are some great game, new browser releases and innovative uses of augmented reality this month. There is also a new section for prominent updates you may have missed during the month. Check it out below.

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.