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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.

According to data recently released by online job board Freelancer.com, Android jobs are on pace to eclipse iPhone jobs by the end of 2012. Despite what the company describes as "solid growth" in iPhone jobs - they're up 9% from Q1 to Q2 this year - Android jobs have increased by 20%. If this same growth rate continues, there will be more Android work available by the end of the year, says Freelancer.

Another area also seeing massive growth is HTML5, which saw a 34% increase during the same time period.

With Nokia's company earnings call now behind us, one of the most startling figures indicative of the decline of the mobile phone maker was this: for the first time ever, the Apple iPhone surpassed Nokia in smartphone sales.

Nokia says it sold 16.7 million smartphones in the previous quarter (April through June). During that same time, Apple sold over 20 million iPhones.

Today Apple released its third quarter earnings. Perusing the revenue figures, I was struck by just how much the iPhone and iPad have overtaken computers and music as Apple's main form of revenue. The iPhone and iPad combined now make up 68% of Apple's entire revenue, compared to just 18% for what were (until the last couple of years) considered the main form of computers: desktops and "portables." What's more, music is now a relatively small part of Apple's revenue - the iPod contributes just 4.6% and iTunes sales about 5.5%.

Specifically, the iPhone is responsible for nearly half of Apple's revenue (46.6% to be precise). The iPad contributes 21.2% towards Apple's revenue. Computers, both desktops and portables (MacBooks), contribute just 17.9% of Apple's total revenue. It's been no secret that iPhones and iPads are very profitable for Apple, but these figures ram home just how much the computing world has changed. Who would've thought even five years ago that computers and music combined would make up less than 30% of Apple's revenue?

Horace Dediu of asymco posted this chart (below) to his Apple trend-tracking blog this week, showing that, finally, app downloads have overtaken downloads of songs on iTunes.

Analytics firm Flurry has analyzed trends on its network of 45,000 companies and 90,000 apps to determine where developers are investing their R&D budgets this year. In a comparison of Q1 2011 and Q2 2011, you can see that the Android project starts have dropped from 36% to 28% while those on iOS have picked up.

Apple is launching a new program designed for business customers: App Store Volume Purchasing. With this option, U.S. businesses have a way to purchase mobile applications built by third-party developers in volume, using a corporate account. In addition, the program sets up a separate app store of sorts where developers can sell custom B2B apps just to those customers enrolled in the Volume App program.

The average price for iOS applications is now at $1.44, up 14% year-over-year. And consumers are buying more apps this year than they did last - 61% more, in fact. This data comes from a new report from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster (reported via Fortune), who found that today's iOS device owners will download 83 applications this year, up from 51 in 2010.

Jailbreaking, the act of hacking an Apple mobile device to allow for the installation of unapproved, third-party apps, is often seen as a niche activity undertaken by only a small subset of users. But the truth is, when you're dealing with Apple devices, even a small subset equates to a large number. According to Jay Freeman, who runs the largest jailbreak app store Cydia, around 10% of all iPhones are jailbroken. In total, he says there are approximately 10 million jailbroken devices in the wild, including iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices.

And now, this rapidly growing user base will have their very own conference: MyGreatFest, the world's first convention for the jailbreaking community.

Why did Apple put out a press release today about reaching the milestone of 15 billion downloads? Maybe to distract you from the other news about how it just lost the rights to the term "App Store" in a high-profile lawsuit against top competitor Amazon.

Well, guess what? It worked! Look what our headline reads!

Still, it is an impressive number, and one that puts competing app stores to shame. And Apple had even more new numbers to reveal today, too.