Google’s Android operating system, which seemed to be a popular alternative to Apple’s iPhone and a way for wireless carriers to combat the lure of Cupertino’s handset, appears to be slowing. Android activations have held steady at about 200,000 activations per day since August, according to a report.

When the Mountain View, Calif. company Monday introduced a new version of its operating system codenamed “Gingerbread,” the firm said they were activating 1.5 million phones per wee, or 214, 200 per day. In early August, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporters the company had topped 200,000 activations per day.

Just like the Visible Man, Apple used to make transparent Macs with the viscera tightly packed and clearly exposed inside. The idea was to allow Apple’s designers to see and understand how components actually sat inside a Mac before the case was attached and the beige slapped on.

These transparent Macs were super rare: only ten are known to exist. One such transparent Mac SE was recently put up on eBay with a rather aggressive reserve price of $25,000.00.

Apple continues to gobble up worldwide market share thanks to the popularity of the iPad, but limited content offerings in local languages are a speed bump.

Apple snared a 12.4% share of global mobile PC shipments in Q3’10 – taking the third spot worldwide behind HP and Acer, according to DisplaySearch’s Quarterly Mobile PC Shipment and Forecast Report

Still, early adopters in places like Japan are not snapping up the tablet, in part due to the lack of content in Japanese.

There are many good ways to promote your product or service. Here at Cult of Mac, we’re particularly taken with people prancing around in animal costumes, then being hit in slow-motion by a barrage of baseballs while the product’s name flashes on the screen. Advertising’s not so hard after all.

Of course, not every advertiser is so inventive, and so there is a lesser school of guerilla advertising: destroying a beautiful and expensive gadget in a web video in lurid, torture porn detail, then directing viewers to a stupid, countdown and uninformative website that the viewer will forget the second it fails to illuminate.

In this case, the site in question is Say Hi To Space, and while the video is beautifully produced and an industrial drill a novel way to destroy an iPad, one can’t help but feel that the iPad’s lack of a camera is just a slight-of-hand justification for the iPad’s destruction… one that will ultimately lead us to a website that has nothing to do whatsoever with Apple or its products.

We end the week with a blast from the past: a PowerMac G4 with a blazing-fast (at the time) 450MHz processor – just $70. Also on tap: Apple has 10 iMacs for sale, including an 22-inch i3 for $1,019. To wrap up the spotlight deals: 180 free iPhone, iPad or iPod touch app downloads.

Along the way, we’ll look at more iPhone apps, cases for your iPad, bumpers for your iPhone 4 and software for your Mac. Like always, details on these and much more can be found at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page right after the jump.

Beatle mania continues on iTunes: after the Fab Four launched on Apple’s store, selling some two million downloads in the first week, a course about them on iTunes U is also soaring in popularity.

Liberal Studies class “The Beatles: Popular Music and Society” from the University of Illinois Springfield has been available on iTunes in podcast form since 2005, but just this week it came in as the second most popular course on iTunes U. (Number one? Oxford’s “Critical Reasoning for Beginners.”)

Half a million people have downloaded the 39 podcasts – a crash course in 1960s music for people not born when John Lennon was killed in 1980? — and another two million have previewed it.

The share of Internet-connected devices powered by Apple’s iOS platform grew 216 percent in November, compared to a year ago, researchers at NetApplications announced Friday. The iOS operating system, which powers the iPhone, iPad and iPod, accounts for 1.36 percent of Internet traffic, leading Android’s 0.31 percent.

Although more PCs are online than mobile devices, the shift to portable Internet products is noticeable in the new NetApplications numbers. Windows’ share is down 1.8 percent to 90.81 percent, compared to 92.52 percent during the same period in 2009. The portion of Macs connected to the Internet fell the same percentage (1.8), pulling Apple desktops to just 5.12 percent of the share of online devices.

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is making a bigger splash in the U.S. than even its makers initially predicted. Since its launch two months ago and the Nov. 10 U.S. start, the iPad rival has sold one million devices. Although Apple sold 2 million iPads in its first two months, the Galaxy Tab is the first real competition for the Cupertino, Calif. company.

The new number comes just two weeks after Samsung announced it had sold 600,000 Tabs amd predicted its tablet would sell 1 million units by the end of this year. However, buoyed by holiday sales, the company now is predicting it will sell 1.5 million Galaxy Tabs when 2010 comes to an end.

What it is: MediaPad Pro is fantastically well designed software for the iPad that allows creative people of all types to easily place multiple portfolios of work — including audio, video, still images and websites — onto Apple’s tablet device and present them in professional, fully customized, brand-able fashion to potential clients, agents or patrons, to virtually anyone they’d like to view their work.

iPhoto is one of Apple’s most popular applications. Bundled with every new Mac since 2002, millions of people have imported and manipulated billions of photos with this useful software. Every time you plug your iPhone or another camera into your Mac, iPhoto leaps to the assistance (whether you want it to or not).

With success come challenges. One common thing I’m asked about as an Mac consultant is how to manage iPhoto libraries that have gotten out of hand – thousands of photos, lots of duplicate items, and sometimes multiple copies of libraries. How do you get all this under control?