Owning an iPhone is a great thing, but the plans sure aren’t. Favoring the carriers more than the consumer, up until now, if you wanted to use an iPhone in the United States, you had to sign yourself up to have your bank account drained for nearly $100 a month for the next twenty-four months.

Last week’s announcement that Cricket Wireless was entering the iPhone game radically changes the carrier landscape in the United States, at least as far as we customers are concerned. The prepaid carrier isn’t some regional oddjob: they service $7 million customers in all fifty states. For $55 a month, you get unlimited voice, unlimited data, unlimited texts… and no contract. The only rub? You have to lay out $500 for the iPhone up front.

It’s worth it. I decided to sit down with my calculator and figure out how much users can save if they get their next iPhone through Cricket instead of one of AT&T, Verizon or Sprint. The answer? A LOT. Here’s the data.

Ever wondered how come iOS titles make it into the App Store’s top 25 list? Some iOS developers have been using download bots to purchase their own apps and manipulate the App Store’s top 25 list, according to a new report from Inside Mobile Apps. The software has been in use for over 12 months to fraudulently promote iOS titles, and some marketing firms charge up to $15,000 a time for the service.

Well, here’s an interesting little factoid: with $76.2 billion in the bank in cash as of the June quarter, Apple now has more money than the gross domestic product of almost two-thirds of the world’s countries… and more than the GDP of the world’s fiftiest poorest countries combined.

When American Airlines announced that they were planning on phasing out the paper in-flight charts in the cockpit in favor of the iPad, some of us smelled a PR maneuver. How could a couple of breakable $500 tablets in each plane be cheaper or easier than just printing out some maps?

As it turns out, though, paper’s heavy… and merely by switching to the iPad in every plane, American Airlines could save up to $1.2 million every year in fuel costs alone.

The Mac App Store had a pretty big first day, racking up over a million downloads, but that’s more than just a big number for Apple… even successful software companies with proven distribution strategies are being wowed by the sort of numbers they’re seeing.

Take the chart above courtesy of Evernote, the popular virtual notebook and productivity suite. Note what happens to the Mac numbers come the Mac App Store launch day. Holy bejeebus.

Macs don’t really get viruses very often, but there’s more than a few anti-software firms who’d like you think they do… and sell you some software to help squash them.

Anytime we write about Mac viruses, then, it should be done with some salt dissolving on the tongue, and anti-virus firm Sophos’ latest report showing a surprising amount of malware on the Mac is no exception.

The data was culled from 50,000 malware reports generated by 150,000 users of Sophos’ free Mac anti-virus software during the first two weeks of November. The chart looks bad, but in actuality, it’s not really very dire… a fact that Sophos themselves are being upfront about.