With the Holiday Season nearly upon us, we at TechCrunch thought it would behoove us to share with everyone a definitive list of the best smartphones currently available (or launching shortly), so as to help with any possible purchasing decisions which may occur in the upcoming months.

In making our decisions, we looked at these phones from the standpoint of the consumer. Thus, developer struggles, business security, and other such problems were not taken into account. Instead, functionality, price, and the overall usefulness of various smartphones made up the criteria which we adhered to during our reviews. These phones can be found on a multitude of carriers, operating systems, and continents.

Late last night, I spent 1,500 words explaining why Verizon’s Droid, like the dozens of competitors before it, is not the ever-sought-after “iPhone killer.” I really should have just waited until this morning and listened to Verizon’s earnings call. After all, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg more or less said it himself.

When asked about a possible partnership with Apple in the future with the iPhone, Seidenberg had this to say, “We obviously would be interested at any point in the future that they would be interested in having us as a partner. … This is a decision that is exclusively in Apple’s court.“

Holy m-commerce, Batman!

According to eBay CEO John Donahoe, shoppers have already spent about $400 million on the popular commerce site using the company’s free iPhone application.

The number pales in comparison with eBay’s total sales figure ($59.7 billion last year), but it’s fairly significant considering the fact that the iPhone has a relatively small market share – about 15% of the smartphone segment – and mobile payment transactions are still new to many. Who would have predicted around half a billion dollar in sales a year would be recorded through the eBay iPhone app when it debuted on the App Store last year?

A few months ago, we wrote about mobile ad network Greystripe’s study that placed “iPhone moms” (mothers of young children who own iPhones) as one of the new and growing mobile advertising demographics on the street. In August, Greystripe claimed that iPhone moms made up 29.5% of all iPhone users. Today, the ad network is releasing a follow-up report which offers detailed behavioral characteristics of moms in their iPhone ad network. Similar to the “soccer moms” demographic, iPhone moms are a consumer segment that has vast potential for advertisers and app developers.

The report shows several interesting patterns. For example, over 59% of iPhone moms surveyed say they let their children use their iPhone. And 41% of moms who own iPhons download apps specifically for their children to use.

We just noticed something in the App Store: An official app made by the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (a.k.a. NASDAQ), the American stock exchange, has been approved. That itself is interesting, but perhaps even more interesting is a key functionality of the app is to highlight tweets about various NASDAQ stocks.

The free app is called NASDAQ Portfolio Manager [App Store Link], and it’s really slick. As you’d expect, you can use it to look up various stocks and get access to real-time data when the market is open. It also has some impressive stock charting options. The main individual stock screen has all the data you’d expect (highs, lows, etc), but if you rotate your iPhone to the side, you get a full chart with a variety of viewing option. And if you run your finger over this chart, you can pinpoint stock prices at various dates.

Remember, earlier this month when we wrote about the upskirt app that Apple deemed kosher, while at the same time banning a satirical Someecards app from the App Store? Yeah, we may have found an even better example of Apple’s hilarious hypocrisy.

Truth is, it wasn’t hard to find. The app called “Asian Boobs” is a top seller right now in the App Store. So what is it? Well, the title says it all: It’s an app that features the breasts of Asian women. Lots of them. Over 2,500 of them. And actually you can double that, for each breast in each picture. That’s a lot of boobs.

So, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but these iPhone app things are a pretty big deal. With the iPhone continuing to sell in record numbers, more and more new users are exploring the App Store everyday to find the apps they want. One of the most popular type of apps are Twitter apps. And the obvious way to find those is to type “Twitter” into the iTunes search box. This query brings up a couple apps called “Twitter.” The only problem? They are in no way official Twitter apps, as the name might imply. And one of them isn’t even actually called that.

Over the past couple of weeks, we must have been pinged a couple dozen times from people pointing this out. Some of those people were unfortunately tricked into buying these apps, which are not free. Looking at the top paid apps list in the social networking area of the App Store, sure enough, both the app called “Twitter” and the one called “Twitter Pro” are top sellers, at #5 and #9 respectively.

Sportswear giant Nike has a nifty application in the App Store that allows you to create custom sneakers and order them straight away, with just a couple of taps. The app is in fact a mobile extension of NIKEiD, a program that allows customer to order personalized Nike shoes straight from the manufacturer. And an excellent extension it is.

The free app (iTunes link) has been available on the App Store since the beginning of this month, but surprisingly there hasn’t been a lot of coverage about it. Even despite this excellent video about it (embedded below).

Appsfire, the service for sharing iPhone Apps with anyone, has announced that they are doing a contest called App Star Awards, in partnership with SFR/AppliStore and LeWeb.

The idea is very simple. Anyone that has a legit iPhone application that doesn’t require jailbreaking, can submit a 30 second video to the contest, even if the app is not totally finished. 30 clips will be preselected, 10 in each category — games, entertainment, utility and other. Those clips will be reviewed and rated by a jury (full list below). Three winners, one in each category, will get a check of $1,500 and a free ad campaign with participating partners.

The results will be announced on stage at LeWeb in Paris on December 9th. TechCrunch Europe is organizing the startup competition in partnership with LeWeb.

Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit, Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker did her annual data dump slide presentation, this year focusing on the growth prospects of the mobile Web. As usual, there were 3 or 4 slides that really captured the trends she was talking about, particularly the ones around iPhone adoption and how that phone in particular is catapulting mobile Web usage into the mainstream.

You can see her full slide show below (all 68 of them), but let me pull out the three iPhone slides that helps put its growth into perspective. The first one above shows the growth of data traffic on AT&T’s mobile network. It is 50 times higher than it was just three years ago. I added two arrows to show when the first iPhone launched in June, 2007 and the iPhone 3G in July 2008.

AT&T saw massive pops in data usage following those two launches as consumers discovered the unadulterated mobile Web for the first time

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Morgan Stanley Managing Director, Mary Meeker, gave her usual quick presentation with a ton of information. Rather than trying to squeeze it all in (which not even she can in her 15 minute presentation), I will embed the slides below when they are up and hit on her major points.

Overall, she notes that Morgan Stanley sees many good signs that the economy is recovering. She notes that stock markets usually are a leading indicator of recovery, and certainly we’ve been seeing that recovery in the tech sector (see: Apple). That’s good news because the tech industry is now the most highest capitalized market, it’s no longer the financial industry.

Today, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Dev team released a humorous video giving a sneak peek inside the Microsoft Apps Lab. Here, you get a behind-the-scenes look at a few of the apps Microsoft dreamed up for its new Windows Marketplace, but were forced to reject for various reasons ranging from stupidity to lawsuits to physical pain.

During Apple’s Q4 earnings call today, a question was asked about how Apple viewed its increased competition for the iPhone in the coming holiday season. In particular, it was asked how Apple views all the new Android phones coming out. Apple COO Tim Cook made Apple’s stance very clear: They’re still catching up with the first iPhone.

Yes, Apple views the smartphone market as still being behind the first phone they released over two years ago. “We’ve moved beyond that,” Cook noted.

The Q4 numbers are in for Apple and they’re good. Quite good. Really good.

The company posted revenue of $9.87 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.67 billion, or $1.82 per diluted share. Apple’s own earnings projections for Q4 were $1.23 a share, but they always put them laughably low. Analysts’ projections expected them to be around $1.42 a share, but some were looking for numbers as high as $1.60 a share. Apple beat all of those, easily.

Apple sold 3.05 million Macs in the quarter, up 17 percent from a year ago. They also sold 7.4 million iPhones in the quarter, a 7 percent growth from a year ago. Both of those are record sales numbers, CEO Steve Jobs notes.

Sometime soon, Facebook 3.03 for the iPhone will be available in the App Store. It should be a small update with some bug fixes. The bigger news is what will be coming soon after it: Facebook 3.1 for the iPhone, complete with Push Notifications.

While we’ve long suspected that this would be a feature in the next major iteration, developer Joe Hewitt confirmed it tonight on Twitter. And that feature will make what is already one of the best iPhone apps out there, even better. The lack of Push Notifications is probably the biggest complaint users have about the app, right now.

Apple wasted little time approving Wolfram Alpha’s new iPhone app, which we hinted at last week. Just a few days after they submitted it to the store, Apple sailed it right through the approval process with such speed that it even surprised the Wolfram Alpha team, which had hoped to get some feedback from testers before the approval. I was one of those people, so rather than send them feedback, I’ll write it here.

There are two key points about Wolfram Alpha’s iPhone app: 1) It is pretty cool, and very nicely done. 2) They’re insane for trying to sell it for $50.

Over the last few weeks there has been an increasing amount of buzz about an unannounced Motorola smartphone due to come out some time between late October and early December. Rumored specs include a powerful OMAP3430 processor, 5 megapixel camera, slideout QWERTY keyboard and touch screen, all housed in a super-compact package and running Android 2.0. A handful of potential names have swirled around, included the Sholes and the Tao, but tonight Verizon has made it perfectly clear what the upcoming phone will be called: Droid. And Verizon is positioning it to be a direct threat to the iPhone in a new advertising campaign it launched at the site DroidDoes.com.

Verizon isn’t holding any punches: it calls out basically every major weakness on the iPhone, from its inability to run background applications to the App Store’s walled garden. The site kicks off with a stream of things that the iPhone can’t do, mimicking the black text-on-white background commonly seen in Apple ads but replacing it with statements like iDon’t run simultaneous apps.

Sometimes even a do-gooder company flubs something badly enough that it deserves to take some crap. So I give that honor to Zipcar, which over the past few months brilliantly and boldly promoted its iPhone app even though, for all practical purposes, it didn’t exist.

The story begins with a giant coup: Zipcar won an invite to show off its App at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco this past June, the one at which Apple rolled out its 3G phones. It’s the kind of exposure that could turn an App into the mobile equivalent of a summer blockbuster—and that, presumably, was exactly what Zipcar execs had in mind.

So on June 8^th, Zipcar CTO Luke Schneider and principal engineer Jonathan Wolfe took center stage before a packed house and gave a slick demo of the car-sharing company’s futuristic App, which, as Schneider proudly announced, “We’re very excited to introduce….”

My name is Robin Wauters, and I’m a news junkie.

Being obsessed with consuming as much news – mostly technology related, of course – as humanly possible in the all too short span of any given day comes with the territory of working for TechCrunch, but I’ve always been a fan of obtaining as much information as fast as I could.

You could say my ever-growing habit of trying to consume as much news in my waking hours as I can is more of a natural cause for my employment in the fast-paced tech blogging scene than it is a result.

It also means I feel very disconnected when I’m not near a computer or mobile phone I can use to tap the Internet for the never-ending stream of news that gets pumped onto the wires.

Boxcar is easily my favorite Push Notification app on the iPhone. It’s 1.0 version was great, and it’s recently approved 2.0 version is even better. Unfortunately, some users complained because it was $2.99 to buy, but used Apple in-app purchasing system to extend its features, charging $0.99 for additional ones. So developer Jonathan George is trying something new.

Following the announcement today that Apple would now allow in-app purchases for free apps (the feature was previously only available for paid apps), George has decided to make Boxcar completely free. With this free version, you will still get 1 free service (Twitter Stream Push Notifications, Twitter Search Push Notifications, Facebook Notifications, etc), and you will be saving the $3 that you can then use towards buying other services, which will now be $1.99 per service.