Overnight news roundup: 22-23 October

Apple's on the up thanks to strong hardware sales, iPods and, of course, the iPhone

As Monday draws to a close, there a host of stories you missed while you were sleeping. But luckily for you, I've got you covered. Check them out.

Apple announced its prior quarter earnings on Monday, and with an amazing showing, it seems the company is on pace to break most analyst estimates for its future market share growth. According to Apple, it sold a whopping 2,164,000 Macs, 10,200,000 iPods and 1,119,000 iPhones in the last quarter.

Ballmer thinks Microsoft Live Search will rule the search market

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO and unabashed loud mouth has gone on record saying Microsoft's Live Search will "dunk every other guy some day." Making the comments at the Web 2.0 Summit, Ballmer believes that recent Nielsen rankings and Live Search growth are indicators that his company will be able to overtake Google in the search market. We'll see.

RealOne Player, the popular alternative to Windows Media Player, has been patched by RealNetworks in an attempt to curb the onslaught of security exploits as of late. According to the company, any RealPlayer version newer than the eighth iteration are vulnerable.

AMD looks poised to deliver a new video card to the market, and this time, it hopes to tackle the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT. Dubbed the HD 3800, the new series of ATI graphics cards will be the result of a die shrink and should go for $200-$300 when released.

Elonex, a relatively unknown audio company, has unveiled a new boombox called the Cube Play that boasts a 22-inch LCD, a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 processor, 1GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, DVD writer, integrated WiFi / Bluetooth and Windows Vista. Pretty nice boombox, huh?

Web sales are expected to jump once again this holiday season. According to studies by Jupiter Research, online shopping will rise by about 20 percent this holiday season, representing an increase in revenue to $39 billion. Most expect Amazon and eBay to be the largest benefactors from the jump in sales.

250,000 unlocked iPhones sold

Along with its earnings announcement, Apple estimates that 250,000 iPhones were sold so far this year with the intent to be unlocked. Interestingly enough, most of those phones were sold after the price cut occurred in the United States. Makes you wonder if Apple really wants to stop unlocking, doesn't it?