In what seems to be a match made in palette heaven, Redbox has found itself a red partner to help expand its video entertainment business into the digital world. Verizon and Redbox have announced a joint venture to combine the famous Redbox new release rentals with content-rich video on-demand streaming. This new venture will package all the services together for an undisclosed subscription price, with hopes of competing against other video subscription services like Nextflix.

A study by The NPD Group, a leading market research company, provided us with some interesting Q4 statistics. On the obvious side of things, the number of smartphones sold in Q4 were up, with Android and iPhone accounting for over 90% of those sales. While you probably didn’t need a study to tell you that iOS and Android lead the smartphone market, I bet you weren’t aware that Android was actually a favorite among first time buyers.

Google is working on a “secret project” that must need some product integrity as they’ve hired Apple senior director of product integrity Simon Prakash. Simon has worked for Apple for over eight years and is responsible for helping Apple remain top among product quality. This seems to be the first time Google has hired such a senior-level person directly from Apple, and this would certainly put the kibosh on any agreement Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs may have had regarding poaching employees.

Crash analytics firm Crittercism released a new study this week, claiming that iOS applications crash more often than Android applications. After monitoring over 215 million apps across a wide range of different platforms, the report concluded that iOS 5.0.1 had the highest rate of application crashes. iOS in general also had more app crashes than its top competitor Android. These are interesting numbers that contradict the long held belief that iOS and the apps that run on it, are more stable than that of Android’s. So why such a large number of crashes on iOS?

If you’re a user of the social app Path, you’ll be happy to know it received a nice update this past Friday, adding support for 720p displays such as the Galaxy Nexus, HTC Rezound, and others. The app worked fine on these device before the update, but the on-screen buttons were quite small and hard to use. The update also fixes some bugs and adds additional features such as: