Now — whether you can’t make it to Times Square or just don’t want to — there’s an app for that.

(Obviously!)

First introduced last year, the Times Square Official New Year’s Eve Ball App — 2012 shows a live stream of the Times Square Ball atop One Times Square, as well as video content leading up to and during the event. I’m told there will also be a live stream of Lady Gaga flicking the switch with Mayor Mike Bloomberg, to get the ball rolling, literally, at 11:59 pm ET.

With the app, users can share photos of themselves via Facebook and Twitter. They can also vote on photos — the photos with the most “likes” will be showcased on the giant Toshiba sign in Times Square that night (so if you’re at home partying in your pajamas and snapping self-portraits, you might want to think twice before sending your photos through the app).

The free app runs on iOS and Android devices, and was created by the Times Square Alliance and Countdown Entertainment, along with Toshiba and Livestream. And because few things are ever truly free, ads will run at the bottom of the app interface.

Last year’s inaugural Times Square New Year’s Eve app was downloaded 174,000 times by users in 163 countries, during a two-week period. An estimated one billion people worldwide watch the ball drop on television each year.

And 30,000 New Year’s Eve kiss photos were sent through last year’s version of the app.

Unless you’re certain you’ll want to use it again a year from now, this one can go on the short-shelf-life list of phone apps. Meanwhile, there are a few other apps you might check out for New Year’s Eve, to ensure the evening goes off without a hitch.

Like Uber, the free iPhone and Android app for calling a car service when all of the taxi cabs are taken. Uber is currently only available in seven cities, including San Francisco, Boston, New York, Seattle and Paris, and the company also sometimes adjusts pricing for holidays, like it did on Halloween this year. Uber has not yet responded to an inquiry about whether prices will go up on New Year’s Eve.

You might also want to check out an app that tempers your holiday wild side, such as the Webroot Sobriety Test app. Or an app that tests your cognitive abilities before you drunk-text, like the $.99 Textalyzer.

Or, for all those good intentions, how about an app not just for making resolutions, but for keeping them, like All My New Year Resolutions?

That’s the method preferred by the folks at SquareTrade, who sell insurance for all manner of electronics.

As they have done with past Apple gear, they went out, bought the latest iPhone and dropped it until its screen was a cracked mess. This time, though, they compared it with Samsung’s Galaxy S II — probably the nearest competitor saleswise to the iPhone when it comes to the leading smartphones.

In this test, which was limited to dropping one phone apiece, the Galaxy S II fared considerably better, surviving both a shoulder-height drop and a face-down fall. The iPhone, meanwhile, got considerable damage even in a waist-high drop and saw its screen thoroughly wrecked when dropped face down onto concrete.

While the tests are clearly designed as a push for insurance for those 4 million new iPhone owners, they also make the case for a nice protective holder for the Siri-packing smartphones.

“Apple’s stock could face headwinds for several weeks as the media feeds on a yet-to-be-determined mix of speculation and disclosures about Jobs’ future role at Apple,” Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner said in a note to clients today. “At the same time, Apple’s investors will theorize and worry about what Jobs’ status will mean for future innovation at Apple. But this worry stage will likely run out of fuel relatively quickly, because convincing evidence of how Jobs’ presence or absence is impacting Apple’s fundamentals won’t present itself for years. Lacking evidence, investors will shortly go back to trading AAPL’s stock based on measurable fundamental performance.”

J.P. Morgan’s Mark Moskowitz was similarly optimistic. “While not knowing the details behind the current medical leave, we point out that Mr. Jobs has demonstrated a great resolve to improve his health previously, emboldened by the attitude and philosophy that helped him lead Apple’s remarkable rise over the past decade,” he writes. “In our view, Mr. Jobs and his team have made Apple become the primal force in shaping consumers’ technology-driven ‘way of life.’ While the competition is increasing in the areas of smartphones and tablets, we do not expect Apple’s technology and user experience leadership to fade.”

PREVIOUSLY

• Steve Jobs’s Finest Product–Apple–Won’t Break Down
• Steve Jobs Asked for Privacy–and He Deserves It This Time
• Apple Shares Down Nearly 8 Percent in Frankfurt on News of Jobs’s Medical Leave
• Citing Health, Steve Jobs Steps Away From Apple, Again
• Deutsche Bank Joins the Running of the Apple Bulls
• Jobs: “I’m Vertical, Back at Apple and Loving Every Day of It”
• Apple Investors Are Wusses
• When Steve Jobs Said “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” He Did Not Mean This Foolish
• AAPL Sauce
• Apple’s Steve Jobs: “I Have Decided to Take a Medical Leave of Absence”
• The Entire Letter: Steve Jobs Explains His Health Problem: “Hormone Imbalance”–Predicts Recovery by Spring and Will Stay On as CEO
• Ain’t Nobody’s Business If Jobs Is or Isn’t

We’ll likely see a similar drop when it begins trading on the Nasdaq again tomorrow, though the company is expected to post another quarterly blowout when it reports earnings after market close. Atlantic Equities analyst James Cordwell suggests investors prepare themselves for a drop similar to the one Apple shares suffered after the announcement of Jobs’s first medical leave. “We’ve been here before at the start of 2009, so it’s probably going to be similar to that,” he told Reuters. “Operationally the company coped very well last time, but there’s a certain Jobs premium in the stock, and that will be the concern.”

And while that’s understandable, that concern is overblown. As I wrote back in January 2009, for investors to sell on news like this is just silly:

“Because if Jobs were to leave Apple–willingly or otherwise–people won’t suddenly stop buying Macs. The iPod won’t suddenly go the way of the Walkman and early adopters won’t suddenly lose interest in the next-gen iPhone. Nor will the Houdini-meets-Edison magic that Jobs has brought to Apple suddenly dissipate.

“Yes, Jobs’s sensibility pervades Apple’s culture and its products, but that culture and those products are not tethered to his health or day-to-day presence at the company. And Apple’s deep executive bench is more than capable of running it–and running it well–in his absence.

“iPhones worldwide will not stop working if something should happen to Steve–although apparently there are quite a few investors who believe this is indeed the case.

“Apple will endure–with or without Steve Jobs. There will be a post-Jobs era, and whether it begins this year or 20 years from now is of little consequence.”

PREVIOUSLY

• Steve Jobs Asked for Privacy–and He Deserves It This Time
• Apple Shares Down Nearly 8 Percent in Frankfurt on News of Jobs’s Medical Leave
• Citing Health, Steve Jobs Steps Away From Apple, Again
• Apple Opposes Proposal on CEO Succession Planning
• Deutsche Bank Joins the Running of the Apple Bulls
• Jobs: “I’m Vertical, Back at Apple and Loving Every Day of It”
• Apple Investors Are Wusses
• When Steve Jobs Said “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish,” He Did Not Mean This Foolish
• AAPL Sauce
• Apple’s Steve Jobs: “I Have Decided to Take a Medical Leave of Absence”
• The Entire Letter: Steve Jobs Explains His Health Problem: “Hormone Imbalance”–Predicts Recovery by Spring and Will Stay On as CEO
• Ain’t Nobody’s Business If Jobs Is or Isn’t

DRAM is the ultimate commodity chip market, and its boom-or-bust cycles are legendary. When demand picks up, manufacturers like Samsung, Hynix and Micron always rush to add manufacturing capacity–prices pick up; chips become scarce.

Everything seemed to be going well for the chip companies until the third quarter of 2010. After five straight quarters where the average price for a DRAM chip increased, it suddenly turned south as demand for notebook PCs slacked. That’s in line with what Gartner and IDC reported yesterday about the PC market.

There’s good news for consumers, however. All that stacked-up inventory has to go somewhere. If you’re planning to buy a notebook this year, the base models will now start shipping with four gigabytes of memory instead of two. And for those who bought a machine with only two in the last year or so, upgrades will be more affordable.

The one bright spot for the memory companies? You got it: Smartphones and tablets. Memory content in phones is expected to increase by nearly two-thirds. And the 57 million tablets that iSuppli expects will ship this year will also need some DRAM. More details here from iSuppli.