MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa — With four days left until the Iowa caucuses, Rick Santorum finally has become the flavor of the month in the volatile Republican presidential race here.

He has lagged in the bottom tier of public polling all year long. He’s someone who lost his race for a third term as the junior senator from Pennsylvania by an eye-popping 18 points back in 2006. And he’s talking more about abortion, marriage and Iran than the economy.

And yet, finally, Santorum has gotten his moment in the spotlight — and it’s at just the right time. There’s no telling now who will win the caucuses on Tuesday night.

Friday afternoon in Ames, where college students gathered at the local Buffalo Wild Wings to watch the hometown college football team compete in the Pinstripe Bowl, Santorum dropped by to shake hands and take advantage of the crowd in the full, loud bar.

He stopped along the way for several interviews — two with Fox News — and waved and smiled at reporters he hadn’t seen in ages but who had finally returned to cover the latest insurgent in the race.

And later, here in Marshalltown, he instructed his audience not to listen to pundits saying he doesn’t have a chance. “Your job is to make the tough call,” he told voters.

“Money didn’t really matter in this race,” he said, crowing about his late rise. “What mattered is talking to Iowans.” He added that no candidate can buy Iowa — a reference to Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, whose campaigns and allies have spent millions of dollars on Iowa’s airwaves of late. Still, the recent surge allowed Santorum to raise more money Thursday than he had in any single day previously in the campaign.

Friday morning, his emergence as a hot candidate was featured in a lengthy front-page article in the Los Angeles Times. He got the Wall Street Journal’s treatment the day before. And his potential to upend the caucuses was Friday morning’s top story on NBC’s “Today” show. If you haven’t figured it out yet, the media have decided that Santorum is the one with the so-called “big mo.”

It’s been a strange road: The winding course of the GOP primary has tended to follow the collective media narrative that develops (and re-develops) at each turn. Michele Bachmann would surge and then plummet, and she did. The same would happen to Herman Cain. The media projected Rick Perry’s rise and fall, and Newt Gingrich’s too. And it’s been the media that have been expecting a last-minute push by Santorum, and they got their wish — as they pulled it along.

The problem for Santorum, however, is that even though he shot up to third place in the state behind the statistically tied Ron Paul and Mitt Romney (according to a CNN poll out Wednesday afternoon), it’s not all breaking his way. Gingrich and Perry are still considered the two major candidates to the right of Romney — the ones who can take the fight to South Carolina as the conservative alternative, as they have the money and infrastructure.

And even in Iowa, they are not finished yet. Influential conservative radio host Simon Conway threw his support to Perry late Friday. And Steve Deace, another radio host who is a Christian conservative and who was influential in Mike Huckabee’s nine-point victory over Romney here in 2008, has backed the former House speaker.

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A local Chinese-language newspaper reported Friday that iPad3 might be launched on Feb. 24 to mark the anniversary of the birth of Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs.

Citing sources close to Taiwanese makers in the iPad3 supply chain, the Economic Daily News said the gadget could be launched in mid-first quarter of next year or by the end of next March.

According to the report, workers at several iPad component suppliers as well as manufacturing partner Foxconn will have limited time off during the usual Lunar New Year holiday. The Lunar New Year holiday itself falls on January 23rd next year, with workers generally receiving a number of other days off from work around that date.

Sources have been reporting a variety of rumored dates for an iPad 3 introduction, with some claiming a debut in the March-April timeframe while others have pointed to a February launch being in the works.

Apple last year launched new MacBook Pro models on Jobs’ birthday, although that unusual Thursday introduction was likely a convenient coincidence driven by the debut taking place during the Presidents Day holiday week.

A U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) judge on Tuesday ruled that Motorola Mobility infringed a Microsoft patent in making its Android handsets but did not violate six other patents for which Microsoft had made claims against Motorola.

Microsoft has accused Motorola Mobility of infringing its Windows Mobile and Windows Phone patents with phones running the Android mobile operating system owned by Google, which recently acquired Motorola Mobility. Those handsets include Motorola’s Droid 2, Droid X, Cliq XT, Devour, and Backflip, as well as software associated with those devices. The software giant filed its initial complaint in October 2010.

The initial ruling by ITC Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) Theodore Essex will be reviewed by the full commission, which will make a final decision on the cast that is expected by April 20, 2012, according to a statement from Motorola.

Tuesday’s initial ruling concerns Motorola’s possible infringement of four claims in Microsoft’s patent for “generating meeting requests and group scheduling from a mobile device,” notes patent expert Florian Mueller on his Foss Patents blog.

“It’s a fairly interesting patent,” Mueller writes. “For business users, [it's] an essential feature. If they’re on travel or even just at lunch or in a meeting room, they want to be able to schedule meetings without having to go back to their office. Scheduling meetings is also increasingly popular on some social networks, so it’s probably a feature for both enterprise users and consumers.

“It remains to be seen how Motorola will address this issue as well as any other Android patent issues that will present themselves along the way, with many other cases and dozens of other patents still waiting for a decision.”

Microsoft deputy general counsel David Howard said the company was “pleased with the ITC’s initial determination.” Not to be outdone, a legal spokesman for Motorola said his company was “very pleased” with the ruling.

“We are very pleased that the majority of the rulings were favorable to Motorola Mobility,” said Scott Offer, senior vice president and general counsel of Motorola Mobility. “The ALJ’s initial determination may provide clarity on the definition of the Microsoft 566 patent for which a violation was found and will help us avoid infringement of this patent in the U.S. market.”

Microsoft is also suing Motorola over the latter company’s royalty rates for wireless networking and video technologies, while Motorola has its own patent claims against Microsoft that concern several of the software maker’s key products, including Windows 7, Windows Phone 7, Bing, Windows Live Messaging, and the Xbox game console.