I think Apple fans watching the brawl between Cupertino and Samsung can sometimes just be confounded by what is going on. Why is Samsung taking a risk of alienating its biggest manufacturing customer just to release some crummy iPhone knockoffs? Madness, right?

Wrong. While not exactly ethical, Samsung is playing it smart: the Korean electronics giant knows that the potential margins on selling smartphones dwarf the margins on any parts it sells Apple. But the proof is in the pudding, so check this out: Samsung actually shipped more smartphones last quarter than Apple did.

A research team from the Georgia Institute of Technology claims to have discovered a keyboard keylogger attack that is performed using an iPhone’s accelerometer. However, the situation has to be so precise — and is so unlikely — that if you’re a victim of this attack you really are one of the unluckiest people on the planet.

Ever the purveyors of fuzzy, geeky, and Apple-inspired throw pillows, the craftsmen over at Throwboy.com have just released some spooky new finder pillows.

Handmade in the good ol’ USA, these fun stuffed finders are available now (and for a limited time) for $29 each, or $125 for the whole five piece set. If you want one of these guys before Halloween though, better act fast; Throwboy says these usually takes 2-3 weeks to make and ship.

In another sign consumers were waiting for the new iPhone 4S, AT&T Thursday said iPhone activations dropped in the third quarter. However, since Tuesday, the carrier announced 1M iPhone 4S units were activated, making it the company’s best-selling Apple handset.

Not many of us expected Apple to introduce LTE or 4G capabilities to its fifth-generation iPhone, but according to one Swedish carrier, the Cupertino company would be killing its iPhone 5 if it doesn’t adopt LTE technology by then.

A Samsung executive and Apple CEO Tim Cook used weekend memorial for the late Steve Jobs to talk about extending a supply deal set to end next year through 2014. The South Korean company is also considering whether to continue its legal fight with the tech giant, considering at $7.8 billion, Apple is Samsung’s largest customer.

While sometimes it may seem that Samsung tries its hardest to taunt Apple’s legal department, the company’s mobile president has revealed that its latest Galaxy Nexus smartphone was built to avoid Apple patents, saving the Korean company yet another legal battle.

The BBC has finally issued an update to its free iPlayer app for the iPad that allows users to stream content to their Apple TV for viewing on their television.

If you’ve got a bicycle and an iPhone/iPt, here’s a pretty interesting development: iBike, who earlier this year introduced a $200-plus kit that turned the iPhone into a sensor-linked cycling computer, has just released a $70 iPhone cycling package for riders who aren’t Gu-fueled cycling nuts; and it includes what looks like a stellar — and free — cycling app.

So you’ve got your new iPhone 4S, and now you want to talk to Siri (and maybe friends) and enjoy some tuneage. Step one: Donate those pathetic white buds that came with your iPhone to your favorite charity, if they’ll take ’em. Step two: Get yourself a snazzy pair of microphone-equipped canalphones — earphones that fit snugly in your ear. Why? Because a good set of canalphones are the best accessory ever made for an iPhone; they’ll create a seal that will block out ambient noise while enhancing sound coming from the earphones, especially bass — which means better conversations with friends (or Siri), and better music.

Around $100 seems to be the point at which there’s a big jump in quality; also, most in that range are now equipped with inline volume controls (in addition to the play/pause and track-skip controls like the ones on Apple’s stock buds).

We’ve assembled an Apple Store’s worth of canalphones at that level, and we’ll be reviewing them over the next several days. Up first is Sennheiser’s MM 70 iP earphones ($100).

Apple has posted an official image from today’s celebration of Steve Jobs’ life. This afternoon Apple held a celebration to honor Jobs at its headquarters in Cupertino, California.

Aerial footage of today’s event shows tens of thousands employees gathered to honor Jobs’ legacy. Artists like Nora Jones and Coldplay played music at the event.

The above photo shows Apple CEO Tim Cook addressing Apple employees at the gathering. Retail employees from around the world watched the celebration today from their respective Apple Stores via a live feed.

The latest piece of full-on AirPlay sound hardware is from the sonic wizards over at Los Angeles-based Audyssey.

Yeah, the Lower East Side Audio Dock Air ($399) looks more like a Lego brick than the outfit’s svelte South of Market dock we raved about earlier this year — but the new, six-speaker dock is filled with audio-techno-jargon like “passive bass radiators” and “Smart Speaker technology,” which is probably English for “this will blow you away, dude.” And of course, don’t forget the AirPlay.

Interactive Innovation Solutions has released an iPhone app for Google Music called gMusic. Members of Google’s music locker service can stream up to 20,000 tracks from the iPhone.

gMusic looks and feels almost exactly like the native Music app in iOS 5, and it offers a native experience over the web app that Google offers its customers.

Every new Mac comes with iPhoto, which is getting better all the time. Still, it doesn’t have all of the features that are made for folks who are really into manipulating their photgraphs. Adobe’s Photoshop is often too much for the budding shooter (and cost prohibitive to boot), and image editors like Acorn – while simple to use and well-priced – don’t necessarily have the “feel” of iPhoto that many Mac users are used to.

This is where FX Photo Studio Pro by MacPhun ($40 in the Mac App Store) comes in.

This is the Lytro, a bizarre and radical new concept in digital photography that lets you snap an image now, and worry about focusing it later.

Pre-orders just opened today, and you can grab one for as little as $399 (I’ll take two!). But before you click the order button, make sure you have a Mac – because Lytro doesn’t work with Windows computers yet.

The developers for popular to-do app Remember the Milk have found a way to integrate their app with Siri, Apple’s new voice assistant in the iPhone 4S.

Once you get the workaround up and running, Siri uses Remember the Milk to create and sync reminders in iOS 5. You can dictate a reminder to Siri normally, except you’ll actually be using Remember the Milk as well.

You may recall the Flashback.A OS X trojan that Apple patched last month. The virus disguised itself as the official Adobe Flash Player installer and connected to an unknown server to secretly download and run unsigned code.

According to F-Secure, the Flashback trojan is back again in a new variant that’s capable of disabling Apple’s anti-malware tool from auto-updating.

CBS Helicopter and Cnet captured some incredible aerial footage of Cupertino HQ’s memorial to Steve Jobs, where both Norah Jones and Coldplay performed for an audience of tens of thousands of employees around the world. Look at the size of the family that Steve built.

Apple has promised that iTunes Match will launch for US customers by the end of the month, and now they are starting to roll out preparations for it to users of iOS 5, namely by turning on the iTunes Match setting under the ‘Music’ settings pane for both developers and us plebs.

Of course, for regular users, this won’t mean much: Apple has yet to allow normal users to pay the $24.99 and sign-up for iTunes Match. In fact, iTunes Match isn’t even baked into iTunes 10.5, with the functionality shuffled over to the 10.5.1 Beta instead.

So iTunes Match is coming, probably within the next week or so. Of course, whether it is ready for prime time is a very different question, as issues with the service abound for developers. In fact, internally, most of our writers have not been able to get our libraries to dependably sync with iTunes Match. The launch of iCloud might have gone well, but expect a bumpy ride when iTunes Match goes live.

[via RazorianFly]

According to reports on Twitter, Apple’s Steve Jobs memorial event is well underway, and it’s already looking like a touching tribute to a great man by the company he built.

A tweet by Rodger Lizaola says ex-Vice President and Apple board member Al Gore has already arrived.

Meanwhile, Nora Jones is reportedly playing a tribute song in memory of Steve Jobs that Kevin Rochowski says “really sets the right tone.” The song she played was Forever Young.

Coldplay also performed, according to Twitter user Larley.

Tyler Stone tweeted: “Wonderful speech by Tim [Cook]. Wonderful speech by Bill Campbell. Wonderful performance by Norah Jones. This really helps bring closure.”

We’ll be updating this post as we get more.

Apple Stores around the country are tastefully drawing white curtains across their windows and observing the life of co-founder Steve Jobs streamed live from Apple HQ. We’re trying to get insider reports on what will be going on inside, stay tuned.

[image via ohwaititsmango]

China has always been important for Apple manufacturing, with marque products such as the iPhone and iPad originating in the Asian giant. However, now China is also becoming an important source for sales revenue. China’s 1.33 billion people are now Apple’s second-best revenue-generating market. Little wonder Apple CEO Tim Cook Tuesday calls China “an enormous opportunity” for the tech giant.

The hate-mongers of the Westboro Church are out with their profane placards in Cupertino today, as we said they would be.

Right now, they’re outside Cupertino High School, where Justin Li snapped this pic of a counter protester dressed in all black (is that a Jobsian turtleneck?) and sneakers with a sign making a mockery of the church member’s display.

Later, Westboro has said it will try to ruin the Steve Jobs memorial service by brandishing the same trademark awfulness outside Apple headquarters in Cupertino.

But Apple fans are on the case. As you can see in the picture above, Apple fans are uniting to counter-protest Westboro’s homophobic, hate-filled picketing.

Everyone’s favorite torrent client for the Mac just got an awesome update. In addition to a number of new features on the Mac, BitTorrent has launched a fantastic HTML5 version of µTorrent for the iPad that makes managing your µTorrent downloads a breeze while you’re away from your computer.

Siri is one of the iPhone 4S’ biggest selling points, and I think anyone who’s had chance to try out the feature would agree that’s it’s pretty exceptional. For the time being, it’s exclusive to Apple’s latest iPhone, but one hacker claims to have it running on any device running iOS 5, and says a jailbroken device is not necessary.