In a single week, Facebook has become not just a competitor to Apple, but the Mother of All Apple Competitors.

Facebook this week announced a series of initiatives and partnerships that the New York Times says makes Facebook a “primary entertainment hub.”

Facebook’s 800 million users will be able to play and share music from Spotify, MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, Turntable.fm, VEVO, Slacker, Songza, TuneIn, iheartradio, Deezer, Earbits, Jelli, mixcloud and other services, right from their profiles and News Feeds.

Facebook will enable the discovery, sharing, buying and renting of movies and TV shows via Netflix, Hulu, Blockbuster, IMDB, Dailymotion and Flixter.

And just as the iPad is gaining traction as the electronic newspaper of choice, Facebook announces partnerships with the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Slate, the Associated Press, Reuters, Yahoo News and others to make Facebook the default online newspaper site.

Facebook is now more directly threatening to Apple’s business model than Microsoft, Google and Sony combined. 

More than 300 people camped overnight for the grand opening of Apple’s first store in Hong Kong. Some camped out for two days to be among the first inside the new flagship store.

Here’s what the store looks like, plus a video report of the grand opening:

Apple is resetting the iTunes Match beta on Monday at  9am, according to an email sent to developers late on Friday night. Developers’ music libraries will be erased and the match process will have to begin again.

The email says:

I am a rummager, capable of picking patiently through a pile of rusty casters to mine four matching couch legs. (Those too-tall ones that came with the couch are irksomely out of proportion. A quest is in order!)

But I love the idea of Yardsale app – which takes advantage of the iPhone’s GPS to find the crap you covet (need!) near you – cutting down on the legwork.

Note: Although this iCapsule only fits the original iPad, we thought we’d include it anyway; why should iPad 2 users have all the fun?

The Rocketfish iCapsule Keyboard ($49) is a big bulky blob of a hardshell case. But it’s probably the best case on the market for turning your iPad into a laptop.

The latest version of my favorite Bittorrent client uTorrent has a pretty cool new feature: iOS support. And while that doesn’t mean uTorrent’s coming to the App Store, it does mean you have a new and easy way to sync torrented content with your iPhone or iPad.

A couple days ago, it leaked that reputable case manufacturer Otterbox had already made up to three million cases for the iPhone 4S. That number always seemed a little far fetched, but the pictures themselves didn’t like: Otterbox was banking on the next iPhone to be a relatively small update over the iPhone 4.

Today, Otterbox is in the news again, though, with a banner ad showing up on their official website implying we’ll see both the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S next month. But what might seem like a knowing insider’s wink is, in actuality, something very different: a tease.

Malware is a small but real threat to the OS X platform, and so it’s not uncommon for the occasional Trojan to pop up, which Apple then usually nukes from orbit through OS X”s built-in anti-malware database. Rinse, repeat, with the only real danger being those who get infected for a week or two.

Well, here’s the latest temporary nuisance to look out for.

One of the things Apple really gets right is the streamlined names. Other companies add a bunch of confusing prefixes and suffixes to each incremental product change, but with Apple a MacBook Pro is simply called a MacBook Pro, and not a MacBook Pro 15XRCT. It cuts down on the confusion for some of us simpletons.

So if that’s the case, you might be wondering: what the heck is all this talk of the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5? Are they the same device? If not, how are they different from each other? What does it all mean?

Well, it’s not as confusing as you think. Here’s the scoop on what all this talk about the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S is really about.

So after months of hype, it looks like Amazon’s finally ready to unveil its 7-inch, $250 Kindle tablet, built upon a custom Android fork and leveraging all of Amazon’s media stores, including the Amazon Appstore, Amazon On Demand, Amazon Kindle and Amazon MP3.

It won’t be official until it launches, but we’ve been hearing rumors of the device for a while now, and have been told Amazon expects to sell 2M of the devices by the end of the year. Now they are sending out invites to an uncharacteristic press conferenmce scheduled for September 28th at 10:00AM.

Can’t wait to see if this is a viable iPad competitor, or just another crap tablet. I have to say, I’m intrigued. If Amazon can do a better job of an entry-level Android tablet than the Nook Color, they might really have something here.

[via This Is My Next]

Android-based tablets have become the technology equivalent of Charlie Brown, constantly warning Apple to ‘wait’ll next year’ following disappointing showing after depressing headline. Now research giant Gartner has weighed in on the issue and their advice: keep waiting. Apple’s iPad will be the most popular tablet through 2015, the research firm announced.

When iOS 5 ships this fall with iMessage support, it could revolutionize the way we look at text messaging, from the de facto way of quickly pinging a person on our phones to an expensive way we reach out to our friends who inexplicably don’t have iPhones.

But could iMessage have a big competitor in Facebook? It’s increasingly looking like it, as inside sources inside Facebook are now claiming that the social networking giant are working on integrating free text messaging to any number into Facebook chat.

Have you checked out If This, Then That yet?

It’s a very cool new web service designed to make connections between all sorts of online services, and automate the way they work together. It’s a bit like Automator on your Mac, but for the web.

Samsung is asking a Dutch court to force Apple to pay patent licensing fees or impose a ban on iPhone and iPad sales. The lawsuit announced Friday comes on the heels of the South Korean company warning it will be more aggressive with the tech giant.

Here’s an interesting little detail from the latest version of Xcode: it supports Marvell’s quad-core, ARM compliant Armada XP processor. Could Apple be preparing to ditch its own A-Series of systems-on-chip and go instead with Marvell for future iPhones and iPads?

It’s the first day of fall in the U.S. and already the forecast is turning gloomy on whether the current batch of Android tablets can overcome Apple’s lead. Amazon, perhaps with the best chance to rival the iPad, may have already stumbled by putting up a 7-inch device against Apple’s larger alternative, industry experts warned Friday.

Samsung, once regarded as a “frenemey” of Apple, is quickly turning into just an enemy. The South Korean chipmaker who also competes with the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant’s iPhone and iPad is now threatening to get medieval on Apple.

If there’s one thing that seems to go hand-in-hand with struggling tablets, it’s generous price cuts. As Apple’s iPad continues to gain overwhelming popularity, tablets that attempt to fight the beast are falling short, and manufactures are being forced to drop their prices to shift their stock.

Unless you go for a boring old transparent hard case for your iPhone 4, you’re going to cover up that Apple logo on the back of your device when you slap a case on it. However, like those stick-on decals that you can buy for your MacBook, these iTattoo Snap cases compliment your Apple logo beautifully.

The iPhone is the equivalent of fly-paper when it comes to keeping customers. The Apple smartphone has at least an 89 percent allegiance, twice that of the closest Android handset, according to a Wall Street survey announced Friday.

The option to purchase additional content within iOS applications seems to have been plagued by an error for at least 10 hours now, with in-app purchases “failing in a big way,” according to one report. iOS developers who rely on the income they receive from in-app purchases are beginning to lose their patience with Apple.

Using tokens in Finder searches and some other application searches will make searching for files on your Mac a lot easier. It all starts when you press Command+F in the Finder.

We received a slew of tech questions from Cult of Mac readers after our inaugural Ask MacRx column, and even provided a few answers! Glad we can provide a useful service. Today we discuss ways to control your Mom’s Mac from afar, missing QuickTime codecs after getting a new Mac, and line spacing issues with replies in Apple Mail.

Here’s something for the iPhone photography freaks out there. It’s called Piece, and it just does one thing: slices your photos up into tiles.

Despite recent rumors that suggest there will not be an iPhone 5 this October — just the iPhone 4S instead — DigiTimes reports that there are issues currently affecting the supply of iPhone 5 touch panels, which will plague the initial shipments of the device.