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According to a new note by Rodman & Renshaw Equity Research, Apple could sell up to 15 million iPhones in the quarter ending in September, easily the company's strongest quarter for iPhone sales.

Sales will be boosted by the upcoming iPhone "4G" or "HD," the smartphone leaked last month by Gizmodo after it was left in a bar by an Apple developer.

Rodman & Renshaw analyst Ashok Kumar said the company will manufacture 12 million of the new iPhone HD for the September quarter, which combined with iPhone 3GS sales could lead to 15 million for the period.

For the fiscal year, Apple could sell 40 million iPhones, up from 18 million for the fiscal 2009.

Adds Kumar (via SFGate): "Apple is close to achieving peak market share with its existing lineup of wireless carriers. The only way to keep growing its iPhone business is to expand its relationships with other carriers and to become more carrier-agnostic."

Last week we reported that Hon Hai Precision Industry of Taiwan, the owners of manufacturer Foxconn, said they were planning to raise worker's salaries by 20 percent amidst a flood of worker suicides at their Chinese factory.

Today, the company has announced it will instead be raising salaries by at least 30 percent.

Workers making a minimum of 900 yuan per month ($132 USD) will get a raise to 1200 yuan ($176 USD), effective immediately.

Says spokesman Edmund Ding: "It's been a while since we increased wages, hence the decision. Raising pay and the suicide issues are two separate matters."

Ten employees of the manufacturer have died via suicide this year, with the latest happening this week, and public anger at the company is rising. Last Thursday, an 11th employee tried to kill himself, slitting his wrists. He was revived by a medical team. The company was allegedly giving 100,000 yuan to compensate families of suicide victims.

According to the latest figures from NetApplications, Google's Chrome browser continues to take market share at a rapid pace, and is continuing its pace to surpass the 10 percent milestone by the end of the year.

For the month ended May 31st, Chrome moved to 7.05 percent share, up from 6.73 percent at the end of April.

Google's gain came at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox, which both continue to lose share on a continuing basis.

IE, which once controlled 93 percent of the market, fell to 59.69 percent from 59.95 at the end of April and Firefox dropped to 24.35 from 24.95 percent.

Apple's Safari, which continues to see growth but at a very slow pace, rose to 4.77 percent from 4.72 the month before.

Additionally, IE6, the aging browser which has seen its reputation hit repeatedly over the past year fell to under 10 percent for the first time ever.

Back in 2008, Sony launched the PlayTV PVR (personal video recorder) for the PlayStation 3, giving gamers in Europe and Australia a chance to to use their console as a DVR, one that can record TV, even if they are playing games.

According to an interview with Spong, Sony Cambridge Studio's Mark Green has confirmed that an updated version of the PVR is coming, dubbed PlayTV2.

When asked by the interviewer what was currently in development at the studio, Green responded: "Well, as a whole studio, I think you saw TV Superstars for Move announced a little while ago. We're still working on PlayTV, PlayTV 2. And then we have other guys working on other concepts..."

Pakistan has unblocked popular social networking site Facebook today, after two weeks of banning access.

The country will continue to block any individual pages that contain "blasphemous" content, however, which mostly means any page that has an image of the Islamic prophet Muhammad.

The ban went into effect earlier in the month when an online competition started that invited Facebook users to submit drawings of Muhammad. Any image, satirical or not, is considered blasphemous.

Pakistan also censored YouTube and Wikipedia along with over 50 other sites, but most have been unblocked in the past week.

Knowledgeable users worked around the bans at first by using proxy sites with foreign proxies, but officials then blocked all proxy sites as well.

This weekend, Bangladesh also banned Facebook, but said it would only lift the block when all offending material was taken down.

Apple has announced the sale of 2 million iPad tablets as of today, a little under a month since the company announced the sale of the 1 millionth unit.

The tablet launched in early April in the United States and the company began selling the device in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK this past weekend, where excitement reached a fervor.

Says Apple CEO Steve Jobs via press release: "Customers around the world are experiencing the magic of iPad, and seem to be loving it as much as we do. We appreciate their patience, and are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone."

The iPad saw 450,000 sales on launch day, and was touted as Apple's most successful product launch ever.

The extremely popular social networking site Facebook has been blocked in Bangladesh this weekend after pages were found to include satirical images of the prophet Muhammad.

Additionally, satirical images were found of Bengali leaders and one man was even arrested and charged with "spreading malice and insulting the country's leaders."

The block is temporary, and Bengali officials say access will be fully restored once all the images are removed.

Adds the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (BTRC) (via BBC): Facebook "hurt the religious sentiments of the country's majority Muslim population" by allowing the images of Muhammad.

"Some links in the site also contained obnoxious images of our leaders including the father of the nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and the leader of the opposition," notes the group.

Pakistan blocked access to Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and Flickr last week after the images first appeared.

According to new rumors circulating the Internet, the upcoming updated Apple TV will cost just $99 USD and run on the iPhone OS 4. The device will also run on an A4 processor.

The current model Apple TV, which can be considered a flop by Apple standards, sells for $229.

The new rumors suggest that Apple sees a need to update their device as Google prepares to release their Google TV web content-to-TV delivery system in the next few months.

Originally, the rumor came from Engadget which cited a "source very close to Apple" in saying the upcoming set-top box will have 16GB of flash storage and "be capable of full 1080p HD."

Apple TV can display YouTube videos, images from iPhoto and Flickr, and gets its video content from iTunes, in SD and HD quality. The current model however, has a 160GB HDD.

Late last year, Google announced it intended to buy mobile ad giant AdMob for $750 million USD.

After over six months of delays, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cleared the purchase last week, thanks in part to Google's arch rival Apple.

Apple recently purchased the third largest mobile ad company, Quattro Wireless, and used it as the backbone of its new iAd platform on the iPad and iPhone. The FTC had been concerned that Google (the world's largest ad platform) merging with AdMob (world's largest mobile ad platform) would violate anti-trust laws. Apple joining the fray eased those concerns.

Today, Google has announced the completion of the acquisition.

Says the search giant: "It's clear that mobile advertising is becoming a much larger part of our clients' and partners' strategies and with this acquisition, it's now a central part of our own business. In continuing to invest in this highly competitive area, we'll be bringing together our technology, resources and expertise in search advertising with AdMob's innovative solutions for advertising on mobile websites and in mobile applications."

According to Google's Doubleclick Ad Planner 1000 list, Facebook is the leading website in the world, reaching 540 million unique users, good for over 35 percent of the entire world's Internet population.

The social networking giant had 570 billion page views, topping the list.

Google's list tracks the top 1000 sites in the world, ranked in order by unique user reach. While Google would likely have topped the list, easily, they did not include any of their properties (Google search, YouTube, etc.) in an effort to keep impartiality.

Yahoo was close behind Facebook, at 490 million unique visitors, reaching 31.8 percent of the world's Internet users. In terms of page views, Yahoo could not even compete, with only 70 billion views.

Combined, Microsoft has the most traffic of any company in the world, with Live having 370 million unique visitors, Wikipedia having 310 million unique visitors, MSN having 280 million unique visitors and Microsoft.com having 230 million. In terms of page views, Live had 39 billion, Wiki had 7.9 billion, MSN had 11 billion and Microsoft had 3.3 billion.

Last week Sprint announced that the HTC EVO 4G would hit stores on June 4th. The phone will cost $199 USD with two-year contract.

Today, a user on XDA-Developers has posted a video of the upcoming phone rooted and running Android 2.2 "Froyo," which has not been released on any phone except for the Nexus One.

It is speculated that the phone is one of the few that were given out to I/O conference participants, the Google event last week.

The HTC EVO 4G boasts the most impressive specs on an Android phone yet, with a 4.3-inch WVGA capacitive multi-touchscreen display (with pinch to zoom), Android 2.1 with Sense UI, Google Search, Google Maps, Google Talk, Gmail, Google Goggles, YouTube, Google Calendar syncing, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g and 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot capability for connecting up to eight Wi-Fi enabled devices.

Skype has rolled out its long-awaited Skype 2.0 app for the Apple iPhone this weekend, adding the ability to make calls using 3G data.

Until this weekend, iPhone owners could only make Skype calls when connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi.

The company says it has also made "CD quality audio enhancements," which should boost volume and sound quality of the calls.

While the deal may sound great for users who want to cut down on their AT&T phone bill by slashing some minutes and instead using Skype, there is of course a catch.

All 3G Skype-to-Skype calls are free until only the end of August, afterwards there will be a "small" monthly fee.

Full changelog, via 9-5:

Upgrades / improvements include:
- Call using your 3G connection. Skype-to-Skype calls on 3G are free until at least end of August 2010, after which there will be a small monthly fee (operator charges for data will still apply).
- Near CD-quality sound for Skype-to-Skype calls using wideband audio (SILK codec) on iPhone 3GS and 2nd generation iPod touch.
- Enhanced call quality indicator.
- Improved start-up time.
- Fast access to the dial pad from iPhone home screen.

Vudu, the movie streaming service, has announced that Toshiba and Sanyo have begun shipping HDTVs and Blu-ray players with Vudu-support built-in, meaning the service has now followed through on their promise of being available on a plethora of players and TVs from different manufacturers.

The service will be available on the Toshiba BDX2500 and BDX2700 Blu-ray players, which will also give access to CinemaNow and Netflix. Vudu movies can stream in up to 1080p resolution. The player is BD-Live, has analog and HDMI-based 7.1-channel surround, and can playback locally stored media, including H.264, says Electronista.

On April 13th, the Opera Mini 5 application was accepted by Apple into the App Store, and the free browser saw 1 million downloads on its first day.

As of April, says Opera, there are now over 58 million Opera Mini users globally.

Opera Mini uses Opera's servers to render and compress pages, thus increasing speed for the end user, and that tactic was what allowed the browser to be accepted to the App Store.

The iPhone is now the most popular Opera device used in the U.S., beating out the entire RIM BlackBerry line. Despite a much smaller market share, it is also now the 5th most popular device running the browser in the UK, as well.

While many of the millions that have downloaded the browser may done so just to test it, U.S. downloaders were the most likely to keep using it.

In early May we reported that "Hurt Locker" producer Voltage Pictures was preparing to sue thousands of alleged pirates for downloading the film online.

This week, that suit has come to fruition, with Voltage suing 5000 unidentified pirates accused of downloading the 2009 Best Picture.

Says the suit: "A Defendant's distribution of even one unlawful copy of a motion picture can result in the nearly instantaneous worldwide distribution of that single copy to a limitless number of people. The Plaintiff new seeks redress for this rampant infringement of their exclusive rights."

The movie was leaked to the Internet, in full DVD quality, about 6 months before its nationwide release in the U.S. Despite winning Best Picture, the film only grossed $17 million USD domestic in theaters.

Voltage, backed by the U.S. Copyright Group, will begin to subpoena ISPs this week to identify the persons behind the IP addresses that were used to download the unauthorized film copy.