Apple sold its one millionth 3G iPhone on Sunday, reports the company. That's up from about 300,000 sold over the first three days of the first iPhone launch. “iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, whom we're sure also wanted to say the weekend was "extraordinary," "incredible," "tremendous," and "unprecedented." Jobs said it took 74 days for Apple to sell as many of the first generation iPhones last year. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster — whose numbers you should take with a grain of salt as he incorrectly estimated Apple only sold 425,000 3G iPhones over the weekend — credited international availability and a 60 percent price cut for the 300 percent increase. Sales would have been even brisker, Munster noted, if it hadn't taken Apple 15 minutes to activate each iPhone. Last year it took only about 60 seconds. Still, we're glad it took so long, if only because we figure 15 minutes is the minimum amount of time needed for geek love to blossom as it did for one Apple store employee and the first iPhone buyer in line.

Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, thinks Apple will sell a record 25 million iPods during the holiday quarter. Last year saw 21 million iPods sold in the same time period. [AppleInsider]

We believe that Android will give many phone makers their first access to software with full web browsing functionality, which the iPhone already offers ... Simply put, in our opinion, Apple is confident that its iPhone operating system is a compelling one, and developers will want to build applications for the iPhone ... [I]f the platform successfully proliferates to many devices and form factors, we do not believe Google will develop a mobile phone (hardware) product ... If the platform does not successfully proliferate, then Google may be forced to release a handset that exemplifies and displays the power of Android.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster — who, incidentally, has a fake blog, which, we're told, is much more amusing than the real Gene — raised his price target on Apple to $250 a share, up from $225. At $250, Apple's market cap would be $218 billion — higher than Google. After that, tech-stock comparisons are hard to find until we get to Microsoft, currently at just over $300 billion. Apple would need a share price of $350 to top that. BUY BUY BUY! [MacDailyNews]

Success has many fathers; failure is an orphan. Or so the saying goes. Google's second-quarter earnings — how to put this delicately? — sucked. At least compared to Wall Street's predictably overhyped expectations. Profits rose 28 percent, but that wasn't enough, and the stock fell 5 percent in after-hours trading, which means someone's got to take the fall. I dialed into Google's conference call, and listened closely to who did most of the talking. When it's bad news, the chief financial officer usually gets stuck with the unpleasant job, and sure enough, that's what happened, with CEO Eric Schmidt quickly handing the call over to CFO George Reyes and flipping tough questions to his colleagues. That tells me even Google insiders thought it was a bad quarter, too. Also on the call: Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and top executives Jonathan Rosenberg and Omid Kordestani.

When Fake Steve Jobs does a pretend Apple earnings call, who's going to be on the line? Why, Fake Gene Munster, of course. (CNBC tech correspondent Jim Goldman tipped me off to this anonymous Apple blogger.) It's a sign of the insanity that's grown up around the faux Apple CEO that someone is now impersonating a stock analyst at Piper Jaffray, a second-tier investment bank known for its tech research. Personally, I'm betting it's actually Munster himself. SEC restrictions on what analysts can say and do have gotten so absurd that an anonymous — and plausibly deniable — blog makes for the perfect outlet. Come on, Gene, fake or otherwise — tell us what you really think.