We touched on the numbers in our report on Apple's Q1 earnings, but the company's throwing out a lot of "record" figures and we thought we'd take a moment to focus on just how its hardware sales stack up. The standout figure is, of course, the 37.04 million iPhones sold during the quarter, which is up 128 percent from the same quarter a year ago (and up from 17 million in the previous quarter, a jump of 117 percent). That also puts it back ahead of Samsung, which sold a total of 35 million total smartphones in its most recent quarter. What's more, as blogger Matt Richman notes, a little basic math reveals that Apple sold more iPhones in 2010 (a total of 93.1 million) than it did in 2007, 2008 and 2009 combined.

iPad sales also set a new record 15.43 units sold during the quarter, which is a 111 percent jump from the 7.3 million sold a year ago, and a 39 percent increase from the 11.1 million moved in Q4 2011. Once again, however, iPods were the one category that continues to decline in the face of the growth of smartphones. Apple sold a total of 15.4 million iPods -- over half of which were iPod touches -- which represents a 21 percent decline from the 19.4 million sold a year ago. The holiday shopping season did boost sales considerably from the 6.6 million sold in the previous quarter though.

Mac sales were also on the upswing, totaling 5.2 million units -- a 26 percent increase year-over-year. Breaking things down further, that translates to 1.48 million desktops (including iMac, Mac Mini and Mac Pro), and 3.7 million laptops (including the basic MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro).

Developing...

Amazon's already pushed out a software update for the Kindle Fire this week, and now its released a fairly major update to the Kindle app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Among the highlights this time around are some revamped magazine options on the iPad, including access to the more than 400 magazines and newspapers available on the Kindle Fire, as well as the ability to read print replica textbooks on the iPad (which preserves the layout of the print editions but still allows for notes and highlighting). All iOS users can also now use a built-in PDF reader that will let you open PDFs from within the Kindle app, and Amazon is promising "seamless integration of personal documents," which will let folks email documents to their Kindle address and have them synced on their iOS devices in addition to their Kindles.

Product names generally fall into one of four different categories: good, safe, meaningless and bad. There may be better categories to group them in, but we'll use these for the purpose of this editorial. In the first category I'd put something like Kindle, arguably one of the best new product names of the last ten years. iPhone and iPad, and their subsequent suffixed versions, are in the safe category. They're perfectly fine names for a cellphone and a tablet, but they're not as original or distinct as iMac or iPod were, which I'd consider good (iPod nano, shuffle and touch, on the other hand, are all safe names).

You've heard the rumors, and Apple has now confirmed that it will be bringing Siri voice control to its new iPhone 4S -- and, yes, it will still be called Siri. That will let you use natural language to perform tasks like asking for a weather forecast or getting directions, setting an alarm or making a calendar appointment, and searching Wikipedia or Wolfram Alpha for information (among many other possibilities). Described as a "humble personal assistant," Siri will work in English (including UK and Australia), French and German for know, and it'll work with all built-in apps and over both 3G and WiFi. It'll also be a beta to start with, and Apple promises that it "gets better" as it learns your voice. Unfortunately for current iPhone owners, however, it looks like Siri will only be available on the iPhone 4S (at least initially).

Apple spent a fair bit of time recapping some already announced iOS 5 features during its keynote today, but it also got around to announcing a new one: Find My Friends. That will let you easily find friends in the real world who have opted to share their location with you, and you'll also be able to invite friends to share their location for a limited time -- when they're driving to your house, for instance, so you can give them directions. Naturally, there are also some parental controls and other "simple" privacy settings.

Well, this is certainly interesting. While rumors of an LTE-enabled iPhone had died down for a little while, they sprung back to life yesterday with a report that just such a device was being tested by carriers. Now we've received the image you see above, which shows some 4G LTE equipment that was recently installed in a major Apple store -- by AT&T, according to our source. Making things somewhat more interesting is the equipment itself, one piece of which supports only the 700MHz and AWS bands -- both of which AT&T plans to use for its LTE network if the T-Mobile acquisition goes through.

We're also told that the Apple Store in question, and all those in the region, are now trying to increase staffing on the sales floor by about 30 percent, which is apparently not related to the usual hiring in the lead up to the holidays (that will apparently still happen later). Of course, this could simply be the result of some long-term planning rather than evidence of the next iPhone, but the timing is a bit curious to say the least.

[Thanks, Anonymous]

It's not clear if its recently acquired group messaging firm, Beluga, had anything to do with it or not, but Facebook has branched out further into the increasingly crowded messaging space today with the announcement of a separate Facebook Messenger app. Available for iPhone and Android, the app lets you send messages directly to individual friends or groups, which they'll of course receive instantly (a la BBM, Huddle for Google+, and Apple's forthcoming iMessage). You're also able to share your location if you choose, and attach photos to your messages, but the app is otherwise streamlined and barebones -- which Facebook says is just the point. We're not seeing the app in either the Android Market or App Store just yet, but it's said to be rolling out today.

Struggling to decide on a few movies to watch this weekend? Then you can always peruse the solid suggestions offered by Roger Ebert's ongoing Great Movies series, which is now available in convenient app form for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch (though not optimized for iPad, unfortunately). In addition to over 300 reviews from Ace in the Hole to Yojimbo, the app offers stills and fully searchable details for each film in the series, plus links to add a movie to your Netflix queue or buy it from Amazon, and the ability to make your own lists of what you've seen and what you want to see. There's still no indication of a release for Android or other platforms just yet, but iOS users can grab the app right now for $0.99 via the iTunes link below.