Samsung is celebrating tonight as they have announced that they have reached up to three million pre-orders worldwide for its dual-core Android phone by the end of April, when it went on sale in Korea. Orders were expected to only go up like this as the phone reached global scale and peaked at 120 countries.

I’d call that a success. In Samsung’s home country, it sold 120,000 of the phones in the first few days. The company had initially predicted 10 million Galaxy S IIs shipping for the entire year. These numbers will level off, but they help Samsung threaten competitors like Apple.

Where would we be without colorware? Our gadgets would be just a monochrome void. Now it is the Apple iPad 2′s turn to get the Colorware treatment. You can make it as beautiful or as ugly as you want. Just be prepared to pay a premium.

It will cost you $910 for the base 16GB WiFi configuration and you’ll need to wait about 4 weeks for it to arrive. Once it does, your device won’t look like everyone elses and your friends will all know that you are down about a grand.

Samsung has to be quite happy with the Galaxy S II. The company has taken over 200,000 pre-orders across all three major Korean carriers between Monday of last week and the launch on Friday. 160,000 of these were at the country’s largest carrier, SK Telecom.

It gets even more impressive. The pre-orders passed 10,000 units in the first 29 minutes and doubled that in over an hour. This surpasses iPhone 4 pre-orders last August and sets a new high for Apple to beat.

Good news iMac fans. Apple is refreshing the iMac lineup today, with prices starting at $1,199 for the 21.5-inch (1,920 x 1,080 pixel IPS panel) model with new 2.5GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 processor and 512MB of AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics.

After that prices go up to $1,999 for a 27-inch (2,560 x 1,440 IPS) model with 3.1GHz quad-core Intel Core i5 CPU and 1GB of AMD Radeon HD 6970M graphics, or optional 3.4GHz quad-core Core i7 processor and 2GB of HD 6970M graphics.

Good news for magazine readers. Time Inc. has made a deal with Apple to allow print magazine subscribers to access the company’s iPad editions for free. Starting this week, those who subscribe to print versions of Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Time will be able to download the iPad versions at no cost, directly within the magazines’ apps, as it should be.

iPad users still won’t be able to purchase exclusively digital subscriptions to Time Inc.’s publications. Time wants to incorporate digital subscriptions to its iPad model, but negotiations have hit some snags, mostly due to how Apple shares subscriber data. Publishers claim to need that data to apply the TV Everywhere model to magazines, but Apple says that the subscriber information should only be shared on an opt-in basis. It doesn’t seem like they will agree anytime soon.

After rumors in March about the LG Optimus Big smartphone, LG has just officially introduced the new phone in South Korea. It also appeared in a photo alongside an Apple iPhone, which showed off its “big” status, so the LG Optimus Big has been confirmed as real, with the name LU6800.

Features include a dual-core 1GHz processor, 4.3 inch WVGA display, 5-megapixel autofocus camera, and Android 2.2 OS, which is likely upgradable to Gingerbread. No word yet on if we can expect this device in the US yet.

This photo comes from MIC Gadget and they claim that it could represent the “iPhone 4S”. The image shows a white iPhone 4, or what looks like an iPhone 4, but with a larger display. It could be just a mockup, but at any rate it clearly has a larger display and edge-to-edge glass.

They didn’t say how they got the image either so we have no way to say if this is genuine or not, however it seems like this is a move that Apple would make with the next iPhone. It also closely resembles some leaked renders and images that surfaced earlier in the year. Stay tuned on this one.

It sure helps to have friends in high places. Just ask Verizon who made friends with Apple and then went on to activate 2.2 million iPhones in the first quarter of 2011, the first in which it offered Apple’s phone.

AT&T on the other hand, which had previously had an exclusive on the iPhone in the U.S., activated 3.6 million iPhones during Q1. Remember, Verizon only started selling the phone in February, so their total only spans two months of availability. Verizon must be feeling pretty good right now.

As we all know by now, you can’t keep Apple products down. They assimilate society like the Borg and spread across the globe, just not in large cube-ships. So it is no surprise that Apple will launch the iPad 2 in 13 more countries next week.

We aren’t sure which countries these are, but so far this month Apple has launched the device in places like Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea. There’s just no stopping the iPad 2. The company’s international push started on March 25th.

According to some people in the know, Apple’s next-generation iPhone will have a faster processor and will begin shipping in September. Production of the new device will start in July/August and it will be very similar to the iPhone 4.

That’s great news for Apple fans and it still leaves us plenty of time for more rumor and speculation. Put your thinking caps on and start guessing at what we can expect from the iPhone 5.

The white iPhone 4 has been a huge pain for Apple and for anyone wanting one. But now it looks like the wait may finally be over. That’s because UK carrier Three has just put up a product page for the white smartphone.

The 32GB version is priced at £159 ($259) on a £35 per month agreement. The first white iPhone 4 handsets will ship on April 20, or this Wednesday. According to the product page at least. Hopefully this will be the end of it and you can hold it in your hands very soon.

Everlight Electronics has reportedly delivered samples of its LED backlight products to Apple, according to China Times. Since Everlight’s products are intended for use in tablet-style devices, it makes sense that Apple is exploring the idea of using the company’s LED backlights for the iPad 2.

Apple has steadily expanded the availability of the iPad 2, launching it in new countries and adding new retailers in the U.S., but component supplies for the iPad 2 are reportedly constrained, so Apple is looking various ways to meet the demand. This also might help to cure the bleeding backlight issue in some iPad 2 tablets.

Looks like the iPhone 4 is about to hit another milestone. It will soon be the most popular camera on Flickr. The site’s Camera Finder shows Apple’s phone ready to overtake the Nikon D90 and it has already passed Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II, Rebel T1i, and Rebel XSi.

Flickr notes that the graphs only track shots with metadata identifying the camera and might omit shots from any platform that has had the information omitted. Some editing tools also either have the option to clear out metadata or will do it by default. D90 users and other DSLR users are more likely to use editing tools than iPhone owners and that will certainly skew the results. Still, we don’t doubt the power of the mighty iPhone 4.

Looks like Apple feels the need for speed, and so they have given a speed boost to the solid-state drives in newer MacBook Air models. Most batches were using Toshiba’s X-Gale SSD, but now a more recent model has been spotted using a Samsung-made 470 series drive.

The 128GB drive is of course much faster in reads and writes, taking things from about 210MB per second and 176MB per second in the old Toshiba SSD to 261MB per second and 210MB per second in the Samsung version. The upgraded drive, which Apple identifies as SM128C, also supports Native Command Queuing to optimize how it reads and writes to the drive. The X-Gale lacks that feature. Good news for those looking in a MacBook Air.

Yesterday we heard the latest rumor that the white iPhone 4 is currently in production. Well, now it is official. Apple says that the white iPhone will be released in the spring. The company had previously indicated that manufacturing problems had delayed its release.

Good news for those of you waiting on this snow white phone. It gives everyone something to look at while we are waiting for the iPhone 5 too. So are you buying a white iPhone or will you wait for the new iPhone 5?