Apple investors prepare for "bad" news: Normally ebullient Apple fanboy (aka Piper Jaffray analyst) Gene Munster is eating a breakfast of cold crow today, estimating that iPhone sales only hit 200,000 for the second quarter of 2008 - this after he excitedly proclaimed sales estimates up to 700,000 units. (Ahem, remember that the "month" actually equals less than 48 hours, since the iPhone went on sale at 6 p.m. on the second-to-last day of the second quarter.) Apple's share price fell on this news, of course, losing about $5.

AT&T announced today that it activated 146,000 iPhones in the first two days on sale. (We'd also like to point out that the company probably would have activated a lot more if they could have gotten their customer service act together... More than a few people we know had to wait until Monday, July 1, to officially activate their phones, despite purchasing them on June 29.)

But American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu isn't scared by the potentially disappointing iPhone sales figures. Wu expects Apple to report earnings per share and sales "well above" the company's April guidance - specifically 73 cents per share on sales of $5.3 billion for the period. Wu also cautions: "Don't expect the actual revenue reported to match up with the unit sales."

Perhaps the real barometer of the iPhone's waning buzz is the report from Blackfriars that news stories on the release of the latest Harry Potter book - the fastest-selling book in history - overtook iPhone articles on Tuesday. iPhone: 18,728; Harry Potter: 22,164.

Meanwhile, AT&T stock jumped 61 percent.

iPhone security exploit to be detailed at BlackHat: Full details about the iPhone exploit reported yesterday will be detailed at the upcoming BlackHat conference in Las Vegas on August 2. You can get a prelim PDF report here. The news about the exploit prompted at least one IT website to remind us: "The iPhone is a computer." Oh yeah... iPhone users can at least take solace in the fact that the security flaw will be patched.

In other iPhone news: Here's some more proof that the iPhone is gaining a foothold in the biz market. New York Apple Stores win bragging rights for highest sales in the country. Roughly Drafted has started a series detailing Ten Fake Apple Scandals. Efiko Software has released a version of its RingToneMaker software for the iPhone that lets Windows users create custom ringtones from MP3, WAV, and OGG files. (We'll wait for the Mac OS X version, thanks.)

Apple is dispensing advice on prolonging the iPhone's battery life. A sample tidbit: Don't leave your iPhone in a hot car. (Seriously?) Signal vs. Noise, on the other hand, has a truly useful iPhone tip.

In other tech news: Acer president Gianfranco Lanci slammed Windows Vista, describing its launch as having "the smallest impact on PC sales of any version of Windows in the history of PC manufacturing." New notebooks from Dell and Lenovo will feature wireless USB. The Gizmodo editors are in lust with the new $299 TiVo HD. And why Guy Kawasaki's Truemors site doesn't suck.