The past week was shaken up by claims that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) has been seeing a slowdown in its iPhone orders, even as Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) continued to see strong demand for its Kindle Fire tablet offering. Apple has apparently informed suppliers of iPhone parts and components to delay shipments in Q4 and Q1 2012 as iPhone 4S sales have not been as strong as expected from the pre-sales period.^[1] Apple has since taken a beating, falling by over 5% in two days since the news.

On the same day, a positive result emerged for Apple from a survey by investment bank Morgan Stanley that found that almost 21 percent of Chinese buyers were considering a Mac as their next PC purchase, making Apple the most desirable PC brand in China.^[2] In the tablet arena, a study by Retrevo.com seems to suggest that more consumers are interested in purchasing Amazon’s upcoming tablet than Apple’s tried and true iPad this holiday season.^[3] Pre-orders for Amazon’s tablet remain strong and the company seems to have recently increased its orders to more than five million units before the end of 2011.^[4]

See our complete analysis for Apple stock here

Research In Motion

A month after BlackBerry service crashed worldwide, stranding some customers for up to three days, the company said on Wednesday that some users were again experiencing service delays. The users whose service was affected on Wednesday were in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, the same part of the world as last month’s shutdown. Later that day, the company announced that the outage had been resolved and service restored in the affected regions. ((RIM suffers another BlackBerry outage as Google plans to ax Gmail app, AppleInsider, November 9th, 2011))

RIM’S tablet Playbook continues to see weak demand despite a number of recent discounts and ‘Buy 2, Get 1 Free’ promotions that company has come out with in a bid to move its inventory. The latest comes from a leaked Staples ad found by TechCrunch.^[5] The office-supply retailer appears to be offering the 16GB PlayBook for $199 as part of its Black Friday special.

Google said it would stop offering a Gmail application for BlackBerrys on Nov. 22. While the app will continue to function after that date, Google also plans to abandon support for it. It seems Google is sticking it to RIM because RIM has become more and more of a competitor, from an ecosystem perspective and, pending the Motorola acquisition, from a device perspective.

See our complete analysis for RIM stock here

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