Apple (AAPL) shells out a ton of money for advertising. In fiscal 2009 it spent $501 million, according to the 10-K form filed Tuesday. That’s up from $486 million in 2008 and $467 million in 2007.

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Here’s a question the FCC neglected to ask Apple (AAPL) in its inquiry into why the company rejected–or as Apple prefers, declined to approve–Google (GOOG) Voice:

Why has a free app that does essentially the same thing–and would seem to raise the same red flags for Apple–been sitting on the App Store for nearly 10 months?

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Tuesday was not a good day for professional analysts as a class–and Merrill Lynch’s in particular. Not only were most caught off guard by the strength of Apple’s (AAPL) record third-quarter results but the men and women who track the company for banks and brokerage houses were bested once again by a bunch of bloggers, day traders and amateurs analysts.

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Over the weekend, Microsoft (MSFT) unleashed the second TV ad in its “you find it, you keep it” series–this time swapping handsome, “technically savvy” Giampaolo for perky, red-headed Lauren De Long. Once again the camera follows a typical budget-constrained buyer on a laptop shopping spree using Steve Ballmer’s money.

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How secure is your smartphone? We may find out next month.

Hackers and computer security experts gathering on March 18 in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the third annual Pwn2Own contest will be targeting five smartphones: an Apple (AAPL) iPhone, a Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry and phones running on Google’s (GOOG) Android, Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Mobile and Nokia’s (NOK) Symbian operating systems.

The contest, sponsored by 3Com’s (COMS) TippingPoint computer security division, will award $10,000 prizes to anyone who can break into one of the phones and “pwn” it–hacker and Internet-gamer slang meaning to conquer or gain ownership. The smartphones themselves will be awarded as prizes to whomever cracks them first.

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The rise of the iPhone, like the course of true love, never did run smooth. Quarterly sales last year varied widely, from a low of 720,000 in June to a high of 6,890,000 in September following the release of the iPhone 3G. But that’s nothing compared with the weird patterns that emerge from data collected by Net Applications.

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Money gets tight. Buyers get picky. Price-sensitive consumers–the kind Steve Jobs  and Apple famously “choose not to serve”–start shopping for bargain basement PCs and Taiwanese netbooks. Mac sales plummet. That’s the conventional wisdom. Or at least that’s the line Morgan Stanley’s Kathryn Huberty pitched in September–when she lowered Apple’s (AAPL) rating twice in two weeks–and reiterated last week, when she earned the distinction of being the first and only mainstream Apple analyst to set a 2009 price target below $100 a share.

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Here’s a headache most companies would love to have. Apple is sitting on a huge cash reserve–$24.5 billion as of September and growing at the rate of $8 to $10 billion a year–that’s doing almost nothing for it. The money is earning about $1.55 percent interest after taxes, according to a report issued Wednesday by Bernstein Research’s Toni Sacconaghi, at a time when the company’s stock is trading at a unusually low (for Apple) multiple of 15 times earnings.

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The number of offerings on the App Store–the venue for independently produced programs that helps distinguish Apple’s smartphone from all others–hit 1,001 on Monday night. That’s roughly double the number that were available when the store opened just over two weeks ago (on July 11, the same day the iPhone 3G went on sale).

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Daniel Smith, a Canadian sales and marketing consultant with an eclectic blog called Smithereens, posted on Saturday what he called “a very plausible rumor” about the launch at of Apple’s iPhone 3G on the Rogers Communications network.

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