Here are your Apple rumors and news items for Friday:

Apple & Barnes & Noble: Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) will likely face even more competition with Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) if rumors of a new Kindle tablet prove true. But Apple may already have a solution: buying Amazon’s most significant retail competitor. A Thursday rumor at BGR, said that Apple is considering acquiring Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS) for between $1 and $1.5 billion. The acquisition is sound. In addition to helping the company to better take on Amazon, Barnes & Noble would allow Apple to rapidly expand its retail operation, cut into the e-reader market by taking over the Nook business, and fix its nonstarting iBookstore digital storefront. The money is there too: With $76 billion in cash laying around, Apple’s potential purchase would hardly break the bank.

iPhone 5 vs. Mango: According to IDC, Apple surpassed Nokia (NYSE:NOK) as the world’s leading smartphone manufacturer in the second quarter. Now the two companies are gearing up for a head-to-head battle to determine which company holds the top spot. According to DigiTimes, Nokia will release its first phone using Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone 7 operating system in October. The debut will come just weeks after the suspected release of Apple’s newest iPhone. A number of manufacturers, including Samsung, HTC, and LG, will also release phones that use the latest version of the Windows platform, codenamed Mango.

Google Picks Up Some IBM: Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has made a strong move to acquire technology patents. Bloomberg (via Apple Insider) has reported that Google purchased a number of patents from IBM (NYSE:IBM) at the beginning of July, leaving competitors like Apple open to litigation for infringement. Apple and Google were among the companies pitted in a bidding war to acquire a series of Nortel patents in June that ended with the intellectual property going to both companies for a combined $4.5 billion.

As of this writing, Anthony John Agnello did not own a position in any of the stocks named here. Follow him on Twitter at @ajohnagnello and become a fan of InvestorPlace on Facebook.