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AT&T still completely focused on T-Mobile buyout.

Chief Financial Officer (CFO) John Stephens spoke at the UBS media conference in New York about the carrier's persistence with the proposed T-Mobile buyout, and the financial resources that it has to complete the deal quickly.

"We continue to move forward with our efforts to complete the T-Mobile transaction...and we will continue to pursue the sale," Stephens said. He said that AT&T will use $10 billion it has accumulated on its balance sheet to prepare for the closing of the deal, and said the company al;so has a $20 billion bridge facility and $8 billion backup.

"So we clearly have an ability to close the deal very quickly and have those resources. That is the plan."

Stephens did not say how the company would get around regulatory hurdles, instead just insisting that any talks with the Department of Justice will not be made public. The DoJ has gone to court to halt the T-Mobile acquisition, finding that the deal would harm competition in the U.S. market.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has come to similar conclusions as the DoJ, prompting AT&T to withdraw its application for approval form the FCC last month.

ISPs have been arguing for years that the heaviest data users should pay more for their service because they put a bigger strain on the network. This is the primary rationale for tiered data plans which cap downloads at varioius sizes and charge overage fees for additional data.

A new report from Benoît Felten challenges that assumption based on analysis of traffic data from an unnamed North American ISP. His conclusion based on that analysis is that heavy data users do not, in fact, put a disproportionately large strain on ISP networks.

While the study itself must be purchased if you want to read the details, he has posted a free summary of his key findings.

• The top 1% of data consumers (hereafter Very Heavy consumers) account for 20% of the overall consumption.

• Average data consumption over the period is 290 MB, while consumption for Very Heavy consumers is 9.6 GB. Thisroughly equates to data consumption of 8.7 GB and 288 GB per month, respectively.

• However, only half of these Very Heavy consumers are customers of the highest service tier (6 Mbps), which implies that half of them have bandwidth usage restricted to 3Mbps (the next service tier) or lower.

• 61% of Very Heavy data consumers download 95% of the time or more, but only 5% of those who download at least 95% of the time are Very Heavy data consumers.

• While 83% of Very Heavy data consumers are amongst the top 1% of bandwidth users during at least one five minute time window at peak hours, they only represent 14.3% of said Top 1% of users at those times.

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam expects the company to begin offering shared data plans for smartphones, combining the plans for different devices on the same account into a single plan.

McAdam's comments came during an interview during the UBU Global Media Conference. He indicated the company expects smartphone penetration, currently at around 40%, to eventually reach around 70% of Verizon Wireless customers.

In addition, with the introduction of more services, including video, for mobile devices, he believes tablet use will also grow significantly. As those things happen, he sees shared data plans as both a convenience for the customer and a cost saving measure for the company.

In the interview he said:

I think in 2012 we'll see it. We've been working on this for a couple of years frankly... because we see four screens or even five screens. If you look at all the machine to machine capabilities that are out there, customers don't want - and neither do we by the way - want an individual account for each one of those devices. It drives them crazy and would raise our costs a lot so getting to one bill and having account level pricing is the way to go.

HP is getting ready to make their final push to rid of the last remaining stock of their discontinued TouchPad stock.

After dismal sales of the WebOS based tablet led to HP discontinuing it earlier this year, they went on sale for below cost and quickly sold out. Later, contractual obligations with suppliers led to an additional batch of TouchPads being produced which were offered in bundles with their computers.

This last bunch of TouchPads consists of refurbished units, which TechCrunch reports will be offered at the same $99 and $149 pricepoints via the company's eBay store. They quote an internal HP email which reads:

In an effort to give HP employees first chance at a very limited supply of refurbished TouchPads, there will be a short delay between when the product is posted live for sale on eBay and when the general public is notified of the sale.

Lately it seems like Netflix can't take a step without tripping over its own feet. The company's latest debacle is the launch of a new Xbox 360 client which has customers complaining about bugs and missing features.

The new client was rolled out yesterday, following Microsoft's update to the console. It takes advanage of new voice and gesture control capabilities, as well as adding access to audio and subtitle settings.

All of this sounds great in theory. In practice it is apparently quite buggy. Here are some excerpts from customer responses to the new client:

This new app is neither easy to use nor attractive. This should not have made it to release at this stage --- not even past the beta stage. What the heck were you thinking? Subtitles, Kinect, Dolby 5.1? Who cares when the software is AWFUL.

Drives me crazy that I can't view a static screen when selecting what episode to watch. Why do I have to be watching an episode to get to a list of other episodes? Not being able to skip forward/back is a pain, and not being able to restart a feature from the beginning is maddening! Please correct these issues!

Some days you have to wonder if anyone at the RIAA actually reads their official statements before unleashing them on the public. At the very least maybe they should check to see if they pass the giggle test.

The latest bit of nonsense is a submission to the Opinion section of a Nashville, Tennessee newspaper claiming the reason they stopped suing P2P users was because the campaign was successful, and the job completed.

The original article in The Tenneseean, which was primarily about how much the recording industry spends on lobbying, said:

The focus on lobbying and campaign contributions comes after the music industry?s use of a tactic, now almost universally acknowledged as a failure, in which it filed lawsuits against individuals accused of illegally downloading songs to stop piracy.

The record industry filed nearly 30,000 suits, which proved to be a poor public relations strategy as stories of teens, college students and families taken to court emerged. The suits ultimately proved ineffective in ending systematic online piracy.

Hackers have posted 14 of Mark Zuckerberg's private Facebook pictures to the Internet in an effort to highlight a serious bug.

The pictures were uploaded to imgur with the headline "It's time to fix those security flaws Facebook."

After the incident, Facebook says it fixed the glitch, which was found in the tools that help users report inappropriate images.

Said Facebook of the glitch (via the Beeb):

Earlier today, we discovered a bug in one of our reporting flows that allows people to report multiple instances of inappropriate content simultaneously.

The bug allowed anyone to view a limited number of another user's most recently uploaded photos irrespective of the privacy settings for these photos.

This was the result of one of our recent code pushes and was live for a limited period of time. Upon discovering the bug, we immediately disabled the system, and will only return functionality once we can confirm the bug has been fixed.

The German Mac site Macerkopf has posted the latest rumor on the upcoming iPhone 5 today.

Sources speaking to the site say Apple is working on multiple configurations of the new smartphone.

The first test device has a quad-core processor, although the site says it was nowhere near a foregone conclusion that the device will have one. The second test device has very powerful dual-core processors, with 28nm technology and high clock speeds.

Additionally, the devices are being tested with different resolutions, all larger than the current 960x640.

720p displays of 1280x720 and 1440x900 are being tested.

The iPhone 5 is expected next October.

Amazon has announced the one day promotion for December 10th.

In an effort to bring awareness to their mobile app, Amazon is offering consumers up to $5 worth of free credit if they compare a product in-store and decide instead to buy it from the e-tailer.

You must use Amazon's Price Check app on Android or iOS, which gives users the chance to scan a bar code, take a pic of the item, or use a traditional text search to find the item, price, details and reviews of products.

When you walk in stores, Amazon is asking that users submit prices of items via the app, so that the company can confirm they have the lowest prices.

"We scour online and in-store advertisements from other retailers, every day, year-round," said Sam Hall, director of Amazon Mobile. "Now, we are enabling customers to use the Price Check app to share in-store prices while they search for the best deals."

The promotion is good for 5 percent off, up to $5, for up to three items.

For the second year in a row, AT&T has gotten the worst rating in Consumer Report's annual satisfaction survey.

On the high end, little regional carrier Consumer Cellular got the highest ratings.

Among the major carriers, Verizon took first, Sprint took second and T-Mobile took third.

Despite being in third, T-Mobile had significantly higher ratings than its GSM rival, across the board. AT&T had tried to acquire the carrier for $39 billion but was rebuffed by the U.S. government.

"Our survey indicates that subscribers to prepaid and smaller standard-service providers are happiest overall with their cell-phone service," added Paul Reynolds, electronics editor for Consumer Reports. "However, these carriers aren't for everyone. Some are only regional, and prepaid carriers tend to offer few or no smart phones.The major carriers are still leading options for many consumers, and we found they ranged widely in how well they satisfied their customers."

Consumer Reports says "we surveyed over 66,000 of our subscribers about their service and customer-support experience with both standard and no-contract providers." The full report will be available next month.

Apple's China woes continue.

A Southern China court has denied Apple's claim that a Chinese company has infringed its iPad trademark. The Intermediate People's Court in Shenzhen heard Apple's complaint against Proview Technology, which the iPad-maker says unlawfully uses the iPad trademark in its products.

The court rejected this claim and pointed out that Proview lawfully registered the iPad trademark as far back as 2000 for products sold in a number of countries, including China.

Apple is betting heavily on the Chinese market, with executives saying that the company has not even scratched the surface in China when it comes to sales.

But the Cupertino giant has not had a very pleasant Chinese experience. It has had to battle counterfeiters in the region, who peddle millions of phony iPhones and iPads to consumers. It also has had to address the problem of fake Apple stores in the country.

Now a Chinese court has sided with Proview Technology over the use of the iPad trademark in China, and Proview itself is taking legal action against Apple for infringement, seeking $1.5 billion in compensation.

German patent firm threatens retailers with legal action.

IPCom said on Tuesday that it has requested that German mobile phone retailers stop selling phones made by HTC. It threatened to take legal action against any retailer that persists selling HTC devices, citing a 2009 injunction against the sale of a HTC smartphone.

The patent firm also went to the Mannheim court and requested that it fine HTC for ignoring the 2009 injunction. The court originally ruled in 2009 that a HTC handset infringed patents held by IPCom, issuing an injunction against sales. It set a penalty of up to ?250,000 for each time HTC failed to comply with it.

HTC appealed the verdict, but last week withdrew the appeal, prompting IPCom to push for enforcement of the injunction. However, HTC says the injunction only covered one HTC handset, and that is no longer solder in the German market.

IPCom hopes for a quick decision in the case, but the Mannheim court is likely to take months to decide on its requests for sanctions against HTC.

Nintendo 3DS regains some momentum in Japan.

Nintendo has said that sales of its 3DS handheld console will hit 3 million units in the Japanese market this week. The firm had released new software titles, including the Mario series, to prop up sales of the ailing gadget.

Nintendo admitted, however, that the holiday rush is started later than expected in the United States and Europe, citing poor economic conditions. Nevertheless, Nintendo is focused on keeping up sales of the 3DS after a strong Black Friday performance in the United States.

It projects a total of 4 million sales of the 3DS in Japan for its first year, and 16 million globally by March 2012. After cutting the price of the 3DS handheld in August, Nintendo is taking a loss on every unit that it currently sells, which is not an alien concept to other manufacturers of consoles but a rarity for Nintendo.

Nintendo's Wii home console sold 500,000 units on Black Friday in the United States. Still, it was overshadowed by a huge 960,000 Xbox 360 consoles sold in the week of Black Friday, setting the Microsoft console's best week of sales during its life.

Update will roll out this week.

Logitech has announced that it will begin delivering a software update of the Android 3.1 platform to Logitech Revue with Google TV. The update brings access to the Android Market, a simplified user interface, Logitech Media Player improvements and better search and browse capabilities.

If you're already a Revue user, simply ensure your unit is turned on and connected to the Web, and accept the update that pops up onto your TV screen. New customers are expected to receive this version automatically upon activation.

"In a world of infinite entertainment choices you need an easy way to discover the content you want to watch: Logitech Revue has you covered," Logitech's blog states.

"The Quick Search Box quickly vets TV content, Web video, Apps, Bookmarks, and the Web, so you can spend less time searching and more time watching. And the TV & Movies app allows people to easily search, watch and even rate more than 80,000 movies and TV episodes from cable, Netflix, Amazon and YouTube."

Microsoft details Windows Store for developers.

Microsoft has given details about the Windows Store, the primary source of Metro-style apps for the Windows 8 operating system. In the video below, Microsoft's Antoine Leblond explains the revenue sharing and the reach of the Windows Store when it launches.

Microsoft confirmed that the beta of the Windows 8 operating system will be released in February 2012. Research firm IDC expects that Windows 8 will be pre-installed to new PCs as early as August of next year.