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Asus has confirmed the launch date for their upcoming quad-core tablet, the Transformer Prime.

The device will launch on November 9th and will be the first tablet to be powered by a Tegra 3 quad-core processor.

Additionally, the tablet will supposedly also come with Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) which would put the tablet light years ahead of other current devices.

Furthermore, Asus is looking to "focus on innovation and product perfection" with two upcoming tablets in the Q1 2012.

Asus will also unveil Windows 8 tablets in the Q3 2012.

Electronic Arts (EA) has announced today that Battlefield 3 is their fastest selling game of all-time.

The game sold 5 million copies in its first week of availability.

Figures include global sales for all consoles and PC.

Additionally, the publisher notes that the game has 2.5 million "likes" on Facebook and over 200,000 followers on Twitter.

Gamers have already "executed 73 million savior kills, 48 million revives and destroyed 67 million vehicles," adds EA.

By comparison, EA's last war game, Medal of Honor, sold five million copies in 120 days.

Without a doubt the most highly anticipated game of the month is Activision's Modern Warfare 3, the latest in the Call of Duty blockbuster franchise.

This weekend, it appears part of the PC version of the game was stolen from a shipping warehouse in California.

The disc has inevtitably leaked its way to warez, p2p and torrent sites.

Because the disc is disc 2 of a two-disc set, it isn't particularly useful but some pirates have already tried playing it online.

Activision is shutting down that kind of behavior, however, with one pirate claiming he was fined $5000 for trying to play the game. "Do not buy MW3 before release date. They will come get you. I already went through it," said the pirate.

MW3 will be released on November 8th and Activision is expecting 20 million sales across all platforms in 2011.

In a slide presented during their Q3 earnings call, Asus disclosed plans to release a tablet running Windows 8 in Q3 of next year.

Windows 8 features a completely new UI called Metro which is intended to make it more tablet friendly. Windows 8 also adds support for ARM processors, an important step for supporting current tablet hardware.

The good news for Microsoft, at least for the moment, is the number 2 tablet OS, Android, has yet to make a significant mark. Of course that could change by the time Windows 8 launches next year.

Putting Windows on a tablet does, in theory, have some advantages over either iOS or Android. Where iOS and Android are essentially phone operating systems upscaled for tablet use, Windows 8 on a tablet will be similar in many ways to a desktop experience.

At the same time, consumers could be turned off by a lack of compatibility with existing applications due to processor and interface limitations on tablets.

From Microsoft's point of view, Asus might be the best possible partner for such a product thanks to their preference for selling tablets with keyboard and trackpad equipped docking stations. Arguably that's the best way to show of Windows 8's capabilities.

Apple has announced the iPhone 4S will be launched in South Korea and several other markets on November 11. Pre-orders in those countries will start a week earlier on November 4.

The other countries where the iPhone will be released on that date include Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, El Salvador, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Malta, Montenegro, New Zealand, Panama, Poland, Portugal, and Romania.

South Korea is home to Samsung, a company engaged in patent battles with Apple around the world. In September a report from the Korea Times suggested Samsung would attempt to have the iPhone 4S banned in that country.

To date that doesn't appear to have happened, although it's possible they were waiting for Apple to announce a release date first. Don't be surprised if a lawsuit is filed in the next few days.

Samsung has already filed lawsuits asking for a ban of the iPhone 4S in various European countries, as well as Australia and Japan.

Samsung is once again going on the offensive in their Australian patent battle with Apple.

They are asking a judge to order Apple to hand over source code for the iPhone 4S firmware so they can examine it for violations of Samsung patents. Samsung has previously claimed Apple is being deceptive about identifying some of the hardware used in the iPhone.

The move, reported by Australia's Smart Office, is part of their effort to get the new iPhone banned in Australia. In part, their request may be motivated by recognition of the weakness of charges Apple is violating 3G patents.

As courts in Europe have already pointed out, even if Apple is violating Samsung patents for 3G technology, those patents are subject to FRAND licensing rules. FRAND, or Fair, Reasonable, And Non Discriminatory rules are applied to technology required for implementing industry standards from various organizations.

Those rules require that Samsung offer Apple reasonable license terms for their 3G-related patents.

Next week the first 2 4G (LTE) smartphones from AT&T will go on sale.

On Sunday, November 6 AT&T stores will begin selling the HTC Vivid and Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket, both of which feature both HSPA+ and LTE support.

Existing AT&T customers may be confused by the new options since AT&T has been selling phones advertised as having 4G capabilities for several months. That's because there are multiple standards marketed as 4G.

HSPA+ is an extension of 3G standards which was AT&T's original choice for 4G service due to the relatively low upgrade costs. An aggressive advertising campaign from Verizon touting the advantages of their LTE, or Long Term Evolution, 4G network forced AT&T to rethink those plans.

Their first LTE markets went live in September. Unless you are in one of the handful of areas where AT&T has already upgraded their network to add LTE capability, there is no advantage to buying one of these new phones right now.

Currently those markets include Washington DC, Baltimore, Boston, and Chicago, plus 2 Georgia markets (Atlanta & Athens), 3 more markets in Texas (Houston, San Antonio, & Dallas-Fort Worth).

Despite being such new technology, the iPad is already gaining a foothold in US schools according to research from Piper Jaffray.

Researchers spoke with technology officials at 25 schools, all of whom indicated iPads were being used in their schools. Android, on the other hand, wasn't represented in this sample at all.

According to AppleInsider, analyst Gene Munster detailed the results at a conference on the integration of technology in the classroom:

While this may be expected due to limited availability of Android tablets early in the tablet cycle, we also see it as evidence of Apple's first mover advantage. We also see a trend in education (which is mirrored in the enterprise) that familiarity with Apple devices among students (or employees) is causing a demand pull within institutions to also provide Apple devices.

Education is arguably one of the most important markets for tablet makers to target. The needs of both students and teachers are unusually well aligned with the capabilities of tablets.

At the same time, it gives tablet makers a unique chance to capture the attention of potential future customers. A smart tablet vendor would factor that into their long term plans.

HP and Best Buy will be running a promotion to liquidate the remaining stock of 32GB TouchPads. They will be offered for $149.99 exclusively to customers who buy a HP or Compaq desktop or laptop computer.

After being discontinued in August and subsequently selling out at bargain basement prices, HP produced one last batch of TouchPads to fulfill supplier contracts. Some of them were offered to HP employees, while others were used to fulfill backorders.

Rather than simply taking a loss on the rest, HP has decided to use them to help drive PC sales.

Although the TouchPad comes with WebOS installed, thanks to the work of CyanogenMod developers, there should soon be a fully functional Android ROM available for it.

Barnes & Noble is expected to unveil the successor to their Nook Color a week from today, on November 7.

The Nook Color is an Android-based tablet marketed primarily as an eReader. Introduced in October of last year, it became the most popular eReader in the world in the first quarter of this year.

According to Business Week, Barnes & Noble has sent out invitations to a media event next Monday.

While the invitation is short on details, sources inside Barnes & Noble previously told The Digital Reader about a major revamp of their stores intended to showcase more than the current 2 Nook models currently available.

The success of the Nook Color was one of the biggest reasons Amazon decided to enter the tablet market with their Kindle Fire and start taking pre-orders more than a month before it was available.

Earlier today Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced plans to transform his company's Ubuntu Linux distribution into a universal platform capable of running on any type of device, including tablets and smartphones.

Shuttleworth made the announcement during his keynote address at the Ubuntu Developer's Summit in Florida.

In a blog post afterward, he wrote:

By 14.04 LTS Ubuntu will power tablets, phones, TVs and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server and the cloud.

Unity, the desktop interface in today?s Ubuntu 11.10, was designed with this specific vision in mind. While the interface for each form factor is shaped appropriately, Unity?s core elements are arranged in exactly the way we need to create coherence across all of those devices. This was the origin of the name Unity ? a single core interface framework, that scales across all screens, and supports all toolkits.

Although it has long been popular for applications like web and database servers, Linux has never caught on as a mainstream desktop OS for the average consumer. With the rise of the smartphone market, Linux is finally coming into its own.

Tomorrow Sony is expected to announce a plan to split their TV business into 3 separate divisions.

Sony has been under fire for their TV division's losses. Despite losing money for 8 straight years, Sony executives have insisted, as recently as August, they will not exit the TV business.

According to Reuters, their plan to split the business into 3 divisions will be announced tomorrow. Company spokeswoman Ayano Iguchi told them the goal is to, "make clearer the mission" of each.

The divisions will be LCD TVs, next-generation TVs, and outsourcing. Despite Sony's claim to the contrary, this seems like it might be a precursor to selling portions of their TV business.

They may already be planning to sell Samsung their stake in the joint TV manufacturing venture between the 2 companies, a move they have been trying hard to avoid.

Disney's ABC Television Group is increasing their presence in the US subscription streaming market via new deals with Netflix and Amazon.

The Netflix deal extends an existing agreement which gives Watch Instantly subscribers access to completed TV series like Lost and previous seasons of ongoing series like Desparate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy. Amazon's deal will match that for Amazon Prime customers.

Where the Netflix deal distinguishes itself is adding access to ABC TV shows just 30 days after they first air.

The Amazon deal, in particular, seems to indicate serious competition for Netflix streaming may be on the horizon. Amazon is one of several companies looking to take advantage of Netflix's weakened position after their recent price increase.

Amazon still has a lot of catching up to do if they want to be a serious competitor for Netflix. In particular, Netflix has a significant lead in streaming clients for smart TVs, Blu-ray players, and game consoles.

Gazelle, a site to trade-in your electronics for cash with free shipping, has said this week that BlackBerry trade-ins are at all-time highs, even jumping as high as 80 percent the week the iPhone 4S was released.

To a much lesser degree, Android and iPhone 3GS, 4 trade-ins saw spikes, as well.

Additionally, RIM's recent network issues, in which users lost emails and instant messages for almost 48 hours, helped cause the mass exodus from the struggling smartphone maker.

For an example of what Gazelle does, you head to the site, input the product you are looking to trade-in, post if there are any functional or cosmetic issues and then the site gives you a buy back price. If you accept the price, you send in the device with a provided label and are credited the money.

Older BlackBerrys like the Bold 9000 trade-in for under $40 while the new Bold 9900 can net you back $300.

China-based mobile phone maker ZTE has passed Apple to jump into fourth place.

ZTE shipped 18 million mobile phones in the Q3, just ahead of Apple's 17.1 million, says Strategy Analytics.

Despite seeing negative growth, Nokia remained the top vendor at 106.6 million.

Samsung came in second at 88 million, thanks to strong smartphone growth.

LG managed to hold to third despite a huge decline to 21.1 million handsets shipped.

Says the research firm:

Despite ongoing economic volatility, global handset shipments grew a relatively healthy 14 percent annually to reach 390 million units in Q3 2011. ZTE was the star performer as it captured 5 percent market share and overtook Apple to become the world?s fourth largest handset vendor. ZTE?s growth is being driven by competitive pricing of entry-level models for feature phones and Android smartphones.