THE WRAP: Another Nokia warning, AT&T wields the axe

This week Nokia cut its outlook and AT&T cut staff.

In its second profit warning in three weeks, Nokia said it could not confirm its Q4 target. It expects handset shipments and mobile network sales to fall by at least 5% next year.

AT&T said it would cut 4% of its workforce, or 12,000 staff, citing economic pressures and "a changing business mix". It set aside $600 million for redundancy charges.

AMD expects a 25% fall in Q4 revenue because of weak demand. Previously it had forecast sales would be flat.

RIM lowered its profit forecast by 9% as a result of the slump and currency fluctuations.

Smartphone sales grew 11.5% in Q3, its weakest period of growth since market tracking began, said Gartner. Despite that, Microsoft will launch its own handset in early 2009, a tech analyst predicted.

Australian electronics Kogan will release the world's second Android phone in January. Nokia unveiled its iPhone challenger, the N97, with a touchscreen and map-based social networking.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said he planned to use the EU presidency next year to "regulate the internet".

Nortel and Hitachi won a contract to overlay KDDI's cdma2000 network with LTE.

SingTel and Chunghwa Telecom contracted Mitsubishi to build a new $131 million satellite to cover east Asia and the Middle East. Chinese engineers raced to salvage a $437 million satellite built for Venezuela and due to go into service in January.

Chinese telecom vendor stocks soared on reports that the mainland government is about to issue 3G licenses.

Yahoo's stock spiked on a Wall Street Journal report that former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller planned to raise $30 billion to buy the internet firm.

The FBI warned that escalating theft of copper wire threatened the US national infrastructure. The White House rejected a plan to require all US mobile base stations to be equipped with eight hours of backup power.

The iPhone app store hosted its 10,000th app. Logitech made its 1 billionth PC mouse. US-based MobiTV boosted its mobile TV subs from 4 million to 5 million in just four months.

Handset-maker HTC bought San Francisco design firm One & Co. Microsoft will release the first beta version of Windows 7 on January 13. YouTube cracked down on sexually explicit content.

The newest top-level domain - .tel, which is designed to serve as a repository for contact data - opened for business.

VC firm Ferrata Capital kicked $1 million into Total Prestige, a social networking site for the super-rich.

And a surgeon in the Democratic Republic of Congo amputated a boy's arm using instructions sent by text.