Google announced this week that carrier billing in the Android Market is now available to AT&T customers. This means that Android users can charge their app purchases to an AT&T subscriber account and have the cost added to their monthly network bill rather than using a credit card.

Google initially launched carrier billing with T-Mobile last year. AT&T is the second US carrier to participate in the program. Google hopes that carrier billing will lower the barrier of complexity for Android Market transactions, thus simplifying app purchases for some users.

One thing about Gran Turismo 5 is clear: you'll want a wheel. Sure, you can play it with the Sixaxis controller if you want, but you really need a wheel to get the full experience. The PS3 platform has quite a lot of these already available; unlike Microsoft's Xbox 360, USB wheels that work with PC games will work, and Logitech has an array of offerings at different price points. Logitech also used to have the official GT franchise, but that's history now. Now things have gone way upmarket with Thrustmaster's new T 500 RS, a hefty-looking thing with an equally hefty price tag.

Coming in at $599, the wheel itself weighs more than 10 lbs, and Thrustmaster claims the motor is twice the power of its rivals. Like other leading wheels (Fanatec's new GT2, the Logitech G27), it's belt driven. The flappy paddles are large, although it's unclear from the promo shots whether or not they're attached to (and therefore rotate with) the wheel or not. The T 500 RS offers gamers 1080° of steering lock, with the ability to tailor this; that's a good thing and hopefully easy to do on the fly (like it is with the Fanatec), because the first thing you notice about real racing cars is they don't have three turns lock to lock! I'd like to be able to tell you if it's wireless, but those details weren't in the announcement.

The pedals are an even more massive affair, weighing 16 lbs. They claim to be fully adjustable, and can be set up like your road car (hinging from above) or like a VW Beetle, Porsche 911, or F1 car (hinged at the bottom). The Thrustmaster PR mentions technology I don't pretend to understand, like "magnetic sensor-based H.E.A.R.T HallEffect AccuRate Technology™," but nothing about what kind mechanism the pedals use as pressure sensors. For the money you'd hope something similar to Fanatec's Clubsport set.

The money. Yes, might as well come out and say it: $599 is a lot of cash for a console peripheral, and again there's no indication whether you'll be able to use the wheel with a PC or an Xbox 360. The former is probable, the latter much more unlikely. There's also no stick shift yet—that will likely come later and presumably cost more money.

I've obviously not set hands on a T 500 RS so I can't tell you if it's any good or not. The same money will definitely buy you Fanatec's new GT2, Clubsport pedals, a gear shifter, and their wheel stand, and that will work across platforms. However, I've found my Fanatec is quite buggy when used with the PS3, even on the latest firmware (still works flawlessly with the Xbox 360). The T 500 RS was designed specifically for GT5, and the game has tuning options coded in, giving it a level of official support that neither the G27 or Fanatec can access. If GT5 is your game of choice and you have the means, the T 500 RS might be your first port of call.

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Motorola has published a teaser video for a tablet product that will be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next year. Although the video offers virtually no details about the planned device, it lends credibility to some of the recent rumors surrounding Motorola's Android tablet roadmap.

The company is said to be working on a tablet that runs Android 3.0, codenamed Honeycomb, which is the next major version of Google's mobile operating system. Honeycomb is expected to bring substantial user interface improvements that will boost Android's suitability for adoption on devices with a tablet form-factor.

Ever since former Microsoft business division head Stephen Elop became Nokia's CEO, we have seen a steady flow of rumors and speculation surrounding the possibility of the Finnish phone giant producing a handset with Microsoft's new mobile operating system. Such rumors got a big boost this week when legendary Nokia stalker Eldar Murtazin claimed that the two companies are engaged in ongoing discussions about hardware collaboration.

Murtazin, a Russian blogger who writes for the site Mobile Review, has a generally excellent track record on Nokia leaks and is often the first to reveal new handsets produced by the company. Although the whimsical notion of a Nokia Windows phone is a compelling thought experiment, such a product is highly unlikely to materialize. If Nokia is teaming up with Microsoft on hardware, we doubt that it's a smartphone—it's more likely to be something a lot more mundane, like a possible successor to Nokia's Windows-based Booklet 3G netbook.

With two months gone since Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7, the company has finally started to address the big question about the new smartphone platform: how well is it selling? In an interview with Microsoft vice president of business and marketing for Windows Phones Achim Berg published in a press release earlier today, Microsoft claimed that phone manufacturers had sold more than 1.5 million Windows Phone 7 handsets.

Though that's not quite the answer that people want—what we really want to know is how many handsets have made it into users' hands, not been sold to the cellular networks—it's still a strong indicator that phone networks and OEMs alike are supporting Windows Phone 7 in a big way. Even if half those phones are sitting in storerooms or on shelves, that's still three-quarters of a million phones sold to actual customers, and for a brand new platform, that's not a bad record at all. Given the difference in sales models between iPhone, Android, and Windows Phone 7, exact comparisons are always a bit hard to make, but by means of comparison, Apple took 74 days to sell its first million iPhones, and T-Mobile in the US took about six months to sell one million Android-powered G1s.

While there are still some questions about the strength of the operating system's launch, it's becoming clear that the Windows Phone 7 application store, Marketplace, has gotten off to a very strong start indeed. In the two months since opening, the Marketplace now boasts in excess of 4,000 applications. It took five months for Android's Market to reach 2,300 applications, and fifteen months for webOS's App Catalog to hit 4,000 applications. Even the iPhone App Store, which had the advantage of being launched a full year after the iPhone, didn't grow this quickly; two months after its release, it had fewer than 4,000 applications available.

At just two months old, it's still early in Windows Phone 7's life—and as Berg acknowledged in his interview, Microsoft is in the smartphone race "for the long run." It will be months or years before Windows Phone 7's success can truly be ascertained, but it looks like it has hit the ground running.

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TiVo's Premiere-series DVRs offer access to Netflix's Watch Instantly streaming service, and the company has announced that Hulu Plus support is coming soon. But if you get your TiVo Premiere from your cable company, you won't be able to access either service. Rightsholders are using licensing terms to prevent these services from directly competing with paid video-on-demand from your cable provider.

Both Netflix and Hulu have confirmed to GigaOM that the contracts in place with content providers specifically forbid offering subscription service to DVRs that are leased to customers through cable companies. Such subscription services would compete directly with TV providers' VOD services which charge as much as $3 per TV episode and $10 for a movie.

This kind of access blocking isn't new, either. Movie studios have gotten Netflix to agree to a 28-day window for access to new releases in exchange for better access to back-catalog content for its streaming service. The 28-day window is intended to help prop up dwindling DVD sales as customers continue to transition to on-demand streaming video services. It seems content providers are happy to license content to Netflix or Hulu as long as they can keep it from supplanting existing revenue sources and can find ways to try to charge multiple times for the same content.

Needless to say, customers expecting access to these services are likely to be displeased, since TiVo boasts about the features for its identical retail devices. But TiVO could be in trouble as well—the company has been hoping that deals with cable companies could help boost its dwindling user base. If the Premiere DVRs from cable companies have significant features missing, customers may opt for other options.

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In a statement on the official Android developer blog, Google security engineer Nick Kralevich highlighted the relative openness of Google's new Nexus S smartphone, confirming that it provides a simple and easy way to unlock the bootloader for the purpose of installing third-party fimrware—much like its predecessor, the Nexus One.

More significantly, he contends that it is possible for Android to meet the security requirements of the mobile carriers without necessitating the kind of enthusiast-unfriendly lockdown mechanisms that are common on handsets that are sold at subsidized prices with contracts.

Apple announced Tuesday that the second-generation Apple TV—introduced in September—will cross the 1 million units sold threshold this week. This may signal that Apple is finally ready to stop calling the device a hobby and start taking it more seriously.

The significance of the announcement shouldn't be underestimated. Apple has never revealed unit sales of the original Apple TV in its quarterly financial results, and in fact would not reveal the total number sold when we asked on Tuesday. It is believed that the first-generation Apple TV never met Apple's internal goals, and therefore the company continually referred to the product as a "hobby."

The second-generation Apple TV was radically different from the first, in hardware, software, and industrial design. The original was based on a low-end Intel processor and an NVIDIA graphics chip, ran a variant of Mac OS X, and looked like a squished Mac mini. The second-gen device is based on Apple's A4 processor, and hardware-wise is not unlike an iPod touch. It also runs iOS, with a version of the Apple TV interface running on top of that. And the device is hardly larger than a deck of UNO cards, clad in polished black polycarbonate. The look is more A/V and less computer.

Apple also introduced new TV show rentals and Netflix compatibility with the new Apple TV. And while the potential for the device to run device-specific applications using iOS development tools may have fueled greater interest among consumers, the $99 price point was likely the biggest factor in its increased sales.

It's impressive that it only took three months for the Apple TV 2.0 to outsell the original Apple TV, which was on the market for three years. Unless Apple opens up the device to app developers and adds more sources of content, however, it may be unable to weather the increasing competition in the set-top box market.

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