AT&T announced on Wednesday that it has rejiggered its smartphone and tablet data plans, with changes going into effect beginning Sunday, January 22. The bad news is that prices are going up, but at least AT&T is giving users more data allowance to take off some of the sting.

Previous smartphone plans included a $15 DataPlus tier that included just 200MB of data usage per month, and a $25 DataPro tier that included 2GB of data. DataPlus users that went over 200MB would get charged another $15 for an additional 200MB allotment, while DataPro users would get an additional 1GB for $10.

Eastman Kodak, after 120 years in business, filed for bankruptcy today. It may not be surprising, given the way today's digital technologies are making photographic film a relic. But Kodak says it has a plan to rebuild, based heavily both on its own patent portfolio and its own digital technologies.

Kodak has sued the likes of Apple, HTC, Research In Motion, and Samsung, mainly over the use of how smartphones use and send digital images. The patent portfolio is a big part of Kodak's plans to "complete its transformation," as the company said in a statement today.

“Chapter 11 gives us the best opportunities to maximize the value in two critical parts of our technology portfolio: our digital capture patents, which are essential for a wide range of mobile and other consumer electronic devices that capture digital images and have generated over $3 billion of licensing revenues since 2003," Kodak CEO Antonio Perez said in a statement. He also touted Kodak's "pioneering investments in digital and materials deposition technologies," which account for 75 percent of the company's digital revenue.

Since 2003, Kodak has closed 13 manufacturing plants and 130 processing labs, and reduced its workforce by 47,000 people. But the company is obtaining $950 million in credit from Citigroup and said it will be able to continue to pay employee wages and benefits, and continue customer programs during bankruptcy. Kodak said it hopes to emerge from bankruptcy as a "lean, world-class, digital imaging and materials science company.”

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The blackout movement to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act that began with reddit and Wikipedia has spread to many major sites across the Internet, many of which are important examples of Web entities that could be shut down without due process by SOPA-like legislation. Below are some of our favorites.

Research in Motion may be getting shopped around to other tech companies including Samsung or looking to license its OS, according to recent reports. Citing its "trusted sources," Boy Genius Report says that RIM may be looking to sell either some of its divisions or the whole company, though it may be overvaluing what it has to offer.

RIM has had its share of difficulties over the last few years, from price reductions on its PlayBook tablet and delays for its BlackBerry 10 operating system to a service outage and plummeting smartphone market share. Now Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM, is apparently shopping RIM to companies that may interested in purchasing RIM for some of its still-strong features.

According to BGR, one of RIM's selling points is its BlackBerry Messenger system, something that might help a company like HTC or Samsung in differentiating themselves from other Android smartphone manufacturers. RIM's enterprise services are another potentially salable part of the company.

But RIM may not be preparing to sell the company in full: on January 4, Barron's quoted an analyst from Jefferies and Co. as saying that RIM had agreed to license its BlackBerry OS to "Samsung, HTC, and possibly others."

Whether the company is trying to sell or prop itself up via licensing, it's reportedly attaching a a big price tag. According to BGR, RIM wants over $10 billion, and likely as much as $12 billion to $15 billion, for a full sale.

RIM did not respond immediately to requests for comment, and Samsung tells Ars it "does not have information to share at this time."

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Long-time Mac peripheral and accessory maker Other World Computing made a number of new product announcements throughout the last week at CES. Ars spoke to company representatives on the show floor about several new products, including SSDs for the MacBook Air, a new enterprise class 2.5" SSD drive, as well as new enterprise storage products using Mini-SAS (Serial Attached SCSI).

We were also able to sneak a peek at an unannounced PCI Express-based modular SSD for Mac Pros (as well as Windows PCs), and a look at updated Newer Technology miniStacks designed for the latest Mac mini models.

A pretrial order issued earlier this month indicated that Oracle's lawsuit against Google would likely head to a jury trial in March. In a new filing, Judge William Alsup decided to delay the trial until Oracle can propose a reasonable methodology for measuring the damages.

The bitter intellectual property dispute relates to Google's Android mobile operating system. Oracle claims that the patents it holds on the Java programming language and related technologies are infringed by Android's custom Java runtime environment and compiler.

Android is also under siege from rival smartphone vendors that have issued their own patent claims against the operating system. Google has spent a considerable amount of money over the past year assembling a formidable defensive patent portfolio that will help insulate its mobile operating system from patent litigation.

One of the most contentious issues that has arisen in Oracle's litigation against Google is the methodology for computing damages. Judge Alsup has been vocal about his dissatisfaction with the proposals issued by both parties in the dispute. In the latest order, he complains that Oracle has twice "advanced improper methodologies obviously calculated to reach stratospheric numbers."

Judge Alsup believes that the trial will take approximately two months when it finally occurs.

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Lenovo trotted out a slew of new computers and computer-like items at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, including two ultrabooks and a tablet with keyboard dock. One of the ultrabooks, the IdeaPad Yoga, has a display that can fold all the way back into a tablet-like form factor.

IdeaPad Yoga

The Yoga wasn’t so much announced as teased at the beginning of CES, with a set of photos showing it bent into poses like downward dog. During our meeting with Lenovo, many more details emerged—the notebook has a 1600x900 13.3-inch screen, weight 3.1 pounds, is 0.67 inches thick, and will have a Core i7 processor.

At CES, Sculpteo, a French company specializing in additive manufacturing—otherwise known as 3D printing—was showing off a new smartphone app that allows the uninitiated to create personalized, usable ceramic objects from a photo. The firm was also demonstrating a new "cloud engine" that allows designers and small businesses to create customized products they can sell through their own websites—basically aiming to become the Etsy of the 3D printing world.

The app side of Sculpteo's pitch is fairly gimmicky: snap a photo of someone in profile with an iPhone or Android device, and the app will recognize the profile. Then it exports data derived from the image so that the user can create a custom object based on it, derived from prebuilt designs. Those include a coffee cup with the profile in relief and a vase made from a rotational volume of the profile.