Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to the BlackBerry Porsche P'9981 - the ugliest BlackBerry I've seen in years. Unveiled at RIM and Porsche Design's Dubai event, the new BlackBerry Porsche is clad in equal parts stainless steel and leather. While the device's shell has gotten quite the facelift, the internals aren't a far cry from the standard: it sports a 1GHz processor, a 5-megapixel camera with 720p HD video, and an NFC chip.

 THIS IS SO ODD?! Facebook says it will soon allow you to get help from your friends when you get locked out of your Facebook account. According to a post on Facebook's official Security page, you'll be able to designate three to five friends as "Trusted Friends" who will be sent special codes in the event that you're locked out of your Facebook account and unable to access your email.

After churning out a parade of sequels to all of their flagship games, has EA finally learned its lesson? Last month, EA CEO John Riccitiello said that his company is taking dead aim at Zynga, implying that perhaps the company understands what's at stake, and is determined to be just as much of a player in digital games as it has been on consoles.

It hits you when you least expect it. It slips away under a mask of dormant inactivity. And it can ruin your entire day. It's your iPhone 4S battery life, and it sucks. It's been 17 days since the iPhone 4S was released - 19 since iOS 5 - and just like the madness that was Antennagate, complaints are churning out left and right. As Erick so clearly pointed out, the iPhone 4S is meant to offer 8 hours of talk time, or "up to 6 hours" of Internet use on 3G. For so many of us - including iPod touch and iPhone-not-4Ses running iOS 5 - that simply isn't the case. But there may be hope.

Battlefield 3, a new first-person shooter video game from EA and DICE, has hit the ground running with great sales numbers and a slew of online problems. The game, released Oct. 25, was hit with serious problems in its first weekend, Kotaku reports. Gamers were blocked from going online and joining multiplayer games. Other players were booted mid-game thanks to widespread server issues. These faults haven't stopped Battlefield 3 from shipping more than 10 million copies of the game, according to EA, with more than 2.2 million players logging in to play online

We've seen many expensive gadget makeovers, but this one probably takes the cake for being over the top: An iPad 2 dressed in gold, diamonds and bones of a 65-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex.

News from the never-ending patent war between Apple and Samsung: the Wall Street Journal is reporting today that Samsung filed for preliminary injunctions in the Tokyo District Court and in the New South Wales Registry, Australia. This time, the goal is to block sales of the iPhone 4S, which launched in both countries last Friday.

Over the weekend, Nokia launched a suite of casual games developed at Nokia Research Center which are meant to demonstrate how NFC can enable new forms of mobile gaming. The three new games include Nokia World Flags, Nokia Shakespeare Shuffle and Nokia Nursery Rhyme Shuffle. All can be played now on any Nokia Symbian NFC-enabled phone including the Nokia C7 Astound, C7-00, 600, 603, 700 and 701.

Following the September launch of Twitter ads in the U.K., Twitter is now bringing its advertising products known as "Promoted Tweets," "Promoted Trends" and "Promoted Accounts" to its Japanese version of the service Twitter.jp. According to a post on the official Twitter Japan blog, the rollout began earlier this month.

Late Friday evening, I tweeted out that, for some reason unbeknownst to me, Google's Web History tracking "feature" (the one that keeps tabs on every search you've made for sake of tailoring ads to your tastes and/or creeping you out) had seemingly been enabled on my account. This wouldn't be too strange in most cases - as an opt-out service, Web History is enabled for everyone by default. The problem? I'd manually disabled it years ago.

Soon you, too, will be able to talk to the hand. A new interface created jointly by Microsoft and the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute allows for interfaces to be displayed on any surface, including notebooks, body parts, and tables. The UI is completely multitouch and the "shoulder-worn" system will locate the surface you're working on in 3D space, ensuring the UI is always accessible. It uses a picoprojector and a 3D scanner similar to the Kinect.

Well it would seem that NTT DoCoMo, one of the largest wireless carriers in Japan, has let slip the Samsung Galaxy Nexus announcement just a couple hours early. According to a tweet, "the latest Android OS smartphone with Google and Samsung Electronics [will be] announced on October 19 in Hong Kong tomorrow. DoCoMo is almost equivalent to the fastest in the world, scheduled for release in November. More later." (Anyone who's fluent in Japanese, please feel free to add clarity that Google Translate can't.)

Car sharing network company Zipcar this morning announced the release of a Facebook application that allows its members to 'reserve their wheels' on the popular social networking site without having to leave it.

Kodak, let us admit, is doomed. Founded over a century ago, it has dominated film for as long as film has existed, but now that film is on the verge of ceasing to exist, they have very little to dominate. They're short on cash and while they deny plans to file for bankruptcy, many question whether they will have the luxury of choice a few years from now.

Apple just announced that it sold four million iPhone 4S handsets over the last weekend. The phone hit stores on October 14th and it took just three days to move the massive lot. Incredible.

You know that scene in CSI and its ilk where the detective says, "Can you enhance the image?" and some faceless tech hits a few keys and suddenly the license plate is clear and readable? Nerds have been mocking those scenes for decades, but it might be time to stop.

Facebook has filed for a trademark on the usage of "Facebook" on business cards and, more curiously, "non-magnetically encoded" ID cards among other things. If granted the trademark would protect using the word Facebook in the specified formats, not any actual invention.

We already know that YouTube is seeing 3 billion videos viewed per day day, but now the online video giant is now seeing a whopping 800 million people per month visiting the site, Google revealed in its third-quarter earnings report last week. And today, YouTube is also announcing the ability to sell merchandise, tickets and more via the site.

Research In Motion is on a quest for goodwill after last week's massive outage that left BlackBerry users without service for three days. The company just took to the wires and announced that over a $100 worth of premium apps will eventually be free for a limited time and enterprise users will also net one month of free technical support. RIM hopes SIM 3, Bejeweled, N.O.V.A. and many more will help calm the nerves those BlackBerry users thinking of jumping ship.

Microsoft this morning announced that it has closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, a deal that was originally announced back in May. They even made an infographic to showcase the importance of the deal completion. /sarcasm Other than that, not much news to report. As previously announced, Skype becomes a new business division within Microsoft, and Skype CEO Tony Bates will assume the title of president of the new unit.