To a man with an iHammer, everything looks like an iNail, as the Informer’s great friend Mark Twain once said. And just to prove the old man right, the powers-that-be at Cupertino are suing Samsung, HTC, Mother Theresa, Adam and Eve and growers of mostly green, rather tasty pieces of fruit for infringing on its intellectual property. Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter, who wouldn’t have been able to attend legal proceedings in person as she couldn’t get the time off from kindergarten, settled out of court.

The pending deal between AT&T and T-Mobile USA is symptomatic of growing market maturity in the US but will be better for the American telco than it will for Deutsche Telekom, according to Ovum analyst Steven Hartley.

Years of speculation regarding T-Mobile USA’s future ended yesterday with the surprise announcement that AT&T is to buy the embattled telco for $39bn. Rumours regarding the possible sale of T-Mobile USA have been circulating for years but almost always worked on the assumption that the telco would unite with a smaller operator, such as Sprint or, more recently, Clearwire.

US vendor Qualcomm has given the strongest indication yet that it is set to call time on its Flo TV mobile TV service. The firm has announced that it is to suspend direct to consumer sales of service and devices immediately, and has committed to maintaining service for existing D2C customers only until spring 2011. The firm said that it would offer refunds to users “in the event of a discontinuance of service”, suggesting that this is the probable outcome, and conceded that it was expecting to have to make “some layoffs”.