The company says, according to documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission, that Verizon would receive an “excessive concentration” of wireless spectrum in the deal.

T-Mobile is not too pleased with a plan Verizon Wireless has hatched to acquire nearly $4 billion in wireless spectrum.

According to the Washington Post, which obtained the documents, T-Mobile lodged a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) yesterday, urging the government agency to block the sale of wireless spectrum from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks–collectively known as SpectrumCo.–to Verizon.

According to the Post, T-Mobile believes the sale could provide Verizon with an “excessive concentration” of wireless spectrum.

Verizon announced plans to acquire the so-called Advance Wireless Services (AWS) spectrum in December. If the deal is approved, Verizon will have the option to sell cable service in its stores, and the cable companies involved in the sale will be able to access its wireless network on a wholesale basis. The deal is a boon for Verizon, as the gold rush for precious spectrum heats up.

“Spectrum is the raw material on which wireless networks are built, and buying the AWS spectrum now solidifies our network leadership into the future, and will enable us to bring even better 4G LTE products and services to our customers,” Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead said in a statement at the time.

Despite T-Mobile’s reservations, Sprint isn’t so quick to jump on the bandwagon. The carrier didn’t ask the FCC to block the deal, but it did request that the government agency take a deep dive into the particulars of the agreement to ensure it won’t hurt competition across the wireless space.

Sprint’s tempered response is no surprise, considering the company has somewhat strong ties with cable companies. Years ago, for example, cable companies and Sprint formed an ill-fated joint venture called Pivot designed to get the cable providers into the wireless business. To attempt to block the deal could have a negative impact on Sprint’s relations with those firms.

If Verizon can gain FCC approval for the spectrum purchase, it could achieve something its chief competitor, AT&T, wasn’t able to do last year in its $39 billion bid for T-Mobile USA. Federal regulators argued that the acquisition would have hurt wireless competition. After a brief court battle, AT&T decided to abandon plans to acquire T-Mobile USA. If the deal had been approved, AT&T would have acquired a boatload of spectrum and significantly improved its 4G LTE rollout across the country.

If all goes well, Verizon and SpectrumCo. hope to complete the acquisition by the middle of this year.

A new lawsuit against Apple says its visual voice mail feature is infringing on someone else’s patents. Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.

The voice mail system on Apple’s
iPhone has once again become the target of a lawsuit from a company claiming infringement on one or more software patents.

A new lawsuit filed yesterday against Apple by Pennsylvania-based Brandywine Communications Technologies in a U.S. District Court in Florida accuses Apple of infringing on two of its patents covering voice technologies.

The filing, picked up by GigaOm today, says Apple’s infringing on U.S. Patent No. 5,719,992 as well as U.S. Patent No. 6,236,717, both of which cover a “simultaneous voice/data answering machine.” Brandywine claims Apple had knowledge of the former patent since “at least December 13, 2011,” which is when the group sent Apple a letter about it.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the suit.

The patent itself says it “coordinates the storage of voice messages and data messages on an audio answering machine and a personal computer, respectively.” In the abstract, the inventors make the case that this lets people retrieve their messages like they would an e-mail.

The suit covers the first through fourth-generation iPhones, and does not mention the
iPhone 4S, despite being filed some four months after its introduction and release. Curiously, the suit also lists those devices as the “iPhone 4, iPhone 3, iPhone 2″ and “iPhone 1,” despite Apple having only used an enumeration scheme in its fourth generation model. Also curious is the inclusion of the
iPad 1 and 2, which do not have phone applications, and thus voice mail software.

This is not the first time Apple’s voice mail software has been targeted in a lawsuit. In December 2007, just a few months after the release of the first iPhone, Apple and AT&T were sued by Klausner Technologies, which said that Apple was infringing on a patent it held for visual voice mail–a feature that was exclusive to the iPhone at the time. By mid-2008 the Apple, AT&T, and Klausner Technologies reached a settlement for an undisclosed sum.

Brandywine is seeking damages as part of the case, but not an injunction (a ban on sales of infringing devices) as some other recent patent cases have requested.

The draft of the federal budget for 2013 takes an ax to the rival Global Hawk program. An Air Force general says the U-2, a design that dates to the 1950s, is “the stronger system.”

Score one for old-school aircraft against the upstart drones.

Perhaps it’s just a brief respite from the seemingly inevitable winds of change propelling unmanned aircraft ever higher in the Pentagon’s airpower depth charts, but the venerable U-2 spy plane has won a key vote of confidence over the unmanned RQ-4 Global Hawk. That victory came not in a head-to-head aerial dogfight, but in a more bureaucratic conveyance: the draft of the federal budget for the U.S. government’s fiscal 2013.

“The Administration proposes to end production of the Global Hawk unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicle,” says the budget proposal (PDF), released last week. “High altitude reconnaissance operations will continue with the manned U-2 aircraft which can perform the same missions as the Global Hawk, but at a lower cost.”

The Global Hawk line item drops from $342 million in the current fiscal year to zero for the coming year. The Air Force’s fleet of 30-plus U-2 aircraft, meanwhile, are already pretty much bought and paid for. The last delivery of a U-2 to the Air Force from manufacturer Lockheed Martin was in 1989.

The Air Force didn’t mince words about the selection. “The U-2 is a stronger system, so we’re going to go with the stronger system,” Maj. Gen. Edward L. Bolton Jr., deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for budget, said in a Pentagon news briefing last week. The base budget for the Air Force in the 2013 proposal stands at $154.3 billion, down from $162.5 billion this year.

That’s not how it was supposed to play out. The Air Force had been looking to retire the U-2 last year. And its plans had called for continued expansion of Global Hawk ranks. (Remember, too, that a budget draft isn’t the actual budget. Global Hawk maker Northrop Grumman may yet find support enough in Congress to reinstate some funding.)

It says a lot about issues of cost and complexity that a hot new technology is taking a back seat to a design that’s been around since the mid-1950s. The slender U-2 has been upgraded over time with a newer engine, fiber optics, a longer wingspan, and the digital conveniences of the glass cockpit, but it’s still essentially the same recon and surveillance aircraft that the U.S. used to good effect in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a couple of years after the unwelcome publicity of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 being shot down by the Soviet Union.

The U-2, also known as the Dragon Lady, is in good company when it comes to codgers. The B-52 and the C-130 have also been in service for more than a half-century.

The new devices could appear later this year, with hybrid disk drives helping keep costs low, according to a report.

Lower-end ultrabooks equipped with hybrid disk drives could hit price points as low as $600, according to an Asia-based report.

Because hybrid HDDs–which combine a small-capacity solid-state drive with a standard hard disk drive–cost about 50 percent less than solid-state-only drives, PC makers will opt for hybrid drives in lower-end models, according to a report Wednesday in DigiTimes. This will drive prices below $700.

Ultrabooks–skinny
Windows 7 laptops that mimic the portability of
tablets–currently bottom out at about $800. That includes the Toshiba Portege Z835, now priced as low as $799.99 at retail. The Z835 uses a 128GB SSD, not a hybrid drive.

Future ultrabooks equipped with hybrid HDDs will fall to between $600 and $700 in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to DigiTimes, citing sources.

Those same sources claim that Intel will cut prices on its next-generation Ivy Bridge chip by up to 70 percent.

Intel doesn’t see it that way, however. While the chipmaker does not discuss pricing of its products prior to launch, the DigiTimes report of a $60 to $70 price reduction on Ivy Bridge processors “is simply not true,” a source at Intel told CNET on Tuesday.

Ivy Bridge is due in the spring and is expected to be the ultrabook processor of choice for Windows 8-based systems.

Leaked document shows ad upgrade presentation apparently targeting the friends of advertisers’ fans.

Facebook is expected to launch an upgrade next week to its premium ads program that will target the friends of advertisers’ fans.

The new ads, which will launch February 29, will be created from content posted organically to pages, according to a purportedly leaked document (see below) obtained by GigaOm.

“Anything you can post to on your page, you can turn into an ad,” the document says. “Upgraded ads can be targeted to anyone you want.”

When the users seeing the ad are friends with fans of the page, Facebook will automatically expand the ad and provide social context about the friends. The ads will also feature an expanded interface allowing fans to comment on the post directly from the ad.

The social network promises advertisers that the new ads will be in a larger format, boosting engagement by 40 percent and increasing retention by 80 percent. Fan rates are also expected to increase 16 percent, as well as purchase intent, according to the documents, which appear to be a presentation prepared for Facebook advertisers.

The new premium ad types can feature a photo, video, question, status, event, or link. They will replace “classic” ad options such as Premium Like (Photo and Video), Pemium Event, Video Comment, and Premium Poll (Photo and Video), which will be phased out on February 29. Marketplace ads on the right column will not be affected.

Facebook representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Facebook Premium Ads Overview

T-Mobile’s latest Galaxy S
Android Gingerbread handset will feature a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen, a dual-core processor, and HSPA+ speeds for less than $200.

As usual, Samsung was involved in a fair number of product announcements this past
CES, but the Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G‘s debut proved the most hush-hush. T-Mobile executives announced it at a small, exclusive event to a knot of journalists, in almost the same breath as the carrier’s mission statement to keep on fighting in the aftermath of the disintegrated merger with AT&T.

From such tinder comes more news of T-Mobile’s Galaxy S Blaze 4G, including an official launch target–”late March”–and pricing: $149.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate card, and with a two-year contract.

LTE may still be on T-Mobile’s to-do list, but the Blaze is equipped to handle HSPA+42, T-Mobile’s faster of its two 4G strains. An Android 2.3 Gingerbread phone, the Blaze 4G sports a 4-inch Super AMOLED display, a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 processor, and a 5-megapixel camera with support for 720p HD video. A 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera assists with video chats.

T-Mobile and Samsung are plugging the preloaded apps, which include T-Mobile TV, a version of the Yelp that will let you save profiles, and the T-Mobile 4GPro App Pack that bundles business-minded apps like LinkedIn, DropBox, and TripIt into a single package.

At this point, the handset is still just ghostware, but we plan to get our hands on the Galaxy S Blaze 4G next week at Mobile World Congress, so stay tuned.

Toyota will reveal a concept
car that’s a study in affordable production of ultra-lightweight and fuel efficient hybrid vehicles.

Toyota appears to be doubling down on its hybrid bet. In addition to the world premier of the Toyota Yaris hybrid, the auto manufacturer will show off a new affordable hybrid city car at the 2012 Geneva Auto Show next month. The company released a sketch of the concept before the reveal.

You may think that the pint-sized Yaris Hybrid and the Prius C should already count as city cars, but it appears that Toyota has something even smaller and lighter up its sleeve. Not much has been shared about the car in advance of the world premiere, but the manufacturer says it is a study of an ultra-lightweight vehicle that can be manufactured affordably without using exotic and expensive materials. The FT-Bh concept will demonstrate how a hybrid city car can be massed produced using materials and processes already used in the automotive industry.

Comcast is reportedly launching a new subscription movie service that will give Web access to the company’s films and TV shows.

Comcast announced a new subscription video-on-demand service today that will provide out “out of home” access via the Web.

Comcast has named the new service Xfinity Streampix and it is obviously following HBO’s lead in confronting Netflix, the Web’s No. 1 video rental service.

Streampix is designed to compliment Comcast’s existing service Xfinity by offering users a much broader selection of movies and TV shows. Variety, the Hollywood trade magazine was first to report the story.

HBOGo, the Internet service that enables HBO subscribers to access every episode of the company’s past and present shows, has become a model for cable companies looking to compete with Netflix. With Streampix, Comcast is adopting a similar strategy.

The service “enables Xfinity video customers to instantly view favorite movies and TV shows in and out of the home,” Comcast said in a statement. The TV shows includes “numerous past seasons of current hit shows and full series.”

This is a smart move. This hits Netflix where it is weakest now; in its selection of videos available for Internet streaming. Netflix is locked out of acquiring the latest movies from the five of the six top Hollywood film studios and managers have struggled to keep the streaming library fresh.

With Netflix companies grumbling about the last of new titles, Comcast will try to offer a wider range of shows than they would have gotten from the regular Xfinity. But there’s a price. A Comcast subscriber must either be a member of one of the company’s triple-play packages (high-speed Web, video, phone, etc) or pay an addition $5 a month for Streampix.

That extra $5 may be the service’s Achilles heel. When it comes to price, Netflix is far less expensive than any of the cable guys.

Comcast said the new service will be available on multiple Web-connected devices, including smart TVs.

Toyota’s hydrogen powered concept
car slated for production in 2015 will make its European debut in Geneva.

On the second stop of its world tour, the Toyota FCV-R fuel cell concept vehicle will make its European premier at the Geneva auto show next month.

The hydrogen-powered concept debuted at the Tokyo Motor show late last year. Few details about the FCV-R were shared, but the compact car seats four and has a cruising range of about 434 miles on a full tank.

Toyota is currently holding field trials of the Highlander Fuel Cell Hydrogen Hybrid Vehicle (FCHV) in the U.S. Although it’s not clear what will become of the hydrogen-powered SUV, the FCV-R concept is expected to enter production in 2015.

New smartphones continue to appear in advance of Mobile World Congress. Samsung is the player this time with the Galaxy Ace 2 and Galaxy Mini 2.

At this point, there may not be any new phones left to unveil at Mobile World Congress.

This time Samsung is getting a head start on next week’s wireless trade show by announcing the Galaxy Mini 2 and Galaxy Ace 2. Though we heard rumors of the Mini 2 last week, Samsung waited until early Tuesday morning to make the handsets official in a press release from the company’s Korean headquarters.

As if the “2″ in their names wasn’t a dead giveaway, both phones are sequels to the Galaxy Ace and Galaxy Mini that we saw last year at Mobile World Congress (the recent Galaxy S Plus is another member of the family). That means of course, that both devices offer entry-level features and simple compact designs.

The Galaxy Ace 2 has a 3.8-inch WVGA display, an 800MHz processor,
Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), a 5-megapixel camera, a second VGA shooter around front, a digital music player, a microSD card slot, 4GB of internal memory, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB 2.0, GPS, and Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. For connectivity, it supports all four GSM bands plus HSDPA for data.

The Galaxy Mini 2 also has an 800MHz processor and Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), but its features are scaled down just a bit. There’s a 3.27-inch HVGA display, a 3-megapixel camera, a digital music player, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB 2.0, a microSD card slot, and 4GB of internal memory. It has TouchWiz, as well, and it’s a quadband world phone with HSDPA support.

The Ace 2 will be available in the United Kingdom starting in April while the Mini 2 will hit France next month with a global release to follow. Samsung did not reveal pricing at the time of this writing.

We’ve no doubt that Samsung will show off the phones when Mobile World Congress begins next Monday in Barcelona, Spain. CNET will be there to bring you details on Sammy’s other announcements plus hands-on impressions.