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Facebook on Thursday set the share price for its initial public offering at $38. Shares of Facebook will begin trading on the NASDAQ exchange after the opening bell on Friday, and the social networking giant could raise as much as $16 billion. The offering will be the largest ever Internet IPO, besting the $1.4 billion raised by Google in 2004 by a substantial margin. A total of 421,233,615 shares of its common stock will be made available. Facebook’s press release follows below.

Hewlett-Packard is reportedly mulling a massive workforce reduction that will see as many as 25,000 jobs cut from the company. Bloomberg cites unnamed sources in reporting on the potential layoffs, which would amount to 8% of HP’s global workforce. Between 10,000 and 15,000 of the cuts could come from HP’s enterprise services group, and several thousand of the workers affected by the possible layoffs may be offered early-retirement packages. HP confirmed in March that it would undergo a major reorganization that would see its Personal Systems Group merge with its Imaging and Printing Group, but it did not announce any wide-scale layoffs at that time. The struggling vendor will report its results for the second fiscal quarter next Wednesday.

AT&T noted record smartphone sales when it posted a monster holiday quarter to close out 2011, and the carrier came back in the first quarter this year with another record-setting report that beat Wall Street’s profit expectations. Verizon Wireless reported record revenue growth in the fourth quarter last year, and profits were up 16% in the first quarter of 2012 compared to the same quarter in 2011. But despite soaring performance, executives at both carriers confirmed to investors this week that they are preparing to make new moves in an effort to squeeze more revenue out of subscribers.

Apple’s display suppliers are reportedly preparing to undergo a certification examination as rumors surrounding a smaller version of Apple’s wildly popular iPad tablet continue to swirl. Taiwan-based news organization The Liberty Times on Thursday reported that display panel suppliers LG Display and AU Optronics are currently readying their lines and sample panels for a certification exam. Assuming all goes as planned, the manufacturers will reportedly split production of 6 million “iPad mini” screens ahead of the tablet’s launch later this year. TPK Holding and Chimei Innolux are said to be supplying backlight modules for the new slate. Apple is rumored to be developing an ultra-thin iPad mini that will launch in the fourth quarter this year. The tablet will seemingly feature a display that measures 7.85 inches diagonally, and a recent report suggested that Apple intends to launch a fierce attack on low-cost tablets from Amazon and Barnes & Noble by pricing the iPad mini between $200 and $250.

A recent study found that contrary to arguments repeatedly posed by major record labels — and perhaps contrary to logic as well — BitTorrent piracy has a direct correlation to increased album sales. Between May 2010 and January 2011, North Carolina State University assistant professor Robert Hammond tracked BitTorrent download statistics for new albums ahead of their releases. He then compared his data to music sales figures and found what he believes to be a connection. ”I isolate the causal effect of file sharing of an album on its sales by exploiting exogenous variation in how widely available the album was prior to its official release date,” Hammond wrote in his paper. “The findings suggest that file sharing of an album benefits its sales. I don’t find any evidence of a negative effect in any specification, using any instrument.” Of course, the case may simply be that popular music is popular music; whether consumers steal it or buy it, massive marketing budgets help ensure that people are exposed to labels’ premier acts as much as possible, thus promoting demand.

Some believe Siri is a driving force behind Apple’s record-breaking iPhone 4S sales, but not everyone is impressed with the Cupertino, California-based company’s virtual assistant. Apple’s TV ads depict Siri as an impressive, fast-acting feature that intelligently offers help or information in responds to a wide range of and commands. A number of users have found that Siri is not as helpful as Apple leads consumers to believe, however, and the company has been hit with a number of lawsuits as a result.

What do you get when you cross a struggling vendor’s debut tablet with a mobile operating system that has spent the past 18 months running into the brick wall that is Google’s Android operating system and Apple’s iOS? One Dutch developer seemingly needed to find out, so he ported Microsoft’s perpetually-emerging Windows Phone OS onto RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook. The result is a somewhat responsive slate that gives us a look at what will never be; Microsoft is on record in stating that it has no interest in bringing Windows Phone — emphasis on “Phone” — to tablets. Of course, with the software giant’s next-generation Windows 8 platform on the horizon there is no reason to put Windows Phone on a tablet. But for those curious to know what a Windows Phone tablet might look like, a video of the developer’s PlayBook running Microsoft’s mobile OS follows below. “Gamer109X,” the developer behind this curious chimera, said he plans to release a Windows Phone build for the PlayBook to the public in the coming months.

UPDATE: A number of readers point out that rather than having hacked Windows Phone to run on the PlayBook, Gamer109X is running Microsoft’s Web-based Windows Phone emulator in the PlayBook’s browser with reading mode enabled.

According to a new report from Forrester Research, Microsoft is leading both Apple and Google in the TV and home entertainment sector, The New York Times reported on Wednesday. While Apple and Google may control mobile, Microsoft’s Xbox entertainment system tops both Apple TV and Google TV according to the report. With the Xbox, Forrester analyst James McQuivey believes Microsoft is the farthest along when it comes to delivering users content through their television sets. “Using those metrics, Microsoft is in the lead, offering everything that matters: a growing content library, a convenient engagement path for millions of existing Xbox 360 owners, and a growing ecosystem of partners and developers eager to exploit the platform for their own purposes,” McQuivey wrote in the report. Microsoft has continued to add more content apps — such as Comcast Xfinity, Verizon FiOS and HBO Go — to the Xbox, alongside thousands of games. The software giant has shipped more than 66 million Xboxes worldwide, and Forrester estimates that half of all Xboxes in the United States are connected to the Internet.

LG on Wednesday announced a new user-interface skin for its Android-powered devices running Ice Cream Sandwich. The South Korean company’s Optimus UI 3.0 is said to be designed with convenience and speed in mind, and is being labeled as both unobtrusive and simple. “With smartphone hardware becoming more and more similar, it’s important for manufacturers to differentiate their products from the competition through the user interface,” said Dr. Jong-seok Park, President and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company. “Both carriers and customers tell us that they want LG phones to look and feel unique and the UI plays a big part in that. LG is really going to push the boundaries of what is possible in user interfaces starting with Optimus UI 3.0.” The new UI will allows users to drag anywhere to unlock the screen, and will feature an an Icon Customizer, revamped Pattern Lock and a Voice Shutter feature to allow photos to be taken with voice commands. The Optimus UI 3.0 will debut next week with the launch of LG’s Optimus LTE II in Korea. LG’s press release follows below.

Similar to Apple’s iTunes program, Google Music only allows a certain number of devices to be connected to the service at one time. Google allows users to upload up to 20,000 song for free, which can then be accessed by up to 10 “authorized” devices. Once the limit is reached, a user can “deauthorize” a device to allow another a different phone or tablet to take its place. The problem, however, is that Google has limited device deauthorizations to just four per year. While Google’s limit may not affect the average Joe, rooters, ROMers, enthusiasts and even bloggers may run into some trouble. Custom ROM users in particular may run into trouble — Google Music often has difficulties handling custom ROMs and will occasionally de-register and re-register it as a completely new device. According to XDA-Developers, the change is relatively new, and was rolled out over the last 60 days. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Despite some vendors seeing record smartphone sales, worldwide sales of mobile phones declined 2% year-over-year to 419.1 million units in the first quarter of 2012, according to research firm Gartner. The decline represents the first of its kind since the second quarter of 2009. “Global sales of mobile devices declined more than expected due to a slowdown in demand from the Asia/Pacific region,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. “The first quarter, traditionally the strongest quarter for Asia – which is driven by Chinese New Year, saw a lack of new product launches from leading manufacturers, and users delayed upgrades in the hope of better smartphone deals arriving later in the year.”

One year ago, less than 40% of mobile subscribers in the United States had a smartphone. That number has increased dramatically, however; according to Nielsen, one in two mobile subscribers now owns a smartphone. Driven mostly by the rise of Android and iOS, which account for more than 80% of the U.S. smartphone market, 2012 has turned into the year of the app. The average number of apps installed on each smartphone has jumped 28% in 2012, an increase from 32 apps to 41. Smartphone owners are also spending increasingly more time using apps than using the mobile web, roughly 10% more than last year. Nielsen notes that the top five most active apps continue to be Facebook, YouTube, Android Market (now Google Play Store), Google Search and Gmail. Despite the increase of apps, smartphone owners spend roughly the same amount of time using them each day — 37 minutes in 2011, compared to 39 minute in 2012.

Sprint’s costly $15.5 billion gamble on Apple’s iPhone won’t pay off until 2015, according to CEO Dan Hesse. At that time, however, the iPhone will be “quite profitable,” and the company is “very happy” with the deal despite conflicting reports, AllThingsD said. Hesse sees the iPhone as a long-term investment that will slow subscriber defections and attract new customers. “We believe in the long term,” the CEO said. “And over time we will make more money on iPhone customers than we will on other customers.” Sprint sold 1.5 million iPhones in the first quarter of 2012, and while the number doesn’t approach AT&T or Verizon’s sales, 44% of Sprint’s iPhone sales were made to new customers.

Analysts for Barclays said in a note to investors that a new 7-inch iPad will be released this fall, Business Insider reported on Wednesday. “Following up on comments made last week, recent research still leads us to believe that Apple may be planning to add another form factor to its iPad line in the 7″ range for the fall,” the note read. The banking firm states that a smaller iPad would be useful in promoting Apple’s education agenda and could also help the company’s gaming efforts. Rather than sullying the iPad brand and iOS ecosystem, Barclays states that a “lower priced iPad [is] a necessary entry point to make the tablet market the size of the PC market by 2015 in terms of units (over 350 million units) – a figure CEO Tim Cook repeatedly mentions.” Apple has long been rumored to be readying a 7.85-inch iPad mini to compete with Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet. The slate is expected to be priced between $249 and $299, and could launch as soon as the third quarter of 2012.