The launch of Apple’s new iPhone 3GS was the best sales day ever for AT&T’s retail stores, while the number of orders taken at its online store also hit an all-time high, according to an internal memo obtained by MacDailyNews, a blog devoted to all things Apple. While the memo doesn’t outline the precise number of devices sold, it does reveal other details.

On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008 — all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008’s launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.

In the market for a new TV? These days, there are bargains galore, especially when it comes to those with plasma screens. The Wall Street Journal reports that the growing popularity of their LCD cousins has TV makers such as Pioneer and Vizio phasing out their entire plasma TV line-ups. Others may soon follow suit. (Read an alternative take on the future of Plasma TVs.)

One can hardly blame them — there were 30 million LCD TVs sold in the U.S. in 2008 vs. 4 million plasma TVs, according to Display Search, a market research company. That’s quite a comedown for a technology that once represented the cutting edge of the display market.

Mobile phone sales are going to decline sharply over the next five years, to the tune of 1.04 billion devices, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. In its new report, “The Financial Crisis: Analyzing the impact on global mobile markets,” the research firm has revised its forecast for device sales over the next five years down by 14 percent.

Some 6.39 billion devices are forecast to purchased between now and 2013, Informa said, vs. its previous expectation that 7.43 billion devices would be bought. For 2009, Informa revised its forecast for the number of mobiles phones that will be purchased down to 1.12 billion devices from 1.32 billion. This is a brutal revision for a business that has always been about furious growth and razor-thin margins.

These are select images from Day One of my recent trip to Cody, Wyoming. Shot with the built-in 3.2 megapixel camera of my faithful T-Mobile Blackberry 8900. Surprisingly in the middle of nowhere I am getting full signal strength.

I am a big fan of Pixar and the movies they make. I love how they use technology to build great animation franchises and tell great human stories. I was way too busy this weekend doing nothing, otherwise I would seen the new Pixar/Disney movie, Up.

Wall Street analysts had been very negative about this movie, Up has turned out to be third best Pixar movie based on the opening weekend collections. The flick about a grumpy old man, a precocious boy and a flying house took in about $68.2 million this past weekend. J.P. Morgan analysts expect the movie to take in $280-to-$300 million in domestic box office. That is a lot of money for a movie that was supposed to be a dud.

I started working on GigaOM mostly at my neighborhood Starbucks store. I would sit there after work, and plan how I would turn GigaOM from “one man and a blog” to a media company. It goes without saying that I have a special fondness for the location and for Starbucks. Of course, I am not as fond of the chain as as Rafael Antonio Lozano Jr. aka Winter who is on a mission to visit almost all Starbucks stores, chronicling his journey on Starbuckseverywhere.net.