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Apple has announced this week that it is recalling its first generation iPad Nano in the U.S.

The devices, which launched in September 2005, apparently have a rare overheating issue.

Apple is telling users to stop using their devices immediately and the company will replace them for free.

Battery overheating issues on the 1G iPod Nano is not a new issue, and the replacement program is expanding to add the U.S. It is currently available in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Reads the post:

Apple has determined that, in very rare cases, the battery in the iPod nano (1st generation) may overheat and pose a safety risk. Affected iPod nanos were sold between September 2005 and December 2006.

This issue has been traced to a single battery supplier that produced batteries with a manufacturing defect. While the possibility of an incident is rare, the likelihood increases as the battery ages.

Apple recommends that you stop using your iPod nano (1st gen) and follow the process noted below to order a replacement unit, free of charge.

Google is expected to launch the Music service on Wednesday.

At a press event in California, Google is expected to add downloading to its cloud-based music service along side new social networking features.

However, it appears that Google was never able to get deals in place with Sony Music or Warner Music Group, the 2nd and 3rd largest labels on the planet.

Universal Music Group has signed a licensing agreement, and it is unclear whether EMI will join.

Talks between the labels and Google are ongoing, however.

One sticking point is the labels want the app "MP3 Download Pro" to be removed from the Android Market as it encourages piracy on Android devices. The app has been downloaded over a million times.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has said this weekend that it will begin production on its 28nm GPU "Kepler" chips soon, for availability in 2012.

The Kepler architecture will be featured in a "massive amount of notebook designs" next year, adds the exec.

Says Huang:

The vast majority of the increase is coming from the very significant increase in design wins that we have in several areas. We have more notebook design wins for the Ivy Bridge cycle than we ever had in notebooks; this is likely the most successful notebook cycle we have ever experienced. And so we have got a lot of engineers dedicated to getting those notebooks into production.

Kepler GeForce chips should bring significant performance improvements and incredible energy efficiency, leading to better battery life for devices and less overheating.

Activision has announced this weekend that Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5 million copies in its first 24 hours of availability.

Making that massive number even more impressive is the fact that the game is only available in North America and the UK right now.

Rival EA announced last week that their shooter Battlefield 3 had sold 5 million in its first week, a blockbuster by any normal standard.

Says Activision CEO Bobby Kotick (via Ars):

We believe the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is the biggest entertainment launch of all time in any medium, and we achieved this record with sales from only two territories. Other than Call of Duty, there has never been another entertainment franchise that has set opening day records three years in a row. Life-to-date sales for the Call of Duty franchise exceed worldwide theatrical box office for Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, two of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time.

Despite yesterday's report that Citigroup has managed to sell EMI in pieces, the deal still has some major hurdles to clear.

Whenever a coporate acquisition of this scale occurs, it must pass scrutiny from officials in various countries. At least one source is suggesting both parts of this deal, Universal Music Group buying EMI's recording division and Sony Music Entertainment purchasing their publishing arm, will almost certainly be rejected by European regulators.

Helen Smith, who represents an independent label trade association called IMPALA, wrote in an email (via Digital Music News):

Given that Brussels has taken a previous decision that Universal should not be any bigger, we would expect the sale to Universal to be blocked outright, even if it offers to increase the divestments it is prepared to make.

She added, "The same would apply to Sony if it buys EMI publishing."

Don't be fooled by the fact IMPALA represents independent labels. Their lawsuit to block the merger of Sony Music and Bertlesmann Music Group in 2006 was ultimately unsuccessful, but raised significant pressure on EU officals to check the power major labels wield in the market.

Amazon, who is losing at least $10 on every Kindle Fire sold, appears to also be losing money on every $79 Kindle they are selling.

According to a teardown from research firm IHS, the hardware is costing the company $84.25 to make.

The bill of materials is $78.59 but the added $5.66 includes everything else, says the firm.

It is also important to note that the figure only includes costs "incurred until the end of the assembly line," and does not include shipping and R&D.

As with the Kindle Fire, Amazon is expected to quickly make the money back through sales of e-books. The Fire, however, should be a much larger money maker given its access to Amazon shopping, books, music, movies and cloud storage.

Walmart is hoping to jumpstart the Christmas shopping season a few hours early this year by starting their Black Friday sales at 10PM on Thanksgiving.

Black Friday is traditionally the most profitable sales day for US retailers. Many people consider it the official start to holiday sales, and the majority of Americans don't have to work that day, being the Friday after a national holiday.

Over the last few years, many retailers have opened their doors early in the morning on Black Friday, offering even bigger discounts for as little as an hour or two to the earliest shoppers. This year Walmart continues that trend, but the sales will start on Thursday evening.

Between 10PM and midnight on Thursday they will be offering an Xbox 360 4GB with Kinect Console plus a $50 Walmart gift card for $199.96 and an assortment of DVDs with prices starting at $1.96.

At midnight their sale will include:

• A Samsung 51" class (50.7" actual) Plasma TV for $498
• An Emerson 32" class (31.5" actual) LCD TV for $188
• A Sansui 19" class (18.5" actual) TV for $98
• An LG Blu-ray Player for $49
• A Philips Wi-Fi Blu-ray Home Theatre for $178
• An 8GB iPod Touch for $195
• A HP laptop with a 15" display and AMD Dual-Core processor for $248

Apple has now made unlocked iPhone 4S pre-orders available in the U.S.

The devices have a 1-2 week ship time but all colors and capacities are available.

As of now, unlocked devices are delivery only and cannot be picked up in store.

Unlocked devices will work with all GSM micro SIM cards worldwide.

If you are interested, the 16GB (in black or white) will set you back $649, the 32GB will lighten your wallet by $749 and the 64GB will make you cry at $849.

Speaking to an audience of investors and industry analysts, Logitech Chairman Guerrino De Luca announced the company's Google TV set-top box, the Revue, will be discontinued once the existing stock is sold.

It will not be replaced by another product. Instead Logitech will get out of the set-top box market for the forseeable future.

Their primary mistake with the Revue, in De Luca's estimation, was not the decision to support Google in the venture, but rather the scope of his company's commitment to an immature business. He said he would do it again, but "with a significantly smaller and more prudent approach."

"It's not a mistake of intention, It's not a mistake of strategy," said De Luca, "It's a mistake of implementation of gigantic nature."

He blamed a backlash from content providers for the overall failure of Google TV so far:

Google TV is a great concept. Google TV has the potential to completely disrupt the living room, except that that was not the case when we launched Logitech Revue. Logitech Revue was launched with some... software that was definitely not complete and was not tuned to what the consumers wanted in the living room, let alone the issues with content delivery that the threat, or the perceived threat, Google poses to other content providers generated.

Citigroup has finally managed to sell off large record label EMI.

Universal Music Group has purchased the recorded-music unit for $1.9 billion, while Sony Music has purchased the publishing arm of the label for $2.2 billion.

EMI has been up for sale since earlier this year, after Citigroup was forced to take it over. The former owner could not pay its debt and lost the collateral.

Universal and Sony were not expected to be the winners in the auction, where Warner Music and Bertelsmann were long considered the favorites.

Citi was hoping for $4 billion for the businesses, but most industry analysts had expected them to receive a figure closer to $3.3 billion given the credit markets.

Regulatory approval of the deals are expected to take up to 20 months, and Universal will most likely have to sell hundreds of millions worth of non-core assets.

President Obama will not have to follow through with his threat to veto a resolution forbidding the FCC from implementing net neutrality rules. On Wednesday the senate resolution was rejected by a narrow margin.

The vote was 52 to 46 with 2 other senators not voting.

The FCC's rules were created in response to Comcast's 2008 victory over the agency in federal court. The FCC punished Comcast for throttling various types of traffic, including P2P traffic from BitTorrent.

The court found the FCC's lack of rules on the subject meant they couldn't punish the largest cable company in the US for their throttling practices.

Opposition to the new FCC rules aren't limited to the Senate, or even to opponents of net neutrality in general. Media reform activists at Free Press are suing the FCC claiming exemptions in the rules for mobile Internet providers are illegal.

As the popularity of Android has grown, so has the threat of patent infringement lawsuits against device makers.

Although Apple's lawsuits have gotten the lion's share of attention, Microsoft's threats of patent suits are arguably making just as big an impact on Android vendors.

Barnes & Noble, maker of the Android powered Nook Color and Nook Tablet, think that warrants antitrust action by the US Justice Department.

They are not alone in their criticism of Microsoft either. In a recent interview, Google's chief patent attorney characterized Microsoft's patent suit threats, which have resulted in licensing deals with major manufacturers like Samsung and Acer, as a reaction to their own failure in the market.

Barnes & Noble is going further. They are asking the DOJ to investigate Microsoft for using patents to keep new players out of the market.

Apple's iOS update to fix the battery life problems plaguing some iPhone owners hasn't done the job for everyone.

Numerous posts to the thread for the issue on Apple's support forums complain that the fix has not changed anything. A few people have even said the problem is worse with iOS 5.0.1.

These forum posts do not tell us how effective the fix has been overall. As anyone who has ever worked in a customer service position can tell you, it's much more likely you will hear from angry customers than satisfied customers.

And yet some people have said the problem is fixed, while others have noted a slight improvement. But for every one of those posts to that thread, there are many more complaints:

3gs: with the iOS 5.0 battery was good.
sinds the new update iOS 5.0.1 Battery life is shorter!!

Some people believe it is a hardware problem, and that Apple is aware of the problem but simply doesn't want to admit it:

Yesterday I applied the Fix 5.0.1.

Do you guys remember the "ANTENNAGATE" Fix where Apple was just has changed the display for the signal bars strength? ROFL?

In addition to the quad-core-powered Edge, HTC seems to have another monster smartphone in the wings.

Dubbed the Ville, the device will be the first to run on the 28nm Snapdragon S4, says BGR.

The rumored specs:

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
HTC Sense UI 4.0
4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display
1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 (MSM8960)
8-megapixel backside-illuminated camera with 1080p HD video capture
Beats Audio
Metal construction case and just 8mm thick
1650 mAh battery

Surprisingly, the device will not have NFC support.

Confirming reports over the past few days, Valve has responded that the Steam databased was indeed hacked, with personal information stolen.

The Steam forums have been down for days, but many speculated that is how far the hacking went.

Private data like usernames, encrypted passwords and addresses were taken, says Valve.

The company says credit card data should be safe, but will not guarantee it.

Reads the press release:

Dear Steam Users and Steam Forum Users,

Our Steam forums were defaced on the evening of Sunday, November 6. We began investigating and found that the intrusion goes beyond the Steam forums.

We learned that intruders obtained access to a Steam database in addition to the forums. This database contained information including user names, hashed and salted passwords, game purchases, email addresses, billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked. We are still investigating.