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Today at their gamescom press conference, Sony Europe has announced the launch of a new PSP, dubbed the E-1000, which will sell for just €99.

Additionally, the company says it will relaunch some UMD titles like FIFA 12 and Invizimals as "PSP Essentials" for just €9.99.

In order to hit the sub-€100 mark, Sony has slashed Wi-Fi from the handheld. You better enjoy playing single player campaigns.

The design and form factor are slightly different as well, with a matte feel and "charcoal" color seen on the slim PS3s.

Sony says the console is only available in PAL regions, at least for now.

Some pictures:

PlayStation-maker seeks boost in sales to regain ground on Xbox 360.

Sony announced that it will cut the price of its PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles to push up sales and prepare for the holiday season. The announcement comes on the eve of GamesCon, the biggest gaming trade show held in Europe.

From Tuesday, the price of a 160GB PS3 model will drop to $249 from $299 in the United States, to €249 from €299 in Europe and to ¥24,980 from ¥29,980 in Japan.

A 320GB PS3 model will set you back $299 in the United States, down from $349. In Europe, it will cost €299, down from €349 and in Japan, ¥29,980, down from ¥34,980.

The price cuts take affect in Europe and the United States immediately, but not until Thursday in Japan. The new price points for the UK have not yet been published.

Lawyers unveil their "smoking gun".

Attorneys for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have filed new evidence that they previously described as the "smoking gun" which proves the ownership case brought by Paul Ceglia is a fraud. The after-hours filing includes an image of a contract.

Ceglia's case relies on a contract he claims to have made with Mark Zuckerberg back in 2003. He is claiming that it entitles him to a large share of the social networking giant, having allegedly made a $1,000 investment in the year leading up to Facebook's launch.

The new court filing contains an image of a two page contract that refers to a street-mapping database Ceglia was hiring Zuckerberg to work on. It was recovered by digital forensics experts from Ceglia's computer.

"This smoking gun evidence confirms what defendants have said all along: the purported contract attached to the complaint is an outright fabrication," attorney Orin Snyder of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, wrote Monday. They argue that the image is of the original contract made between Zuckerberg and Ceglia, with no mention of any Facebook investment or ownership entitlement.

Ceglia said that he made the $1,000 investment at the same time that he hired Zuckerberg to work on the street mapping project.

Suppliers say iPad 3 won't make Fall 2011 launch.

Apple has cancelled its suply schedule for the iPad 3 in the second half of 2011, according to sources within Apple's supply partners, reports DigiTimes. Apple's supply schedule has reportedly been between 1.5 million and 2 million iPad 3 units in Q3 2011, and then between 5 million and 6 million units in Q4 2011.

The reason for the change is apparently supply problems with the 2048x1536, 9.7-inch panel. Supply partners reportedly cannot meet the volume requirements for a Fall 2011 launch.

DigiTimes sources also suggest that the higher-resolution panel requires a much larger backlight source, and that a single edge light bar is not cutting it at the moment.

Reports of Apple testing a higher-resolution display surfaced over the past few months. The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was testing a prototype iPad with a higher resolution, though not as high as the panels referenced in the DigiTimes report.

According to former reporter Clive Goodman, News of the World executives knew about the phone hacking being used by its journalists since 2007.

Goodman is the only reporter to be arrested for the phone hacking scandal that led to the closure of the 165-year-old tabloid.

The Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee has been examining and interviewing News Corp. employees, past and present, but cannot conclude on how much the executives knew. There were, however, "devastating revelations" found in the examination.

James Murdoch, son of CEO Rupert, told lawmakers he did not learn about the scandal until 2010, but News of the World's legal manager and top editor told lawmakers they told Murdoch of the phone hacking in 2008.

The phone hacking scandal came to a head two months ago when it was revealed that the tabloid was hacking the voicemail of a missing school girl to clear her inbox, leading the carrier and her family to believe she was still alive when she was not.

According to a new study from Dr. J. Lennert Veerman of the University of Queensland, watching TV will likely contribute to a shortened lifespan.

The study found that anyone who averaged six hours of TV watching per day, lived, on average, 5 years less than a person who did not watch any TV.

After the age of 25, every 30 minutes spent watching TV decreased lifespan by 22 minutes.

Of course, the TV watching is the indirect reason for the decreased lifespan. Explains Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University School of Medicine:

As a rule, the more time we spend watching TV, the more time we spend eating mindlessly in front of the TV, and the less time we spend being physically active. More eating and less physical activity, in turn, mean greater risk for obesity, and the chronic diseases it tends to anticipate, notably diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Potentially, those that watch excessive TV are lonely, or isolated, or depressed, and these conditions, in turn, may be the real causes of premature mortality.

The study used data on 11,000 people aged 25 or older.

In March, ICANN, the governing body behind the Internet approved .XXX domains, almost 10 years after the idea was brought to the group.

With a vote of 9-3, and despite objections from the adult industry, the measure passed. Adult sites can choose to use the new domain, but are not required to do so.

The domains will begin launching in December and it appears that large companies have already begun buying up .XXX domains, to protect against "cybersquatters" or others that will use their brand names maliciously.

900,000 "expressions of interest" have already been received by the ICM Registry from companies looking to pre-register their trademarks.

A few companies include Mattel, Viacom and the Red Cross who certainly don't want to see spongebobsquarepants.xxx, redcross.xxx or barbie.xxx used by the wrong person.

Steve Kondik, aka 'Cyanogen' has been hired by Samsung Mobile.

Hired as a software engineer, the developer says the new job will not affect CyanogenMod and it is not affiliated in any way with Samsung.

CyanogenMod is a custom ROM for Android devices built from scratch from the open source Android.

The ROM is preferred by users who don't want UI overlays like "MotoBLUR" and have rooted their devices.

It should be interesting to see if Cyanogen eventually makes its way to a retail phone, with no root necessary.

(Pic via Phan)

Injunction barring import and marketing of Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 now limited to Germany.

The German court previously had imposed a preliminary injunction at Apple's request, which affected Samsung in most of the European Union. Now, the court has lifted most of the injunction, so it only affects the German market and not areas outside the country.

The Duesseldorf regional court questioned its own authority to impose restrictions on international companies operating outside Germany. Now, the court says the ban is still effective in Germany, but also applies to Samsung GmbH (German Samsung Unit) throughout the European Union.

"We look forward to the opportunity to reassert our intellectual property rights at the hearing scheduled on August 25," Samsung said in a statement.

Apple accused Samsung of slavishly cloning the iPad 2 in its design for the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. It has sued Samsung in the United States, Europe, Australia and South Korea, trying to get import bans enforced.

The mobile patent war rages on.

Taiwan's HTC Corp. has filed a lawsuit against Apple Inc. alleging patent infringement in Macs, iPhones and iPads. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, seeks a halt to the import of products found to infringe HTC patents.

Additionally, it also seeks compensatory damages and triple damages for "willful infringement." Apple has previously targeted HTC with patent infringement cases of its own, including a filing with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC).

HTC said in July that it would consider trying to settle its patent dispute with Apple.

Did Apple manipulate picture to strengthen its case against Samsung in Europe?

Questions are being raised about a photograph in an Apple court filing that compares an Apple iPad 2 with a Samsung Galaxy Tab. Apple has argued that Samsung slavishly clones its products, and that the Galaxy Tab takes considerable liberties in mimicking the iPad 2's design.

So far, Apple has been successful in getting a German court to ban import of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, though a court in The Hague declined to impose an immediate injunction until a decision is made next month.

Dutch publication Webwereld.nl noticed a strange comparison in an Apple court filing. The picture shows an iPad 2, alongside a Samsung Galaxy Tablet, but the dimensions of the Samsung device are considerably different to the device on the market.

The identical proportions shown in the picture lends to the accusation that the Galaxy Tab is very similar to the design of the iPad 2, but the Galaxy Tab is actually widescreen, not as shown in the picture. Some have suggested that the picture could have been of an earlier tablet made by Samsung, but that then should not be used as a case to ban the widescreen Galaxy Tab.

Logging into Facebook on stolen Macbook Pro is a bad idea!

Information security professional Greg Martin, who formerly worked for NASA and the FBI, had his Macbook Pro stolen in West Kensington last week. He had been staying at his girlfriend's house due to troubling occurrences near his home.

Martin had previously installed open source tracking software on the Macbook Pro (http://preyproject.com) and flagged the laptop as missing within Prey.

"Almost two weary days had gone by and I'm at dinner on a business trip in Luxembourg and I received an email which nearly knocked me out of my chair with excitement," Martin wrote on his blog. He then went back to his Hotel room and changed the frequency of reports from the stolen device to every five minutes.

"After two hours hours of watching him surf religious revelation videos, shopping for Mercedes A class on autotrader he finally popped onto facebook," Martin wrote. He went on to gather a treasure trove of information available to him, including the suspect's name, school, address, IP address, ISP, wireless ssid and Facebook profile. He took the information, along with snapshots from the webcam, to the Metropolitan Police.

Larry Page gives details in blog post following announcement.

Google and Motorola Mobility announced yesterday that a $12.5 billion acquisition of the Motorola unit, by Google, was agreed. In the press information released, Google said it would run Motorola Mobility as a separate business, and that it would remain dedicated to Android as an open platform, continuing to work with mobile partners.

Larry Page took to the Official Google Blog to tell the world how the acquisition would supercharge the Android operating system, and to reaffirm the commitment to an open Android. He also squeezed in a couple of remarks about other companies that Google recently lashed out at over their patent strategies.

"Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies," Page said in the post.

Google said previously that Microsoft, Apple and others were banding together in an anti-competitive patent attack on Android. He also mentioned in the blog that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) had to intervene in the results of a recent patent auction, and is currently looking into the results of the Nortel patent auction.

Rumor suggests carriers testing 4G iPhone, though not necessarily iPhone 5.

Boy Genius Report claimed on Monday that Apple's U.S. carrier partners are testing a new prototype iPhone that connects to high-speed Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. The claim comes from images said to be code from the firmware of an internal iOS test build issued to Apple carriers.

The firmware's .plist (property list) file is where the the indications are found. A key tag allegedly found references, "connected mode LTE Intra-frequency Measurement."

Rumors of Apple pursuing 4G have been around for some time, though the company has said it doesn't need to bring out a 4G iPhone yet. Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook previously said that the company was happy with the performance of its 3G handsets and is in no rush to make the next step.

Upcoming browser will use as much as 50 percent less memory.

Mozilla is tackling the amount of memory that its Firefox web browser uses, and how it uses it over prolonged periods of times. For users who keep a lot of tabs open for long periods of times, memory usage might become an issue on some systems.

On Mozilla's blog, programmer Nicholas Nethercote details improvements that are being made to near-future releases of the browser. Mozilla recently switched to a quick release cycle, promising major updates much more quickly than in the past, mimicking Google's release patterns for the Chrome browser.

"Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less," Nethercote wrote. "In particular, Firefox 7′s memory usage will stay steady if you leave it running overnight, and it will free up more memory when you close many tabs."

He credited the improvements to MemShrink, which is a Mozilla effort to improve how Firefox uses memory. Going past Firefox, he said early development versions of Firefox 8 even improve memory usage further.