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Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has confirmed this week that upcoming Wii U games will be, on average, $50 per title, following the trend of its predecessor, the Wii.

The president did add, however, that established multi-platform games like Call of Duty would "likely" cost the industry standard of $60.

Says Iwata (via GR):

I think there is already some indication that the [current pricing] trend is going to stay here. When you consider some of the most popular franchise – such as Call of Duty or Madden – the publishers can afford to affix a rather expensive price tag on that because the franchise has a premium value. On the other hand, … without an established franchise, they cannot afford to keep that expensive price tag. I believe there will be a wider price range.

If that holds true, Nintendo's most popular games, like Zelda and Mario, will have a $50 price tag, which should be a relief for gamers tired of paying $60 for games.

In news that has been unanimously panned, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has said that the company may begin offering premium versions of its online content via subscriptions.

The company is also looking to partner with traditional media companies in an effort to "help create great content and monetize it properly."

Adds Armstrong:

I think content subscriptions on the Internet can be a very viable business.

AOL purchased the Huffington Post in February for $315 million and TechCrunch for $25 million last year, in an effort to add popular content to its portal and network.

The company is best known for being a dial-up giant that purchased Time Warner for $164 billion in 2000, at the height of the tech bubble. The merger is easily the worst transaction in the history of the industry as the bubble popped the next year and AOL never recovered, heading down from a market cap of $240 billion to its current $2 billion, even after being spun off by Time Warner in 2009.

Apple is preparing to release an iOS-powered Apple-branded HDTV this year, says an anonymous former exec of the company speaking to DT.

The company is already in talks with a "major OEM," adds the report, which they speculate to be Samsung, a long-time partner.

Apple will "blow Netflix and all those other guys away" with the HDTV, which will bundle Apple TV and iTunes in a slim, Internet-capable device.

While Samsung (and other OEMs) sell TVs themselves, the source claims it will not be an issue because "if you have to be competing with somebody, you want to be competing with yourself."

A 2011 launch is expected, but the exec does admit that Apple could wait until early 2012 to make sure everything is perfect.

BGR posted earlier this morning that Apple may be ready to unveil the iPhone 5 as early as August, a date that would break tradition from the company's normal September release of new hardware.

Apple is already "late" in releasing a new iPhone as the last few have been released at June's WWDC.

The company used this year's conference to show off Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5 and the iCloud.

If accurate, the new iPhone could be released in early-mid-August and will feature a fully revamped design.

The rumor (and pic) say the iPhone 5 could have a screen that stretches from end-to-end and have a "teardrop" design like the iPod Touch.

Microsoft has updated its SkyDrive cloud service this week, adding an HTML5 design alongside new features.

Anyone with a Hotmail/Live account can sign up for a free SkyDrive account, which has 25GB free storage space and allows users to collaborate on Office docs, or just share content like music and pictures.

Says SkyDrive's program manager (via Lint):

Starting today, we are launching a new version of the SkyDrive website. We took advantage of modern browsers and HTML5 to make SkyDrive faster, easier to navigate, and more beautiful for viewing photos. The new SkyDrive will be rolling out soon, so check back if you don’t see it right away.

SkyDrive's photo sharing will also be improved, and better integrated into Windows Phone 7 when the Mango update hits.

Continues the manager:

Regardless of what screen you have, how big your browser window is, or how many photos you have, SkyDrive always arranges your photos in a clean layout that preserves the original aspect ratio

UPDATE: Sources say the bidder was Yahoo.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that popular on-demand streaming service Hulu has received a buyout offer and is now mulling selling itself.

Reads one journalist's tweets:

WSJ: Hulu is weighing whether to sell itself after a potential buyer approached it with an offer -- Sources. Story to follow

Another journalist tweet reads:

Sources tell me it's NOT GOOGLE who made the offer for HULU

There is no word on who the company may be, but it appears the Hulu's board is now seeking all options.

Popular cloud-storage solution experiences huge security lapse.

Dropbox founder and CTO Arash Ferdowsi used the company's blog to explain a major bug with the Dropbox authentication mechanism. On Sunday, Dropbox updated some code and unknowingly introduced a bug affecting its authentication mechanism, which potentially exposed its users data to anybody.

Between 1:54pm and 5:41pm (Pacific time), users could have logged into accounts without the correct password. Ferdowsi says that a very small number of logins were made during that time (much less than 1 percent of userbase.) After the problem was discovered, it was fixed (and was live) within minutes.

Dropbox is now conducting an investigation to determine if any accounts were improperly accessed. Upon finding the bug, all logged in sessions were ended as a precaution. If the company finds that any unauthorized account use happened during the time the system was vulnerable, it will alert the account holder immediately.

"This should never have happened. We are scrutinizing our controls and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again.," Ferdowsi said.

"We are sorry for this and regardless of how many people were ultimately affected, any exposure at all is unacceptable to us. We will continue to provide regular updates."

Metropolitan Police arrest 19 year old man; media links case to LulzSec group.

Police officers from the Metropolitan Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) carried out the arrest as part of a pre-planned intelligence-led operation, which included cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the United States.

The Met statement does not mention the group LulzSec by name, but it does say the investigation being carried out involves network intrusions and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against international business and intelligence agencies by what it believes is the same group of hackers.

The Met statement comes the same day as confirmation by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONC) that it is investigating a claim that LulzSec has accessed data from the 2011 Census. "We are working with our security advisers and contractors to establish whether there is any substance to this. The 2011 Census places the highest priority on maintaining the security of personal data," the ONC said in a statement.

"At this stage we have no evidence to suggest that any such compromise has occurred."

The 19 year old suspect targeted by the e-Crime Unit was detained on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act, and Fraud Act offences and was taken to a central London police station, where he remains in custody to undergo questioning.

Nokia unveiled its first (and last) MeeGo handset today, the Nokia N9.

The first promotional videos from Nokia displaying the new handset were pretty uninformative, and left a lot of readers of Nokia sources asking for more details about the device. Nokia Marketing Manager Jussi Mäkinen filled the gap for a UI tour, and the most complete version of the handset specs were posted online the company.


Nokia N9 MeeGo User Interface Demonstration by Jussi Mäkinen

Nokia unveiled ealier today the company's first MeeGo touting handset. As previously leaked in the pictures the phone comes in a slate form factor and is called Nokia N9. The phone features a 3,9 inch AMOLED display with 854 by 480 pixel resolution, a single-core one gigahertz CPU, up to 64 gigabytes of storage, and runs MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan.

The slate previously dubbed as codename Lankku was indeed released under the name N9, even though rumors from months and months back had N9 in a QWERTY slider form factor. Adding to the 1GHz CPU the MeeGo phone comes with gigabyte of RAM memory, pentaband WCDMA and quadband GSM, 8 megapixel AF camera with dual LED flash, and all the necessary connectivity features including NFC.

Huawei, the largest Chinese mobile phone-network maker, has launched its latest tablet this week, the 7-inch MediaPad.

The MediaPad will run the upcoming Android update, Honeycomb 3.2.

CEO Ren Zhengfei says the company will continue to expand into smartphones and tablets as revenue from its traditional businesses sees slower demand.

By expanding, the company hopes to triple their annual revenue to $100 billion within the next 10 years.

The device will run on a dual-core 1.2GHz SnapDragon processor with a WSVGA display that packs 217ppi, higher than the iPad 2's 132ppi.

MediaPads also weigh just 0.85 pounds, are 10.5mm thick and have dual cameras, HDMI-out, HSPA+, Wi-Fi and BlueTooth 2.1.

(Pics via Cnet)




(Pic shows 3.1, but be reminded, 3.2 isn't available yet)

K Computer achieve's a world-beating 8.162 petaflops.

A collaborative effort of Fujitsu and RIKEN, the K Computer is part of the High-Performance Computing Infrastructure (HPCI) initiative led by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The system is currently in its configuration stage, featuring 672 computer racks equipped with a total of 68,554 quad-core central processing units.

It is a wholly-made in Japan supercomputer, from the R&D steps to the development of the processors and ongoing assembly. The system took first position on the 37th TOP500 list announced today, marking the first time since 2004 that a Japanese supercomputer has made it to the top of the list.

The TOP500 ranking list is updated twice per year since 1993. The K Computer's processing speed was measured by the LINPACK benchmark program, clocking up to 8.162 petaflops (petaflop == 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second). Fujitsu and RIKEN aim to begin shared use of the supercomputer by November 2012. When it is completed in 2012, it is designed to achieve LINPACK performance of 10 petaflops.

Microsoft is allegedly porting current Zune HD apps to its Windows Phone 7 smartphone OS line.

The news comes via the latest Zune Insider podcast and transcribed here:

The apps that we have built internally for Zune [HD], we’re actually looking at porting those over to Windows Phone. Right now, our focus for the app team is, more apps for Zune [HD]. Zune [HD] owners would like to hear that there’s more stuff coming. So that’s definitely the case.

Microsoft announced earlier this year that it would be ending the physical Zune line, with the HD being the last of the company's media players.

"Zune" as a brand will live on as software in WP7, Xbox Live and on the PC.

Starting July 7th, Verizon will move to tiered data plans, and to no one's surprise, the plans are expensive.

DL says the plans will be as follows:

2GB – $30/month
5GB – $50/month
10GB – $80/month

Packages with wireless tethering add 20GB for $20:

4GB – $50/month
7GB – $70/month
12GB – $100/month

Overages of your plan will cost you $10 per each GB over the limit.

In comparison, AT&T's tiered plans cost $15 for 200MB (biggest ripoff in history), $25 for 2GB and $45 for 4GB.

HP has now begun selling a wireless mouse than connects to the computer via Wi-Fi, eliminating the need for Bluetooth or RF.

The HP Wi-Fi mobile mouse connects to Windows 7 computers through adhoc, meaning the mouse should not ruin the connecting PC's ability to connect to access points.

Currently, most wireless mice connect via built-in Bluetooth hardware or via dongles.

HP says the new mouse has 9 months battery life per two AA batteries.

The mouse is on sale for $50, available now.