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Nintendo has finally priced the upcoming 3DS handheld for the U.S., giving it a $250 price tag.

The device launches in the States on March 27th.

Most speculators had believed Nintendo would sell the console for $300, around the same price it will sell for in Japan, however, it appears the company has gone for a discount.

At $250, the 3DS will sell for $70 more than the most expensive DS, the over-sized DSi XL.

Both the Cosmos Black and Aqua Blue bundles will come with a free charging dock and a 2GB SD card.

The 3DS will hit Japanese stores on February 26th, 2011, and then the US/European markets one month later.

The first 10 launch games for the system are: Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D, Nintendogs + Cats, Pilotwings Resort, Pro Baseball Spirits, Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracle, Ridge Racer 3D, Samurai Warriors Chronicle, Steel Diver, Super Monkey Ball, and Super Street Fighter IV: 3D Edition.

Just weeks after receiving a $175 million million investment by Amazon, popular daily deal site Living Social has begun a "once-in-a-lifetime" deal of offering a $20 Amazon gift card for $10.

The deal began at midnight and will run until 8 AM tomorrow.

So far, Living Social has sold 500,000 of the gift cards and it is unclear how much they paid for the cards.

The promotion makes it clear that Amazon.com is "not a sponsor" and the gift cards are "sold by LivingSocial, an authorized retailer of Amazon.com Gift Cards," and no one else.

Calls to Amazon have confirmed the promotion will run the full way through, with no cap on how many buyers, with most expecting a final count around 600,000.

Living Social is the second largest daily deal site behind Groupon, and the new deal seems like an easy and cost-effective way to bring in (potentially) hundreds of thousands of new customers to its service, whilst also sending traffic to its largest single investor.

Just two weeks after Geohot revealed the PlayStation 3 root key to the world, developer Infinity Ward has apologized to Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 gamers affected by the influx of hackers playing on public servers.

Geohot revealed the key and just recently created a custom v3.55 firmware which allows for homebrew and Linux to be run on the latest Sony PS3 firmware.

While the hacker does not believe in piracy, others have been busy creating custom 3.55 firmwares that will run backup managers, allowing for the playback of pirated games right from the hard drive.

Infinity Ward says it has fallen victim to the ever increasing amount of users running custom firmwares, but says the hacking does not affect the latest game in the series, Black Ops, which was developed by Treyarch.

Digitimes has reported today that HP should begin shipping their first webOS tablets starting in March, throwing its first real competitor into the suddenly crowded media tablet market.

Says the source:

The development of WebOS tablet PCs was finished in 2010, but HP will have Taiwan-based Inventec begin ODM production and shipments in March 2011 to allow for software testing and timing of launch schedules in line with market development.

IDC reported earlier this week that Apple controls over 87 percent of the market with the popular iPad, but a number of Android 3.0 models are coming in the next few months, which should put some pressure on the leader.

Through leaks, two WebOS tablets have been confirmed, "Opal" and "Topaz," and it is speculated that the Topaz will be the product shipping in March.

The Topaz is 9-inches, has no buttons, a 1.2GHz processor and dual cameras.

Despite 300,000 Android devices being activated daily, only 0.4 percent of all users are running version 2.3 Gingerbread, the latest upgrade to the mobile operating system.

The figure comes via Google's Android Developers website, with the note that Gingerbread's low adoption rate is thanks to the fact that it is only available on the Samsung Nexus S, which was released last month.

Google says (via LAT) that 51.3 percent of all devices are now running 2.2 Froyo, with 2.1 Eclair being run on 35.7 percent of Android devices.

The 2.1 figure is so high mainly thanks to Samsung's failure to upgrade Galaxy S owners to 2.2. There is still no official word or timetable for the update, leaving 11 million owners with an outdated operating system for the time being, unless they root their devices.

Users with the ancient 1.5 and 1.6 variants make up the remaining 12.6 percent.

The fragmentation of the operating system has been a main critical point of Android over the past year, with critics pointing to iOS 4.xx, which is on around 90 percent of all iPhones and iPads and is pushed to devices by Apple themselves, and not by the carriers.

IDC has reported this week that the Apple iPad controls 87.4 percent of the "media tablet" market (as of the Q3), while Amazon controls the standalone e-reader market at 41.5 percent.

A "media tablet" is defined as a 5-to-14-inch tablet shaped device with color displays running lightweight OS, such as Android or iOS.

By the definition, the Nook Color is considered a media tablet, while the original Nook, which uses a monochrome E-ink display is considered an e-reader only.

Furthermore, IDC separated "tablet PCs" from the group, defining those as running a Windows OS, and being based on x86 processors.

Apple made tablets "trendy" when it launched the iPad in April of last year, and competitors have been scrambling to keep up. The company sold over 7 million devices in the last quarter (Q4), alone.

To date, the biggest competitor has been the Samsung Galaxy Tab, which runs on Android 2.2 and has sold 1 million units. Competition is expected to heat up in 2011, as a plethora of powerful dual-core tablets will hit the market running Android 3.0 (tablet-optimized) or webOS.

Roku will announce this week that it has signed its first cable channel, "WealthTV," to its ever-growing programming lineup.

The company, through director of business development and content partnerships Ed Lee, says WealthTV is just "the first domino to fall," and the set-top box company is already in talks with other channels.

For $2.99 per month, all Roku users get 24/7 access to the WealthTV feed that cable subscribers gets, as well as VOD right for programs.

Says WealthTV founder Robert Herring:

We’re probably the only one in the industry who can do what we’re doing right now. It’s going to be a chance to lead.

PaidContent explains that "the loophole that WealthTV is slipping through is that it doesn’t have affiliate deals with either of the two biggest operators, Comcast and Time Warner Cable . They typically insist for an independent channel seeking linear carriage to sign a contractual clause known as an alternative distribution methods (ADM) clause and/or sometimes even sell some equity in the venture to the operator."

Citing the "explosion" in data usage by smartphones and tablets, U.S. carrier Sprint has added a $10 surcharge to the bills of all data-hungry devices, including non-4G phones.

The add-on charge will begin on January 30th.

Sprint says the "Premium Data" charge will help the company continue to offer their cheap unlimited plans.

Says the carrier (via PR):

Sprint wants its customers to experience the range of entertainment and productivity possibilities available with today’s wireless technology. While some of our competitors impose overage charges and complex plans, Sprint continues to provide a worry-free, unlimited data experience while on the Sprint network. This is responsible, sustainable and reflects our commitment to simplicity and value.

Sprint’s unlimited data plans, with or without the $10 charge, continue to beat the offerings of our top national competitors, who cap users’ data, charge data overages, and do not offer the unique functionality of Any Mobile, Anytime, which gives subscribers on the Sprint network unlimited calling to any other wireless user in America regardless of carrier.

One day after announcing that CEO Steve Jobs would take another medical leave from the company, Apple's stock plummeted at the open of trading this morning, falling as much as 22 points before rebounding to end the day down almost 8.

Apple finished the day down 2.25 percent, at $340.65 a share.

After trading finished, the company posted record quarterly results, and reassured investors of the strength of the management team and its upcoming products.

Revenue for the fiscal Q1 came in at $26.74 billion, and profit reached $6 billion for the period.

16 million iPhones were sold in the quarter, a large 86 percent year-over-year jump, with 7.3 million iPads and 4.1 million Macs being sold in the same period.

Says COO Tim Cook:

The team here has an unparalleled breadth and depth of talent and a culture of innovation that Steve has driven at the company. We feel very, very confident about the future of the company.

Cook will take over Job's day-to-day responsibilities in his absence.

We would like to apologize to our regular readers for the lack of updates to AfterDawn's news section over the past week or so.

By coincidence, multiple members of staff have been absent due to bereavement at exactly the same time. Things should start to get back to normal from later today.

Thank you for reading.

The next generation iPhones and iPads are rumored to have Apple's new System on a Chip, which will feature the much more powerful dual core SGX543MP2 graphics chip. It is also said that the chip would enable four times the pixel count of previous iPad. The new iPad 2 Retina display would have a resolution of 2048 x 1536.

The more advanced SoC will also add support for HDMI as well as 1080p Full HD video playback. However, it is not yet certain in which iOS devices you will see these, if any. According to AppleInsider, there will be multi-core ARM Cortex A9 CPUs in the SoC quite like in Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip.

It certainly does sound like the new iOS devices will have a ton more horsepower than the predecessors.

The Japanese police carried out raids all over the country last week. They managed to arrest 18 people who have allegedly uploaded copyrighted movies, music, games, and software to the Internet.

Anti-Counterfeiting Association (ACA) which consists of many of the influential trade groups had been monitoring the Internet use in Japan for weeks to spot the possible copyright infringements. They handed out the information to police who started the operation last Tuesday.

The police searched a total of 50 locations and found 18 individuals who are waiting to be prosecuted. One of the ACA partners, Recording Industry Association of Japan, has released details of the arrested.

Even though the operation was quite a large one, none of the accused pirates are big time crooks. Even the worst of the bunch shared only a couple games or music tracks.

Last week Google announced the removal of H.264 support in its Chrome web browser. A questionable move got a follow-up yesterday when Google said in the Chromium blog that they will be releasing WebM plug-ins for Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Both of the companies have been strongly supporting H.264 and denied the support for WebM in their web browsers.

Google prefers their own royalty-free WebM technology that is backed up by browsers Firefox, Opera and Chrome. Apple and Microsoft are behind H.264 that has a larger supporter group and move established community because of its longer history.

Forming the future standard for HTML video tag is no closer than before. Google won't be giving up easily, Apple and Microsoft on the other hand really want their money. Well, at least now it seems that each of the browsers will be soon supporting WebM. That should be a good thing, right?

After a flood of piracy allegations, the file locker site MegaUpload has stood up against the music and movie industry. In an interview for TorrentFreak the company says RIAA and MPAA are directing them with some "grotesquely overblown allegations".

Just a couple days ago Anti-fraud firm MarkMonitor claimed that upload sites are "on a par with peer-to-peer sites when it comes to piracy." MarkMonitor's stats say that RapidShare, Megaupload and Megavideo alone account for more than 21 billions visits to illegal files per year.

We provide connectivity between end users and storage capacity in the cloud, but no content – just like e.g. ADSL providers and hard drive vendors.

MegaUpload however reminds that the service is actively fighting against sharing of copyrighted material and that vast majority of its traffic is legitimate. They also provide services for employees at most of the Fortune 500 companies. MegaUpload reminds copyright holders that they work in a similar way to many unquestionably legal companies.

The recent rumors from Boy Genius Report's Apple sources say that the Cupertino-based company will remove the home button from their future iPad models. It does sound like a strange move, but the iOS developer release for iPad suggests that there will be support for multitouch gestures that allows navigation to the home screen and other views.

According to the sources, Apple will be removing the home button from iPhone as well. They have already been testing the buttonless handsets that are likely to arrive in stores next summer.

In addition to button removal, 9 to 5 Mac talks about a new camera. The iOS 4.3 developer release hints about a new camera with four images seen below. The shutter images are sized at 1024 x 768 pixels, which also suggests that the iPad 2 will have the same resolution display as its predecessor.