New Zealanders have been enjoying Epic Games’ visual stunner for a few hours now, as per usual, but the past has caught up with the present, so to speak. Infinity Blade is now available on the US iTunes store for both the iPad and the iPhone. Drop the gun, give the mutants a rest, and pick up the sword — cost of entry is $5.99 and the file size is a whopping 318.3MB.

What are you waiting for?

Today’s “people familiar with the discussions” prattle carried by both the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times has Apple reducing the price of some of its US television shows to 99 cents in time for the iPad launch. A quick search through the iTunes store makes it apparent that Apple has already been experimenting with the 99 cent rate (and a few freebies) on select iTunes episodes; shows that previously ran $1.99 for standard definition quality or $2.99 in HD. Of course, this could all change by the time the iPad launches since the talks are ongoing. Unfortunately, discussions between Apple and content providers to provide a monthly TV subscriptions have stalled according to sources at the Wall Street Journal, although Apple remains open to the idea.

It’s worth remembering that prior to adding video support to its iPods, Steve Jobs regularly lambasted the idea of watching video on a tiny, handheld display. The iPad, with its big 9.7-inch 1,024 x 768 pixel IPS panel, is certainly better positioned for video consumption so it’s no surprise to hear rumors that Apple’s trying to jump start its video business by getting back to the magical 99 cent price point it so loves.

Source:  Wall Street Journal, Financial Times

The Rē™ IR accessory and app combine to turn your iPhone® or iPod touch® into a universal remote control that can work in any room of your home or anywhere else. There is no need for Wifi, so plug your Rē™ into your Apple® device and personalize control of your AV entertainment everywhere.

At home, the Rē™ gives you instant access to the functions of all of the remotes you have stuffed in that cluttered drawer and can replace the lost remote you’re convinced you’ll find. You can setup the Rē™ in minutes and have every individual remote instantly available at your finger tips. But more than that, you can build activity remotes that orchestrate your AV equipment to work together and make each viewing or listening activity personalized for simple control.

Away from home, the Rē™ and your iPhone or iPod give you the power to mute the loud TV nobody is watching, or change channels in the break room when the office remote is lost. There are no limits to the number of locations that you can use your Rē™.

• Feature Rich User Interface
• Personalize Settings and Create Macros
• Built-in IR Device Database
• Capable of “Learning” any Remote
• Works Anywhere
• No Batteries, Wires, or WiFi Required
• Unprecedented Power and Value

Quietly unveiled alongside the 27-inch iMac and the Magic Mouse was this: Apple’s attempt to force the unibody construction that we’ve already seen used on its MacBook Pro into the lowly MacBook line. This 13-incher didn’t revolutionize Apple’s low-end laptop line, but it did add a pinch of style and an integrated “7-hour” battery while keeping the price tag steady at $999. We certainly had our fair share of gripes when testing this scuff-magnet out, but now that you’ve had nearly two months to toy around with your own, we’re anxious to hear what you’d do different next time. Is the build quality up to your standards? Are you still weeping uncontrollably as you search in vain for a FireWire 400 port? Is the 9400M GPU potent enough for you? Did this honestly deserve to be priced at a few hundies less? Feel free to unleash hot fury in comments below — maybe ole Steve will feel the heat.

Source: Engadget.com

Well that’s that, apparently. Although this story has evolved quite a bit over the day, according to Peter Kafka over at All Things Digital, Apple has indeed coughed up the dough for music streaming service Lala. If you believe what you read in the report (and you probably can, Kafka tends to be a straight shooter), Apple’s snapping up the company for what will amount to a bargain-basement price… possibly less than $.50 on the dollar. However, Kafka says at least one source claims his valuation of the deal is off, but we’ll have to wait for some official word before we know for sure. If this turns out to all be true, the lingering question is still about Apple’s reasoning behind the purchase — is the company after a particular technology, or is there a service in the offing? Hopefully we’ll know soon.

Note: If you want a little background on Lala, Ross Rubin has covered the service extensively in his Switched On column.

One of the natural side effects of being the largest maker of cellphones in the world is that you produce a lot of different models — a lot — which makes it way too easy for product planning, engineering, and marketing to all have corners cut for even the most important devices in the herd. Nokia seems to be coming to terms with that, though, announcing that it’ll scale back from “around 20″ smartphones released this year to roughly a half of that in 2010, allowing it to give each phone the TLC it so desperately needs. Interestingly, the company says that it’s looking to the low- to midrange smartphone realm as a hot new competitive frontier — and an area where it’ll “have tools to play offence [sic] as well as defense,” possibly thanks to its continued involvement in Symbian even as it looks to Maemo to grow the high end. By any measure, it sounds like Nokia’s starting to get the hint — but it’s still anyone’s guess what kinds of products will ultimately see out of these guys over the next 12 to 18 months.

HELSINKI (Reuters) –

The world’s top cell phone maker Nokia will drastically cut back on the number of different smartphone models it rolls out next year as the Finnish firm tries to shrug off new rivals Apple Inc and RIM.

Twelve South on Monday announced the BassJump, a portable, USB-powered “subwoofer” designed to enhance your MacBook’s audio output by adding midrange and bass frequencies that the MacBook’s built-in speakers can’t adequately produce.

At 5 inches square by 2.2 inches tall, and weighing just 1.4 pounds, the BassJump is small enough to carry in your laptop bag. The speaker’s extruded-aluminum enclosure hosts a 3-inch driver that can produce lower frequencies than a MacBook’s built-in speakers. The BassJump connects to a USB port on your MacBook for power and audio, and you control the speaker’s output via a new BassJump Sound System pane in System Preferences. The software lets you choose the relative volume of the BassJump (compared to your MacBook’s own speakers), the crossover frequency (from 100Hz to 300Hz), and one of five different EQ settings.

The $80 Bassjump is available now from the online Apple Store, Apple retail stores, and the Twelve South Website. The Bassjump’s software requires Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later.

So you like Apple’s fancy Magic Mouse? Its a beautiful piece of engineering with an insane price tag of $70. Problem is, even at $70, it only works on Macs leaving Windows users in the dust. But thanks to a hidden update here is how you get this little guy to work in Windows XP (32 bit) to Windows 7.

Thanks to a little hackery from Apple’s Bluetooth Update (located here) the Magic Mouses driver was extracted via WinRar resulting in a 32bit version and a 64bit version that you can install on any ordinary Windows PC that will enable all the scrolling ‘magic’ of the Magic Mouse.

The debate over Droid v. iPhone rages on, but lots more Android surprises are on the way. Get ready for the Google Phone. It’s no longer a myth, it’s real.

The next “super” Android device will almost certainly be a HTC phone that’s much thinner than even the Droid or iPhone – The Dragon/Passion. This is the phone the senior Android guys at Google are now carrying around and testing, at least as of a couple of weeks ago. If you’re willing to give up the Droid’s keyboard, the Dragon/Passion is going to be a really cool phone. It should be fully available very soon.

But it isn’t the Google Phone. Everything up until now has just been a warm up to the Google Phone.

Way more interesting are the rumors we’ve been hearing for months about a pure Google-branded phone. Most of our sources have unconfirmed information, which we describe below. But there are a few things we have absolutely confirmed: Google is building their own branded phone that they’ll sell directly and through retailers. They were long planning to have the phone be available by the holidays, but it has now slipped to early 2010. The phone will be produced by a major phone manufacturer but will only have Google branding (Microsoft did the same thing with their first Zunes, which were built by Toshiba).

There won’t be any negotiation or compromise over the phone’s design of features – Google is dictating every last piece of it. No splintering of the Android OS that makes some applications unusable. Like the iPhone for Apple, this phone will be Google’s pure vision of what a phone should be.

That’s it for confirmed, super-high confidence information, which frankly isn’t a whole lot more than we all heard back in late October. But we also have a few more details as well that we’ve gathered from a number of sources. Everything that follows we still consider to be just well-sourced rumors:

One source told us that HTC, a Taiwanese company, is building the new Google phone, but we think that information is incorrect. We have some fairly good information that suggests Google is working with a Korean phone manufacturer on the Google phone – LG or Samsung. Samsung has multiple parts in the iPhone and could be pressured by Apple not to work with Google, which says LG is the more likely partner for Google. So rumors like this one may be much more important than they first appear. But either way, the best information we have right now points directly at Korea as the birthplace of the Google Phone.

We’ve also heard from a good source that Google is planning a big advertising push around the device early next year – like January.

That’s all we have for now. We don’t yet know what the device will look like, how big it will be, or even if it has a physical keyboard. But we do know that Google is getting into the phone building business directly, and doesn’t seem too concerned about competing with all the other device manufacturers building Android phones.