This news may be a little bit old for some, but just in case you hadn’t heard the Wii Fit game from Nintendo which is bundled with the Wii Fit Balance Board has gotten an official release date and now an official price. $89.99 will be the price tag associated with Wii Fit on its May 19 US launch date. This price includes both the game and the board bundled together.

In the short time since the announcement, pre-orders for the Wii Fit on Amazon has moved up into the number one position with an 885,500 percent increase in just a day, not to mention all the accessories. Needless to say, it looks like this is going to be another hot item for Nintendo this year.

Nintendo

The new DVI Extender Kit from IOGear packs some serious high-def distance into a relatively affordable package. The DVI extender has the ability to send both a video and audio signal up to 100 feet away through a single CAT 5e/6 cable connection, and can be yours for just shy of $500.

Granted, $500 is getting close to the price of some decent high-def displays but if you have a nice system that you would like to keep away from high traffic areas or just out of the way this is a pretty sweet solution and is way better than trying to use a 100-foot DVI cable. The kit includes two boxes, the local and remote DVI extenders with the remote extender having a 3.5mm jack for connecting your stereo speakers at the other end.

This already-shrunk-down version of the All Spark from the Transformers movie has a few less powers than its likeness in the movie and probably won’t turn your gadgets into small Autobots and Decepticons. It does however have the ability to expand your USB ports by 3 as its main purpose is a 4-port USB hub. As if that’s not quite enough for Transformer fans, the hub will also spout out All Spark phrases from the Transformer movie. I don’t think I remember the All Spark doing a lot of talking during the movie but I suppose that was the next best thing to having the device auto-expand into the full-size All Spark.

The USB hub retails for £17.99, but can only be pre-ordered at this time and isn’t expected to be available until the end of August.

Dr. Stuart Parkin and colleagues at IBM have recently published a paper in Science introducing a new type of storage technology dubbed ‘racetrack memory’.

The memory uses something called spintronics which uses the storage of bits generated by the magnetic spin of electrons rather than their charge to identify each as “on” or “off”. This new storage solution offers some advantages over the most popular current options. It’s faster than traditional hard disk drives and has a lower failure rate since there are no moving parts.

Blockbuster has been rumored to have been secretly working on some new technology in the works that would allow streaming video content from an online rental service direct to consumers televisions, and could be available as soon as the next few weeks. No information has been given on the exact technology or price but the service could again bring the home video renting giant back up to par and possibly ahead in technology, compared to other rival video renting services from Netflix and Apple.

Netflix would be directly affected by this new service by Blockbuster and has recently upgraded their service to provide unlimited streaming to some subscribers, however it streams to their computer and not necessarily to the living room of most consumers. In order to work their way into more entertainment centers, Netflix is also looking into providing streaming video rentals through Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console.

When we heard news that Sony and Konami where launching a Metal Gear Solid 4 PS3 in Japan we of course wanted one but new that this was probably one of those cool, Japan-only things that we would never actually see here in the U.S. But, as it turns out Sony is going to be launching this gun metal colored PS3 console in the United States.

Unfortunately it sounds like this release will be a very limited edition in the U.S., so we probably still won’t get our hands on one but at least now there’s a better chance. The MGS4 PS3 along with its matching DualShock 3 controller has a U.S. launch date of June 12 and will come bundled with the game and the standard 80GB PS3.

Flickr announced on Tuesday that it is has added video sharing to its popular photo-sharing online community. The new video sharing feature allows any pro members of the Flickr community to upload and share video clips with others using the same scope restrictions currently available for photo sharing.

The video clips can be taken with just about any device and can be up to 90 seconds in length or have a maximum size of 150MB. Even though only pro members can upload the video, all visitors will be able to view them depending on the share level given to the video. Flicker currently has about 42 million monthly visitors to the popular photo sharing site and hosts around 2 billion photos from around the world. Adding video content is a logical next step in further growing the sites popularity and may entice many people to upload videos with some sharing restrictions which might not have done with sites like YouTube where they are almost instantly public. The site will also have the ability to tag and geotag the videos and the ability to upload straight from a camera phone.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang on Monday shot back a letter in response to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s 3-week ultimatum for Yahoo to come to negotiations with a firm message that Yahoo has not changed their tune in regards to Microsoft taking over the search engine. Ballmer’s letter had spelled out plans for a proxy contest to unseat the exist Yahoo board of directors and that continued delays could reduce the $44.6 billion offer which would mean less for shareholders.

“Our board’s view of your proposal has not changed,” said Yang along with Chairman Roy Bostock. “We continue to believe that your proposal is not in the best interests of Yahoo and our shareholders.”

Instead of going through the negotiations Yahoo has chosen to beat their exclamation points into swords and fight back against Microsoft. Yang continued in the letter stating that the offer and proxy contest would not be in the best interest of Yahoo and certainly not part of a friendly transaction as Microsoft first proposed.

Google has announced the launch of App Engine, a new tool allowing developers to create web applications that can be hosted on a Google’s own infrastructure. The idea of making a hosted development environment isn’t necessarily new as Salesforce has had the Appexchange platform for some time now, along with a few others companies offering similar services. One of the major things that makes Google’s App Engine stand out from the rest however is that it’s free.

The App Engine platform is launching as a “preview release” with all the expected features of the service not quite complete yet. It’s also going to be available only to the first 10,000 developers that sign up, which at the point of this writing appears to be already full. (You can get on a wait list, though).

Microsoft issued another letter to the Yahoo board of directors on Saturday with a deadline of 3 weeks for the company to accept the previous $44.6 billion takeover offer that Microsoft proposed in the beginning of February. Despite some recent talks between the two companies, an agreement has not been made and Microsoft is starting to lean heavy on the search engine firm’s board by threatening to go straight to the shareholders if necessary.

“If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo! board,” the letter read. “The substantial premium reflected in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal.”, stated Steve Ballmer’s letter to Yahoo.

In anticipation of a new iPhone model coming to Germany, T-Mobile has drastically slashed the price of the existing 8GB model from €399 to just €99 for German customers. This lower price equates to approximately $155 USD, where the 8GB iPhone is currently going for $399 with a 2 year contract in the United States.

The €99 iPhone is being offered for a limited time from April 7 through June 30 and comes with a 2 year plan for 89 euros a month. The 16GB model price appears to remain untouched with a price of €499. Apple has been rumored to have a new, faster 3G version of the iPhone in the works and this promotion may be a way to unload some of the older models prior to the launch. Alternatively it could also just be a promotion for Apple and T-Mobile to unload some of their inventory due to poor sales of the iPhone in the area due to the heavy competition of mobile handsets that are 3G enabled.

Rockstar has an edited version of Grand Theft Auto IV to release in Australia this month in order to obtain a MA15+ for the game with the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC). This may not come as a big surprise to those in Australia, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

To make it even worse, Rockstar has not only confirmed that Australia will be getting a censored version of the game, but they have chosen not to divulge what parts of the game have been cut to obtain approval from the Australian game classification system – our guess is the hookers, again. This is no doubt done to leave the benefit of the doubt with consumers that parts of the games they like most will still be there.

Microsoft has announced that the plan for the general end of shipping Windows XP has been extended a couple of years, at least for the Windows XP Home edition. The latest plan for the end of most sales of XP was dated on June 30, 2008 but the advent of a new market of ultra low cost PCs (ULCPCs) has made Microsoft change there tune on forcing everyone onto the new Vista system.

Microsoft has just released Windows Vista SP1 which is usually a good milestone for those looking at upgrading to the next version of Windows, and is a point at which Microsoft helps push them along, but in the case of these UPCPCs, the Vista OS is just to big and expensive. The OLPC (supposed $100) XO laptop is one such machine that could still take advantage of the XP OS but would be forced to stick with Linux or look elsewhere if XP were phased out.

Google today has announced the roll out of a much anticipated feature for the online Google Docs – bringing them offline. Starting today a select group of individuals that have Google Gears will be able to save their online Google documents and have them available offline as well.

The online Google tools currently provide a great convenience with things like Gmail, calendars and online documents with centrally located storage that can be accessed from almost any browser with an internet connection. One of the downsides is that as soon as the internet connection is lost, so are the documents, email, etc. With this new feature, the documents will still be available through the browser when the internet connection is lost and it will continue to save changes, syncing up with the online storage the next time a connection is available.

According to an announcement by Numonyx CEO Brian Harrison, the company is expecting to have phase change memory (PCM) commercially available and start shipping this year. PCM is a new type of memory that would be in competition with Flash memory and has been in the works for decades but has yet to see commercialization.

Numonyx is a joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Intel and appears to be the first to announce a real-sounding time line for this type of memory. A number of companies have been working on phase change memory including an announcement from IBM in late 2006. Harrison says they are shipping samples now and will have the new memory widely commercially available in the next year or two.