Americans spent a record US$5.53 billion on video games in December, the most money ever in a single month, according to market researcher NPD Group.

But even that wasn’t enough to make up for the rest of 2009, and so the year ended with a sales decline.

It had been a rough 12 months for the industry, as the recession led people to cut back on discretionary spending and many gamers’ attention turned to cheaper – or free – online games.

Even so, there were a few notable bright spots, mainly Nintendo Co. and Activision Blizzard Inc. whose latest “Call of Duty” game set entertainment records when it hit stores in the fall.

NPD said Thursday U.S. retail sales of gaming software, hardware and accessories climbed 4 percent in December when compared with the same month a year earlier.

Much of this increase was due to sales of gaming systems, a signal that price cuts by console makers in August and September helped lure holiday shoppers into buying them as gifts.

Hardware sales jumped 16 percent to $2.19 billion.

The Nintendo Wii sold 3.8 million units, more than its rivals, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 did, combined. It set a record for most gaming systems ever sold in a single month.

“Despite all of the dire predictions,” said Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, Nintendo had a “historic” 2009.

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Of all the hype generated by the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, few products generated more headlines and heat than tablet PCs.

Technology-industry executives showed off their newest table wares to varying degrees of excitement.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer got a ho-hum reaction as he showed off a new H-P Slate tablet, while executives from Dell Inc. gave a look at what they called a tablet-concept device that features a 5-inch screen.

Graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp. boasted of the 500 engineers it took to design that company’s new Tegra microchip, which Nvidia claims will revolutionize the capabilities of tablet devices.

Then there was Apple Inc. — or rather, there wasn’t Apple, which didn’t attend CES but is expected to introduce a tablet Mac of its own, as soon as the end of the month.

Indeed, Apple’s shadow led some analysts to assert that no one would even be talking about tablets were it not for the anticipation over what the Cupertino, Calif.-based company has planned. Read the rest of this entry »

Bill Gates anticipated great things from the so-called “noughties” when he described it as the “Digital Decade” back in 2001.

“The innovations of this decade will be more than just a handful of new features,” he wrote. “They’ll transform the way the PC fits into our lives, and the way we think about computing.”

Was he right? It’s been ten years of rapid technological change; ten years of smaller, faster and cheaper.

The PDA died; you could cook an egg on the heat generated by a 3.8GHz Pentium 4 PC; small laptops spawned recession-friendly netbooks; and social networking exploded with MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

PENTIUM 4: The Intel Pentium 4 was planned to scale up to 10GHz, but never made it past a 3.8GHz chip

At the beginning of the decade, Gates prophecised that we’d all be carrying Tablet PCs, accessing our information on the move, and that our shiny Windows XP-powered computers would be the entertainment and communication hubs of our digital homes.

Needless to say, not all of this has come true. But here are some selected highlights extracted from the TechRadar hive-mind – you can add your own in the comments section below. First up… Read the rest of this entry »

Apple Inc, the famous iPhone and Mac maker was just $5 billion company in 1998, but has now reached the market value of $180 billion. Now, market analysts have started an assumption that “€œcould Apple replace Microsoft as world’s most valuable tech company?” Microsoft Corp, the software giant is the world’€™s most valuable technology company with over $250 billion market cap. The company’s Windows operating system (love it or hate it) runs over 92% computers across the world.

Reasons for such assumption

The assumption to unseat Microsoft from the top position comes due to strong cash and fat margins of the Apple, besides its successful product line, apps store, expected tablet PC and the latest Snow Leopard operating system. The company’s best-known hardware products include Macintosh PCs, the iPod and the iPhone. Apple has about 250 retail stores in nine countries and an online store for its hardware and software products.

Fortune magazine reported that Apple has been the most admired company in US (2008) and in the world (2009). Analysts said that the reasons for Apple’€™s high growth are its market-driven innovation and interesting software offerings, which leads to repetitive purchases.

Apple has doubled its annual revenue since 2005 to $36.5 billion and earnings per share (EPS) up more than four-times to $6.29. Whereas, in the same time frame, Microsoft’s annual revenue has ascended just 47% to $58 billion, with EPS up 45% to $1.62. Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t kill yourselves just yet, folks! Several news outlets are running a story about the likelihood of there being habitable moons like the one in the revolutionary movie Avatar. [As an aside, if you have the slightest interest in moviemaking, or just plain filmed entertainment, go and see Avatar on the biggest 3D screen you can find, preferably IMAX; it really does live up to the hype.] From Discovery News:

As James Cameron’s animated sci-fi movie Avatar goes on general release, astronomers point out that the movie’s habitable moon called “Pandora” may exist in reality.

Although none have been found to date, “exomoons” orbiting exoplanets are sure to exist. Could an exomoon be detected? If so, could that exomoon’s atmosphere be probed? Yes and yes, according to today’s announcement by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Mass. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, one poster (Mike) brought it to my attention that he could not find the tutorial to jailbreak his iPod Touch. I’m guessing this happened during one of the design phases that MashingKeys went through earlier this year, but regardless – the articles have always been around and should be easy to find if you use the search function. I’m currently revising the original iPhone jailbreak post, but the instructions are still accessible to everyone on this site. To help our friend Mike out, if you still can’t find the iPod Touch article, it’s right here. Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

Browsing the web during downtime I came across youtube today and found a few videos of people playing music on their cell phone. I’m not talking about mp3’s or fancy music video, all you need to do that is a proper phone and a proper connection. I’m talking about the cell phone pianists who can play everything from Mary had a little lamb to Yoshi’s theme. I thought that was fantastically neat, and obviously a useless skill that one must have! so I have compiled a small list of songs that I know for sure works, and are fun (and makes sense, because when you play a song that doesn’t make sense, people look at you as if you’re.. well, retarded, and no matter how use to it I may be, I still don’t like it) The hardest thing is to list these songs in a way that’s easy to the eyes and make this article look nifty.. and of course if you have a song that should be on this list, post it, I’ll make sure it’s added!! Click past the jump to see the songs.

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Just to start off, by no way are we promoting gang activity or violence.

we don’t want you to lead a hard life and end up as a brilliant prison inventor.

I do think that we’ve all had our stages of “I’m actually cooler then you think I am” during school, and we learn a lot of useless things that only give us “street cred”. Girls are lying when they say they don’t like the bad boys, because the reality is, who doesn’t like a little action in their day to day routine?

One of the many things I picked up during my years of growing up was the tag alphabet. Now Let me throw out this disclaimer, this set of alphabet serves no other purpose other then “to look cool”. It’s more like a fancy font of letters that is, unless you can read it, undecipherable. By no means should you use these letters to tag up bathroom walls with messages like let’s meet at someone’s house, or, it’s time to jump soandso under the flag pole after school, the stash is hidden in locker 420… Stacey’s mom is hot…. etc. If you’re going to use it for that stuff… well anyway. So browsing through the web I’ve found numerous pages on how to draw graffiti bubble letters, and personally, I think those bubble letters are “neat”, but sometimes you just need something practical to get your message through. and especially when you’re trying to get your message down and get out of dodge before whoever the authority is is coming after you. Plus, I’m one of those people whose artistic side never cooperates. I can draw fine when it comes to doodling, 3 am insomniac attacks, but never when I want to convey something, and especially not when I’m ducking teachers in the bathroom. So I thought it’s time to pass on to the next generation of hoodlums just how to convey messages in plain English (maybe a few slang) in an artistic yet practical way.

I’ve included two messages and the alphabet itself. The first message says mashingkeys.com and the second is the phrase “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” to show you all the alphabets.

click for the larger view

Call me a Japan-o-phile, because I am, and one thing I can’t get enough of is the lush colors they use in their traditional arts. yeah it might not be saying much since we’re talking about a game here, but the only game that has done this style of art before is Okami, and okami was very detailed and beautiful.

There’s alot to be said about this Muramasa though, Muramasa was a famous sword-smith that founded the Muramasa school and created blades , Oscar Ratti and Adele Westbrook said taht Muramasa “was a most skillful smith but a violent and ill-balanced mind verging on madness, that was supposed to have passed into his blades…” his blades were believed to hunger for blood and to impel their warriors to commit murder or suicide.

When there’s already that much story to just the name, it’s gotta be a good game!! upon further reading it is said that it’d only take about 7 hours for a normal play through per character, but there are 3 endings per characters and over 100 different swords to collect.

Another thing to note would be that this isn’t a first release just in the US. this game has previously been released in Japan, and some modifications has already done to improve game play. smells like a success, if it’s been tried and proved to be good enough for Japan to let it out of it’s nation, and improved? and it’s on Wii? I’m ready to play!!