When early reports said Microsoft was dropping its Xbox 360 price, fans of Sony immediately began to speculate on a sympathetic price drop for PS3. While not a price cut per se, Sony today announced something similar.

At the E3 conference in Los Angeles this afternoon, Sony Computer Entertainment America President and CEO Jack Tretton hosted the company's press conference where he announced that in September, an 80 GB Playstation3 Core unit will be made available for $399.

In Nintendo's E3 keynote this morning, the official announcement of Animal Crossing: City Folk brought with it some unexpected functionality that the Wii had been lacking up to now: voice chat and native SMS/e-mail interactivity.

Animal Crossing: City Folk is the third in Nintendo's series of nonviolent, task-oriented, real-time games set in a fictitious village populated by anthropomorphic animals. Nintendo expects to release it before the end of 2008.

Oftentimes, it's difficult to qualify enthusiast-class hardware when it's just plain buggy, especially early in its lifecycle. Such was the case with D-Link's DSM-330 DivX Connected box, a digital media extender with wireless HD streaming.

D-Link's DivX Connected began its life as GejBox, and evolved into what we have today. At CES earlier this year, we looked at the device, and saw a promising future in it for DivX fans.

Yesterday's announcement of the "New Xbox Experience" was just another step toward Microsoft's almost almost four-year-old goal of making the Xbox 360 the home's TV, movie, music and gaming center.

The Xbox 360 was launched in 2005 with Xbox Live capability, but it wasn't until 2006 when the real push for the 360 to be "more than a console" began. After increasing the size of Live games, and scrapping the HD DVD aspect of the home entertainment unit, Xbox Live experienced a growth surge.

GPU maker Nvidia has been in the press a lot lately, for its tight-lippedness on the failure rates of its 8-series mobile GPUs, its dire competition with AMD/ATI, and its new Rambus patent litigation. Today, however, brought some good news.

Intel announced today that the upcoming single-socket desktop Nehalem CPU platform known as Bloomfield will be getting Nvidia's SLI technology, despite an article in the The Wall Street Journal this morning, saying that Intel and Nvidia were still "squabbling over terms of a 2003 licensing agreement" that could have blocked Nehalem chips from having SLI.

Today at E3, Microsoft announced some new features and content partners that will be coming to Xbox Live, the now billion-dollar division of the company.

Of the $1 billion spent on Xbox Live, over one-third was spent on movie and television content, and of all the converged entertainment solutions Microsoft has given its console, today's announcement of a Netflix partnership will no doubt add the most content.

Today, Apple announced the iPhone's opening weekend figures, claiming it had passed the one million sales mark on Sunday, and that 10 million apps were downloaded in the same three-day period.

One by one on Friday, not individual AT&T stores, but entire cities, reported selling out of the device. By mid-morning, Chicago AT&T stores reported total liquidation. By noon, all of New York City's had sold out.

On Sunday, Microsoft officially announced the $50 price reduction to the 20 GB Xbox 360 for the US, as well as the introduction of a 60 GB model at the $349 price position.

Employees of several consumer electronics retailers provided corroborative leaks last week, showing sales circulars advertising the Microsoft console's price reduction.

The next in Activision's popular line of rhythm-based music simulation games is scheduled for release in Fall 2008, and is single-handedly changing the style of the game with the addition of many new features.

World Tour will follow in the footsteps of Rock Band, offering a drum kit and vocal microphone in addition to the expected guitar controllers, which have reportedly also been upgraded. An eight-player "Battle of the Bands" mode, extended character customization, and online career mode, as well as "the largest on-disc set list in a music-rhythm game to date," have been added. A complete set list, however, has not yet been released.

Sony Computer Entertainment America and Europe have announced another partnership in the PlayStation's growing advertising platform.

In October, Sony Computer Entertainment America announced it had formed a division strictly for developing in-game advertisements for all of the PlayStation platforms, including the PlayStation Network.

After an investigation of newsgroups that uncovered large amounts of underage pornography, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo began a large-scale expulsion of the material at the ISP level. Now there's an official Web site for the effort.

Last month, a statement from the Attorney General's office announced that agreements with Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint had been made to "purge their servers" of sites and Usenet groups that were found to contain child pornography.

It seems that even though excitement is high for the 3G iPhone in the suburbs, for fans of the device, waiting in line is just a natural part of the whole experience.

In many instances, lines of folks awaiting the next big consumer electronics purchase have an air of panic about them. Customers often have a notion that the product they're waiting for could potentially be unavailable if they do not stake an early claim.

Yahoo has announced that it will be offering ad-subsidized versions of popular casual games for download, and anticipates as many as 400 will be available by the end of the year.

Yahoo Games prominently features games with unlimited free trial versions as well as for-pay downloads. Today, the company announced it will be adding free, ad-supported versions of those downloads.

Best Buy announced this week that the Samsung Instinct from Sprint has become the retailer's best selling handset of the last two years, apparently outselling all 95 other phones the retailer carries.

It's quite an understandable feat, though, since Best Buy is the device's exclusive non-Sprint retail provider.

Rumors are rapidly being substantiated as the launch date approaches: A price reduction is evidently being planned for the 20 GB Xbox 360, which looks like it'll go on sale this Sunday, July 13, with a price tag of $299.99.

Leaks from Best Buy, K-Mart, and Gamestop have all provided similar information: the Xbox 360 Pro retailing for $349.99 in the United States will experience a $50 drop in price in time for Microsoft's Monday E3 press conference.