After "careful investigation," Nintendo is officially suing Palworld developer Pocketpair...but not for copyright infringement.

Palworld, dubbed "Pokemon with guns," exploded onto the games market in 2024 with thunders multi-million sales. The early access game managed to accrue 25 million players in a month's time through a combination of full game sales and access via Xbox Game Pass (at the time, Palworld was confirmed to have sold 15 million copies on Steam).

While the indie hit was quite close to copyrighted pocket monsters used by Nintendo and The Pokemon Company in their collective billion-dollar franchise, no lawsuit was filed alleging any kinds of copyright infringement. But Nintendo is nonetheless suing Pocketpair, just not for copyright--Nintendo is going after the indie studio for alleged patent infringement.

Qualcomm reportedly made a takeover approach to Intel this week, according to The Wall Street Journal, and only weeks after rumors flew that Qualcomm explored buying 'pieces' of Intel's chip design business.

In the new report, Qualcomm approached Intel and taking control of the sinking ship, as Intel has been slipping in pretty much all divisions for years now. It has lost considerable desktop CPU market share to AMD, the same in the server/HPC markets, lost the GPU battle, the laptop battle is now shifting to AMD, it's firing 15,000+ staff, its semiconductor arm is struggling big time (and lost out to AMD for Sony's next-gen PlayStation 6 contract).

At this point, it's more like "what is Intel doing right?" and this is where Qualcomm seems to be heavily interested, but as Reuters points out, even if Qualcomm did acquire Intel, it would set off alarm bells across the planet, and especially the microscope of antitrust scrutiny.

Key members of Xbox's senior leadership team are apparently quite interested in an Xbox handheld, but will corporate greenlight more potentially risky hardware?

Hardware is not Xbox's strong suit. Unlike other members of the Big 3 (Sony and Nintendo), Xbox does not sell its consoles at a profit. In fact, Microsoft has never sold an Xbox at a profit. The company loses up to an estimated $200 per Xbox Series X sold. Yet Microsoft is still making Xbox consoles because they are critical pathways into its $18.5 billion content and services market--the new Xbox Series X/S duo coming this holiday attest to this, especially with their new higher price tags that help offset the losses.

So...that brings us to an interesting crossroads for Xbox. While the division is trying to expand across all vectors and platforms, there's one area Xbox has been relatively absent: Handhelds. Big-name OEMs like Valve, Lenovo, MSI, and ASUS have created a new hardware market segment with their respective handheld PCs, influenced in no small part by the best-selling Nintendo Switch.

Following the largest acquisition in the history of the tech industry, Microsoft's corporate leaders have lofty expectations for Xbox's earnings performance.

In 2023, Microsoft acquired games powerhouse Activision Blizzard King for $70 billion, adding thousands of employees and 8x new billion-dollar IPs to the Xbox brand. This buyout was a major win for Xbox, adding tons of long-term value through mega-hit games like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush. The acquisition also came with lots of responsibility for the games division at a time when Xbox was already being pressured to grow in an industry that appeared to be doing anything but.

That pressure has weighed on Xbox as Microsoft's board of directors and top C-suite executives scrutinize quarterly results even more than they had before. So far, the results have been impressive; Xbox may not be growing significantly on its own without Activision, but with Activision, Xbox delivered a record-breaking $21.52 billion revenue in FY24. It's unknown whether or not Xbox is meeting Microsoft's internal projections, but new reports indicate that these metrics are difficult to achieve.

Samsung has announced it has started mass production of its new PM9E1: a new Gen5 SSD with the industry's highest performance and largest capacity.

The company is using a Gen5 SSD controller that's made on its in-house 5nm process node, using 8th-generation V-NAND (V8) technology. Samsung says its new PM9E1 will provide "powerful performance and enhanced power efficiency, making it an optimal solution for on-device AI PCs".

Samsung has made improvements to performance, storage capacity, power efficiency, and security over its predecessor in the PM9A1a SSD. YongCheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics, said: "Our PM9E1 integrated with a 5 nm controller delivers industry-leading power efficiency and utmost performance validated by our key partners. In the rapidly growing on-device AI era, Samsung's PM9E1 will offer a robust foundation for global customers to effectively plan their AI portfolios".

Sony has reportedly got two different PlayStation 6 SoCs in development right now, both are being provided by AMD and made by TSMC, with one of them being for the next-gen PlayStation 6 (PS6) console, and the other for a PS6-style handheld.

In a post on the NeoGAF forums, leaker KeplerL2 said: "There's two SoCs in development for next-gen, idk if it's a Series X/S situation or home console + handheld, but probably one of them will be affordable at least", and then replied to a question from another forum member, with KeplerL2 replying: "Yes the two SoCs I mentioned in that thread are for PS6".

This lines up with rumors we heard from leaker Moore's Law is Dead back in February 2024, where we heard about the "Vita 2" being a "PlayStation 6 Family" handheld that will launch "many years from now". The new PS6 handheld would offer amazing levels of performance in the future, but it won't match the next-gen PS6.

EA is cooking up its next-generation Battlefield game that we're all slowly getting hyped for, with ex-Infinity Ward and Apex Legends boss Vince Zampella heading up the Battlefield team for EA... and man, we're hearing some cool things like the return of the Community Test Environment (CTE) in the new Battlefield.

The new Battlefield is going back to its roots -- at least -- returning to its former Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 glory, with EA wanting to move far and away from the clusterfuzz that was Battlefield 2042. Vince Zampella is the head of Respawn Entertainment and EA Studios GM, recently speaking with IGN confirming and teasing some new Battlefield details.

Zampella said that the era of Battlefield 3, which was released 13 years ago in 2011, and Battlefield 4 in 2014 which is now 10 years old, as the series' peak. BF3 and BF4 had a 64-player max per match, which will be the same format for the new Battlefield, as well as its old class system -- see ya later, Specialists -- with a modern-day look that looks to take place in 2025-2030.

Nintendo's next-generation Switch 2 is expected to be unveiled next week, joining the party of Sony's just-announced higher-end PlayStation 5 Pro console. But now we're learning AMD bid "hard" against NVIDIA to win the Switch 2 contract, and lost... but AMD also won the PlayStation 6 contract, so there's that.

In a new video from Moore's Law is Dead, we're learning from Tom's sources inside of NVIDIA that said the T239 SoC inside of the Nintendo Switch 2 was finalized back in 2022. We've heard plenty about the T239 processor since then through leaks and NVIDIA hacks, with the source saying T239 inside of Switch 2 has some efficiency tweaks from the Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, and a "few other goodies" but it's basically a cost-optimized verison of NVIDIA's Orin chip.

MLID talked to some of his sources within NVIDIA, where the first source said: "I'm not that close to the project, but I can say that Samsung 8nm is a perffect match for Nintendo. It's the lowest cost/transistor node on the market, and it's not expected to be as competitive for capacity as more modern nodes over the next few years. Also, remember that with the 128-bit LPDDR5, Nintendo could realistically choose 8GB, 12GB, or 16GB capacities for the SoC we designed for them".

AMD only just released its Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" APUs, but with a heavily beefed-up "Strix Halo" teased in the rumor mill for months now... but now we're hearing about a new Ryzen AI Max naming scheme for Strix Halo.

The company is reportedly working on new Strix Halo APUs that will be split into three newly-rumored SKUs: the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, Ryzen AI Max 390, and Ryzen AI Max 385 each with differing CPU and GPU core counts.

Each of the new Strix Halo APUs will supported up to a monster 96GB of DDR5 RAM, which completely destroys the hardware limit of just 32GB of on-package memory with Intel's soon-to-be-here Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" processors.

TikTok parent company ByteDance is developing not one but two new AI GPUs that are reportedly being made on TSMC 5nm process node, and will enter mass production in 2026.

The information is coming from The Information, where according to their sources ByteDance will reduce its reliance on NVIDIA for its AI hardware, all the while staying in the lines of US export regulations. ByteDance's new AI GPUs are in the design phase, with one of them being for AI training and the other for AI inference.

ByteDance's new AI GPUs are said to be made on TSMC 4N/5N process nodes, which is similar to the 4NP process node that TSMC uses to make NVIDIA's new Blackwell AI GPUs. The TikTok parent company reportedly spent over $2 billion buying over 200,000+ NVIDIA H20 AI GPUs (which cost around $10,000 per H20 AI GPU) this year alone, with many of the AI GPUs not yet delivered by NVIDIA.

Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle has shot his latest movie -- 28 Years Later -- on Apple's older-gen iPhone 15 Pro Max smartphone with some attachments.

In a new report from WIRED, we're learning that the $75 million Hollywood sequel was filled on smartphones, with Boyle starting out his directing duties with 28 Days Later back in 2002 which saw the introduction of Cillian Murphy (his latest movie was Oppenheimer) and it was shot on a regular Canon XL-1 camera worth $4000.

28 Years Later wrapped production at the end of August, where up until now production details have been kept under wraps -- the big detail here is that it was shot on the iPhone 15 Pro Max smartphone. Staff were required to sign NDAs preventing the disclosure that 28 Years Later was shot on smartphones, but a single paparazzi shot out of 150 photos from July, shows a high-end camera that looks like a regular lens... but it's not: it's connected to a smartphone that's inside of a protective cage, according to a professional camera operator not involved with the movie telling WIRED.

Sony has just announced its new PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro "30th Anniversary Limited Edition Bundle" which have some wicked original PlayStation styling throughout the console, controller, and peripherals.

The company is celebrating 30 years since the launch of the original PlayStation, and I remember it fondly: we went to the shopping center near my family at the time (Colonnades, Noarlunga, South Australia for anyone wondering) and picked up the original Resident Evil and Tomb Raider games for the PlayStation.

Man, I remember it fondly... both of those games have spawned into multi-billion-dollar gaming and movie franchises on multiple platforms (and mobile) now.

Windows 11 has become rather notorious for Microsoft jamming in adverts - or 'recommendations' of one sort of another - pretty much everywhere in the interface, but the company's latest move on the ad front looks to be a positive one.

Windows Latest noticed a recent change in test builds of Windows 11 in the Canary and Beta channels (although not everyone has seen this, so the measure is seemingly still rolling out on a limited basis).

It involves the Privacy & security panel in the Settings app, where Microsoft has taken the 'General' options page and turned it into a 'Recommendation & Offers' page.

Ausom is one of the leading manufacturers when it comes to electric scooters and the company is proud to showcase three offerings, the Gallop SR1, and the Leopard DT1 Pro and DT1. If you are interested in these, Ausom is offering $50 off to TweakTown readers when using code Tweak918 at check out.

Starting off with the Gallop SR1, Ausom has equipped this electric scooter with a security system that has set it apart from the competition, with an integrated NFC locking feature that enables riders to unlock their scooter with a tap of their smartphone. Additionally, the Gallop SR1 comes with a lighting system, joystick-controller turn signals for optimized visibility, and hydraulic disc breaks to make stopping a smooth and as safe as possible.

The SR1 features two massive motors capable of delivering 2000W of power, pushing the rider to a top speed of 41 miles per hour. The SR1 will also be able to climb at an angle of 46%, and with its 20.8Ah battery, it has a top range of 54 miles. As for the build of the e-sccooter, Ausom has constructed the SR1 out of an aluminum alloy, making it highly resistant to breakage. Furthermore, the SR1 has 10"x3" knobby tires that are designed for off-road, rugged terrain.

Apple rolled out its new iOS 18 update, and unfortunately, some users downloading the iPad version are reporting that the update is bricking their device. 

iOS 18 hit every iPhone 14 and above on Monday, along with iPadOS 18, and it appears that Apple made some mistakes with its development of iPadOS 18. Shortly after the release of the iPad update users began taking to Reddit to report their iPad became unresponsive mid-update, leading to it shutting down and not turning back on. Another Reddit user reported their iPad was "completely bricked" after downloading the new update. 

Officially, Apple hasn't publicly commented on the anecdotal evidence that iPadOS 18 is causing problems for iPads, but the company has quietly pulled the update from M4 iPad Pros, which leads me to believe these iPads were the most affected by the update. MacRumors reports that not all M4 iPad Pro owners experienced these reported problems, and those who are affected are likely jumping over an OS version to iOS 18.

Recently, NVIDIA quietly announced that it was changing the design of the popular GeForce RTX 4070 graphics cards, switching from GDDR6X memory to the more readily available GDDR6 memory. The change was made due to a GDDR6X shortage, with NVIDIA noting that the update or revision would deliver 'similar performance' to the existing GDDR6X models.

Without a price change, there has been some backlash to the decision - according to vocal community members, NVIDIA should have announced a price drop for what is perceived as a weaker card being manufactured with more affordable components.

With GeForce RTX 4070 cards with the revised GDDR6 memory making their way to retail shelves from various NIVIDA partners, there is one model that features a price point lower than its GDDR6X counterpart. The ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 4070 Twin Edge, which is currently available for $10 less than the GDDR6X version at US retailer Newegg for $549.99 instead of $559.99.

When we reviewed the Logitech G ASTRO A50 X wireless gaming headset, it was a revelation regarding sound quality, broadcast-quality microphone, and comfort. However, upgrading the base station to turn it into an HDMI switcher for PC and console gaming raised the price tag accordingly.

Well, for those wanting an upgrade for the ASTRO A50 that remains true to previous models, the new Logitech G ASTRO A50 5th Generation Wireless Gaming Headset and Base Station is for you. The base station's HDMI switching capabilities are removed, and instead, a more traditional USB approach is used for connecting multiple devices.

This not only lowers the price to match the previous non-X A50 release at $299.99 USD, but it retains all of the new features of the A50 X - including PLAYSYNC AUDIO, the same quality, comfort, and award-winning 24-bit wireless sound.

With a height of just 23mm, the new Logitech G915X Gaming Keyboard is the company's thinnest low-profile gaming keyboard to date - and a successor to the original and popular G915. Logitech describes the new G915X as a flagship, built from premium components and materials, including a "completely redesigned galvanic switch."

This is an improvement and change from the original G915 from 2019. Yes, it has been five years since the G195 first appeared. It introduces a new POM, cross-style stem switch design that improves key stability and supports replacement while offering more customization options. Also, it is quieter typing.

The flagship G915 X LIGHTSPEED offers up to 800 hours of battery life, a twenty percent improvement over the original. However, with 100 percent RGB brightness, this drops to 36 hours.

Microsoft is scheduled to end support for Windows 10 in October 2025, but before the world's most popular operating system reaches its end of life, Redmond has rolled out a new update that addresses changes related to the European Digital Markets Act (DMA). 

One of the ways Microsoft intends to comply with the new DMA changes or operating regulations for any country that falls within the European Economic Area (EEA) is to change how signing into apps on Windows within Windows 10 and Windows 11. Reports indicate that if a user located in a country within the EEA signs into Windows and then clicks on an app, a prompt will appear asking the user if they want to use their Windows login credentials for the application. 

This feature is what Microsoft call an SSO notice, or single sign-on notice. In December 2023 the company said that if a user logins into the app with the same credentials they logged into Windows with, the SSO notice would not longer appear. However, in August Microsoft revealed the notice was appearing much more frequently then intended, for Windows 10 and Windows 11 users. 

A US government regulatory body has issued a proposal to fine Elon Musk's SpaceX more than half a million dollars for safety violations.

The regulator is, unsurprisingly, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the regulatory body that investigates and ultimately grants licenses for flight within US airspace. The FAA has been investigating SpaceX after every launch of its Starship launch vehicle, the world's largest and most powerful rocket.

However, Starship isn't the only SpaceX rocket in the FAA's sights, as the regulator is stringent with making sure the Elon Musk-led company, and any other space-fairing company, is following all the licensing requirements issued to them.