MSI has just unveiled another gaming laptop with it already showing up in a few stores and being available for pre-order elsewhere.

The new GT683DX laptop is a 15.6-inch sized unit using one of NVIDIA's most recent high-end mobile GPUs, the GTX 570M with 1.5GB GDDR5 memory. The rest of the default specs include a 1920x1080 Full HD display, 2nd-gen Intel Core i7-2630QM CPU, 4GB of DDR3-1333MHz memory, 1TB (500GBx2 / RAID 0) storage, 8X DVDRW, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth, 2xUSB 3.0, 720p webcam, 2.1 Dynaudio sound system and a 9-cell battery.

Depending on how much extra you may like to spend over the $1,600 odd base price, you can switch things up for a 120GB SSD+750GB HDD, 12GB RAM, Blu-ray drive and matt-finish display.

Google's Android OS has taken an amazing 48% of the smartphone market in Q2 of 2011, which is an all-time high according to a report by market research firm Canalys. Android overtook Symbian in Q4 of 2010 to become to top smartphone platform representing 32.9% market share at the time. Smartphone shipments have increased exponentially also, seeing a total of 107.7 million units shipped in Q2 of 2011 which is a 73% year-on-year growth.

Android was also the biggest driver of smartphone shipments in Q2, with Android-based smartphone shipments being 379% year-over-year higher, coming in at 51.9 million total units shipped. This is thanks to Android being on so many different branded phones such as Samsung, HTC, LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, ZTE and Huawei.

Apple also did well, iOS taking Nokia's Symbian platform on and winning, rising from third to second place. 20.3 million iPhones were shipped and Apple took a 19% market share in the smartphone world. Apple also became the world's leading individual smartphone vendor, taking the throne that was previously owned by Nokia. Samsung also passed Nokia, with Nokia facing a rapid decline in demand across multiple markets.

Sony have previously said their next-generation portable gaming machine, PlayStation Vita, will launch globally by the end of the year and have said more specifically, that'll it'll be in the fall. Blockbuster have jumped the gun, with IGN nabbing their flier which suggests the PS Vita will hit UK retail shelves on Friday, October 28, 2011. The advertisement suggests that both Vita models will arrive in Europe after two months. Will we see a US or Japan release at the same time? We don't know.

As we can see from the above image (if true), the Vita will be £$229.99 for the Wi-Fi only model, with the 3G & Wi-Fi Vita at £279.99. Pricing doesn't seem too bad considering Sony has promised a PlayStation 3-level experience, as the Vita sports a quad-core ARM Cortex A9 processor with a multi-core PowerVT SGX543MP4 graphics chip that is four times as fast as the PSP. The Vita will come with a 5-inch OLED screen with a resolution of 950x544, two micro-analog sticks to simulate the Dual Shock experience, front and rear-facing cameras, as well as a two-finger multitouch pad on the back of the Vita unit.

Sony is hoping that the front and rear touch screens will offer new three dimension-like motion gameplay experiences never before seem on any device through "touch, grab, trace, push and pull" finger motions. A Sixaxis equivalent with a gyroscope and accelerometer is also available to let players control games by moving and tilting the Vita itself.

WD have today announced that its making the Hulu Plus subscription service available to its WD TV Live Plus and WD TV Live Hub family of media players. WD TV customers can now watch hit TV shows, movies and catch up on previous seasons of their favorite shows.

Hulu Plus compliments the already strong content offerings such as Netflix, Blockbuster, Cinema Now, Pandora, YouTube, Facebook and many others. The Hulu Plus subscription service will allow WD TV customers in the US to watch nearly every episode from dozens of current hit programs all season long from networks such as ABC, Comedy Central, FOX, MTV, NBC and VH-1.

Series such as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,South Park, Modern Family and Grey's Anatomy, to Glee andFamily Guy, to The Office and 30 Rock, dozens of classic shows like Battlestar Galactica, The X-Files, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, Arrested Development, Saturday Night Live, Miami Vice, Ugly Betty, Quantum Leap, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Roswell andAlly McBeal, and hundreds of movies from Miramax and the Criterion Collection.

As many of us know, the next big move we're waiting for from NVIDIA since Fermi came about is the release of its next-generation 600 series cards, dubbed Kepler. As the days roll on following a somewhat uneventful past 8 months or so in the VGA market, it's looking pretty certain that Kepler should come about around the start of 2012.

Kepler will be one of the first products to use TSMC's new 28nm process (with them getting a warmup session on some mobile 28nm GPU parts initially). Of course, it's safe to assume there will be a number of additional features on tap from NVIDIA with these next-gen cards, one of which looks to be in the way of better multi-monitor support.

As reported via the source link below, NVIDIA is apparently taking serious notice of the clear success that is Eyefinity with so many folks jumping aboard and making use of 3-screen gaming bliss since its inception.

ASUS are readying up a standout AMD A75 powered motherboard for launch very soon which HTPC and SFF builders will primarily be attracted to. The new F1A75-I Deluxe is a Mini-ITX based Socket FM1 board which packs a ton of features given its stature.

Using a 4+1 phase CPU VRM setup, it also has a couple DDR3 slots supporting dual channel DDR3-1866 memory and a dedicated PCI-E x16 slot for discrete add-in GPUs should you not already be satisfied with the kickass built-in GPU on the new A-series APU's.

Looking elsewhere on the board, we've got four SATA 6Gbps ports, one eSATA 6Gbps port, 6-channel HD audio with optical S/PDIF, four USB 3.0 ports (two in the form of headers, the other two on the rear I/O), built in WiFi b/g/n support, Gigabit ethernet, Bluetooth and a range of USB 2.0 ports.

At the end of July, Windows XP fell below 50% OS market share. Between June and July, Windows' market share in general dropped 0.63 percentage points (from 88.29-percent to 88.76-percent), whilst Mac OS games 0.22 percentage points and Linux gained 0.03 percentage points. Mobile operating systems have also, most obviously, gained market share. In the same period, Windows 7 gained 0.74 percentage points whilst Vista slipped 0.28.

By the end of 2010, Windows 7 nabbed 20% of the market and by the end of April 2011, it had 25%. Last month Microsoft reported they had sold over 400 million licenses in 21 months which means they're selling no less than 20 million per month. Back to school season is approaching which should see these numbers stay solid until at least 2012.

Blizzard have released some drips of information for their upcoming keyboard/mouse-thrashing RPG, Diablo 3. First off, Diablo 3 will be online-only, Blizzard believe that a high number of users have access to permanent internet connections anyway, and even though piracy was a concern it was not "a deciding factor" in making the decision. Blizzard instead claim that internet connectivity will be necessary due to a cache of Battle.net features that complement the game.

Things like persistent character saving server-side and the possibility of opting in/out of co-op play, persistent friends list, party system and matchmaking, the game's achievement system, and an auction house system that will allow real world currency to purchase items. Blizzard is not planning on selling any items directly through the auction house, instead, they'll let players list items for which they will charge a fixed fee.

The point of this is, real money auctions will be allowed along with in-game gold and normal item trade. Players will be allowed to rock up at the auction house at any time, with instant transactions of nearly everything, inclusive of characters themselves. Finally, Diablo 3 will not include support for bots or mods which Blizzard say is for a "variety of gameplay and security reasons."

ASUS has just dished up a standout graphics card under its DirectCU family with an all-passive cooled HD 6770 powered model.

The first thing that catches your eye with the HD 6770 DirectCU Silent is indeed that chunky passive cooler, which ASUS claims to be 16% more efficient than the reference cooler, while of course being completely silent.

To help with the coolers efficiency, it uses four direct touch copper heatpipes pulling heat away from the GPU. Meanwhile, the card itself boasts a Super Alloy Power design which basically means higher-grade componentry in terms of the capacitors, chokes and MOSFETs, while the rest of the specs shape up with 800 Stream processors, a 128-bit memory interface, 1GB of GDDR5 memory and D-Sub, DVI and HDMI outputs. The out of the box frequencies on the model are not yet known.

Reports are out that the new version of Apple's most popular media player on Windows and Mac, iTunes 11, will feature a UI overhaul as well as deeper iCloud integration. The new UI will be cleaner than the current one and the iTunes Store will not just be a contained web browser anymore. It will instead be properly integrated into iTunes.

The source of this story, iDownloadBlog says:

It's no secret that iTunes is due for a UI upgrade, and this should come true with the release of iTunes 11. A reliable source of ours has stated that iTunes 11, the next major update to iTunes, will be revamped from the ground up.