BF3Blog has received an anonymous report from inside Valve, that they are in late-stage talks with EA to bring Battlefield 3 to Steam. The rumor is that Battlefield 3 will be available just in time for the release of the game on October 25. According to the report, EA and Valve are very close to reaching an agreement regarding sales of DLC content, which is the main reason Battlefield 3 wasn't previously coming to Steam.

Valve requires that all DLC is sold through Steam, whereas EA prefers to sell it through their own channels. This was why Crysis 2 (another EA title) was pulled from Steam earlier this year. Many PC gamers have lobbied both EA and Valve to bring Battlefield 3 to Steam and it looks like this may just happen. Fingers crossed!

Twitter and Facebook (as well as Apple stocks) is alive with disappointed after expecting more from the "Let's talk Apple" event.

Apple left the biggest announcement of the show till the end by introducing "Siri" aka your iPA (personal assistant). Siri takes voice commands and throws the whole concept out the window with a wildly impressive new way for you to communicate with your iPhone.

Apple bought Siri (a mobile assistant app) in April last year and has spent the time since evidently doing a great job of implementing it into iOS 5.0.

The internet and its dog can relax now, Apple has just got done officially revealing and discussing its latest smartphone, the iPhone 4S.

In what seems like what the iPhone 3GS was to the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 4S looks exactly the same as the iPhone 4, but comes with a lot more power. Using the new A5 chip that is used in the iPad 2, Phil Schiller from Apple said "Dual-core CPU, 2x as fast at CPU tasks. Also dual-core graphics. Up to 7x faster in the previous iPhone. One area you really see it scream is in games."

Some may have been expected a low-cost iPhone in the 4S, but we really all should have known it would just be a supercharged iPhone 4. When I say just, that might not have been the right way to put it. I've been using my iPhone 4 since it was first released and it is getting on the slow side and with all the new features and improvements coming to iOS 5.0, the extra power provided by the A5 chip should make a big difference when comparing to a regular iPhone 4 with the A4 chip. Add on to this the iPhone 4S is not a 4G phone as was rumored, but it will be able to offer twice the download speeds of the iPhone 4 with HSDPA compliancy of 14.4Mbps versus 7.2Mbps of the iPhone 4.

Plextor has hit up the ever growing SSD market with a new line of SATA 6Gbps drives in regular 2.5-inch form. There are currently two drives in the new lineup, the 128GB PX-128M2P and 256GB PX-256M2P, both of which depend on Marvell's 88SS9174 controller together with Toshiba TH58TV68D2FDA88 MLC 34nm NAND flash.

With 512MB DDR3 cache on the 256GB model and half that (256MB) on the 128GB, sequential write speeds vary between the two with Plextor promising write rates of 440MB/sec and 320MB/sec on the 256 and 128GB drives, respectively. Read rates, however, are equal at up to 500MB/sec.

Other included features of the new Plextor drives are SMART, NCQ, TRIM, Bad Block Management, Instant Restore and Plextor TrueSpeed firmware. As for pricing, with the drives first showing up in Japan we can get an idea from the JPY pricing of 46,800 (about $610 US) on the 256GB model and 21,800 (about $284 US) on the 128GB.

Enjoy the Superman reference? If not, I meant Phantom Zone, which means that Microsoft have killed the Zune, officially. Microsoft have removed all references to the Zune HD from its Zune site on Monday and later claimed that the removal was "a mistake". I don't think so, Microsoft. It looks as though they might have removed them early, and the removal was pushed mistakenly. A new support article on Microsoft Zune's support pages makes it very clear:

We recently announced that, going forward, Windows Phone will be the focus of our mobile music and video strategy, and that we will no longer be producing Zune players. So what does this mean for our current Zune users? Absolutely nothing. Your device will continue to work with Zune services just as it does today. And we will continue to honor the warranties of all devices for both current owners and those who buy our very last devices. Customer service has been, and will remain a top priority for us.

This confirmation is the arrow to the heart of Zune, as they've failed to prove popular against Apple's iPod. Microsoft did kill off their original Zune-based devices earlier this year, which was the beginning of the inevitable end. Microsoft urged customers to purchase Windows Phone 7 devices for the Zune experience.

Toshiba's 3840x2160 resolution autostereoscopic (no glasses) 3DTV was announced in Europe at IFA last month, but it has now debuted in Japan during CEATEC. This time, with more details. Toshiba revealed that in lenticular 3D mode, it's limited to an effective resolution of 1280x720, and also showed off the face tracking that automatically optimizes the experience for up to nine simultaneous viewers depending on where they're sitting.

Toshiba also mentioned that there was an optional THD-MBA1 input adapter due out in 2012 and that 4K-res streaming IPTV is currently being tested. The Regza 55X3 will be priced at roughly $10K, which is close to its Euro-specced counterpart when it launches in December. No US launch date is currently known. But, I'll take 3 of them, thank you.

Sony are planning to update their PlayStation 3 to allow it to have support for 4096x2160 (4K) content. It will only be still content, but showing off some super high resolution photos on a 4K-capable screen or projector will look insanely awesome. The firmware update is planned for early 2012 and will let the PS3 support native output of 4K stills. The PlayStation store in Japan already has a PlayView "visual magazine" which supports both 4K and 3D.

This new update will allow any high resolution image to blow up to 4K resolution. Obviously you need a 4K-capable display or projector, but at least if you have the cash to spend on a 4K screen you now have something to use your PS3 for other than gaming and Blu-ray movies.

Fusion-io have today announced the next evolution of their ioMemory platform for powering application acceleration and data center optimization. Fusion-io previously broke performance barriers when they released their first enterprise MLC products which dramatically enhanced reliability metrics for enterprise flash, and redefined server-side flash have done it again by introducing their new ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo.

David Flynn, Fusion-io CEO and Chairman says:

Customers have grown to expect nothing but groundbreaking products from Fusion-io. Today, we are proud to raise the bar once more with the ioDrive2. Just as many competitors gauge success by Fusion-io performance standards, we developed the ioDrive2 to outperform the original ioDrive on all measures. Companies around the world trust ioMemory to supply critical data to their trading platforms, ERP systems, virtual environments, enterprise applications and databases, and now, they can rely on the ioDrive2 to accelerate even more of the data that powers our information economy.

Apple seem to change their mind quicker than most companies, and this news is no different. It looks as though Apple might be working on its own GPU technology which would see an Apple-based GPU that would power more than just desktop systems, but quite possibly any future iteration of their iOS-based devices. It might seem like a stretch, but the smartphone and tablet industry is moving more and more away from CPU-based designs to GPU-based designs.

As we see the industry move away and we have companies like NVIDIA making strides in the market, Apple will obviously want a piece of this pie. Apple would obviously not want to create its own CPU as that is quite the engineering effort, and it would be a copy cat design of another company like Intel, AMD or Arm. Graphics allows innovation in new and unusual ways - plus production can be offloaded to places like TSMC.

We have NVIDIA and AMD fighting in the DirectX corner, but an open graphics platform allows for much more flexibility - if you can be certain of what kind of hardware you're targeting. With Apple, there is no option, so it would be a very fixed/stable environment - this is perfect for introducing a slew of new and unusual features and methodologies in a GPU. It would be very different to anything else on the market, because of Apple's very tight grip of its environment.

Battlelog is currently experiencing a love/hate relationship with gamers - some love it, some hate it. But the below trailer shows that there's more to Battlelog than just a server browser and front end. Battlelog expands on the franchise's history of stats tracking, combining it with new social networking features that look like they're ripped right out of Facebook. Another major benefit of Battlelog is that its free, absolutely free. Where the competition (Call of Duty) charges a monthly charge to use the "Elite" service.

Battlelog displays so many options its hard to list them all here, but stand-out displays show different stats on weapons, accuracy, awards, time spent on weapons, win/loss ratios, you're able to comment on games after you've played them (great feature!) which makes Battlelog a serious addition to the Battlefield 3 universe. Battlelog can be used on not only the PC, but consoles and even mobile devices.

Leaderboards can also be looked at, and you can option it so your leaderboard only shows your friends - so you can see who really rules the Battlefield. DICE have supplied the tools to expand the franchise itself, and keep users constantly trying to out-do each other.