Rumor has it that Apple could be preparing to launch the long-rumored Apple television in 2012. The project is reportedly being led by the same software engineer who developed iTunes, according to Bloomberg, citing people with knowledge of the product. Jeff Robbin, who helped created the iPod, is set to be leading the Apple television development.

Piper Jaffray analyst, Gene Munster, believes that Apple already has a prototype in the wild, and could be prepared to launch it late 2012, if not, early 2013. But, Munster has been saying this since 2009, so we should always take that with a grain of salt. Rumors have floated around of an Apple-branded television set for years now, but what has changed the playing field is Walter Isaacson's authorized biography of Steve Jobs.

Excerpts hit the Internet last week, with Jobs telling Isaacson that he wanted to create a television set that was integrated with Apple products and would be easy to use. Jobs elaborated in the Biography with:

HTC has partnered up with Dropbox to offer a new deal with all of the latest Android-based handsets that will give a bonus of 3GB storage in addition to the 2GB of free storage offered by Dropbox if they connect to the platform with the new phone - launching in October.

The deal which is set to extend to all Sense 3.5 devices in the futurer, all allow users to save files and photos on their phone and have them automatically synced to their computer at home, or other devices running the Dropbox software. Dropbox currently offers users 2GB of storage, free, with the change to upgrade that by 8GB by getting friends to sign up to Dropbox. HTC's additional deal with 3GB makes reaching the 10GB storage for free, not that hard at all.

HTC wasn't clear whether this deal will come to their Windows Phone 7-based smartphones, this may be because Microsoft has Skydrive, which is built directly into the OS. Skydrive also offers 25GB free storage, which blows away the Dropbox offer.

Skyrim is only 2 weeks away and Bethesda have just confirmed the system requirements for the upcoming title. The requirements aren't too bad, but they're a tad higher than the 2006-based Oblivion, so if you're still chugging along on older hardware and want to get the most out of Skyrim, you might want to start an upgrade, now.

Recommended system requirements:

Quad-core Intel/AMD CPU

Fathers of the iPod, Ton Fadell who created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three versions of the iPhone, and Matt Rogers who was responsible for iPod software development at Apple, have a new startup: Nest Labs. Their first product? The Nest Learning Thermostat, which is designed to intelligently "learn" the behaviors of the user and adjust accordingly.

During the first seven days of use, the customer will set base temperatures using a single dial which is like a big click wheel. Click the wheel right for the temperature to increase and the display to turn orange, or to the left, to bring it down and the display turns blue. The Nest then records your initial settings and starts to take over after the first week or so. As usage continues, Nest will fine-tune settings using sensors, algorithms and cloud computing.

As an example, Nest is able to detect when users have left the house using a motion sensor and it will throttle back heating or cooling accordingly. The thermostat also includes an ambient light sensor and will adjust the brightness of the display relative to the surrounding light in the room to not cause eye strain.

To celebrate the launch of Battlefield 3 (for some initial impressions, check it out here), SAPPHIRE Technology have introduced the SAPPHIRE HD 6970 BF3 Special Edition, which sports two SAPPHIRE exclusive technologies, SAPPHIRE FleX and Vapor-X cooling as well as performance enhancing options for the enthusiast and finally, a FREE copy of Battlefield 3.

The SAPPHIRE HD 6970 BF3 Special Edition includes a Dual BIOS switch which goes between two performance settings delivering the best performance in its class. While sitting in the 'normal' setting, clock speed sit at 880MHz for core, 1375MHz for memory and a quite fan profile. Choosing the "boost" setting throws the card up to 930MHz as well as increasing core voltage, fan speed and overclock limits to deliver higher performance.

SAPPHIRE's FleX technology is also great as it allows Eyefinity from three DVI monitors, without the need for DisplayPort or any adapters. Vapor-X cooling is also awesome, which enables the performance to be maxed out, but keeping those noise levels down low.

For everyone who reads TweakTown, and more specifically, my news posts, you'll know that I've been waiting for Battlefield 3 for what feels like, my entire life. I've posted everything from screenshots, to launch trailers, alpha footage to beta/full release footage, interviews, details and everything in-between. I found out on a forum last night that the game can be unlocked for some who change some VPN settings, so I did so...

I have a 3 screen (Alienware AW2310's) in Portrait, backed up by 2 x GIGABYTE GeForce GTX570's and a 4GHz Core i7... the beta, I had a few little issues, but they somehow worked themselves out and I was bug-free for the rest of the beta. The full game on the other hand... doesn't even work on my 3 screen setup. Yes, that's right: the beta worked and the full game does not.

My issue is, I launch the game, and it goes full-screen. Once its in full-screen, I can hear it load up and finish, if I move my mouse I can hear the cursor going over menus, but I cannot see the menus. If I alt-tab and go to a window, the menus appear and it's OK. If I click a menu, it goes back to full-screen. So I have to click a menu, alt-tab, full-screen, click a menu, alt-tab, full screen, etc until I get to video and change it to run in a window.

Yesterday we attended an ASUS motherboard technology seminar in Taipei where we were introduced to its range of upcoming Intel X79 Express chipset based motherboards. These motherboards will support second generation Intel Core i7 processors for high-end desktop systems using the new and larger LGA 2011 socket.

Intel has super tight restrictions on what can be said about these new products and as we are bound by an Intel NDA, we need to stick to the rules. That is one of the reasons why the video below might seem a little cryptic at times - we both had to be very careful what we said. The man in the video below is Jack Cheng who is with the ASUS motherboard R&D team and was kind enough to tell us some ASUS ROG driven features of the Rampage IV Extreme X79 motherboard.

Some of the big ASUS features with this board include the OC Key for simple on-screen and very much on-the-fly overclocking, subzero sense for finding out temperatures under extreme cooling conditions and VGA hotwire for putting your video card through hell and back. There is also the X-Socket which allows you to bring along your old coolers and they'll work on the new 2011 socket - it will also be good for extreme LN2 overclockers and their pots. Besides just the video above, there is a selection of pictures below in the gallery which we took.

Yesterday we attended an ASUS motherboard technology seminar in Taipei where we were introduced to its range of upcoming Intel X79 Express chipset based motherboards. These motherboards will support second generation Intel Core i7 processors for high-end desktop systems using the new and larger LGA 2011 socket.

Followers of ASUS will know the Sabertooth motherboard from previous generations and some will also be happy to know that it is back again with the X79 Express chipset. Impressive cooling is a big part of the Sabertooth and Jack Cheng who is with the ASUS motherboard R&D team and was kind enough to go on video and tell us about some of the ASUS driven features of this motherboard.

It's not just cooling though, with the included software powered by the impressive Digi+ VRM power control design you get really good monitoring (12 different parts of the board are digitally thermally monitored) and control over the board and all the different aspects of it using the included Thermal Radar software. There are no real big single handed massive features that will take the crown for the Sabertooth, but the message being sent is that it's "tough".

The VGA market almost seems like it's in hibernation at the moment for the most part, as we all anticipate the launch of new families from both sides of the fence sporting 28nm GPUs, of which we know won't be until a bit of a ways into 2012.

However, it appears NVIDIA has been working on a little bit of a side project in the meantime; some more love towards its popular GeForce GTX 560 Ti. Apparently the company is preparing a new suped up release of the model that switches the GF114 GPU on the original version for the GF110 that's used on the GTX 570 and 580 models.

This in turn would give the card 448 CUDA Cores, as denoted by the supposed model name NVIDIA is going for, "GeForce GTX 560 Ti (448 Core). This compares to the 480 cores on the GTX 570 and 512 on the GTX 580. The card will have 56 TMU's a 320-bit memory interface, 3-way SLI support, DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort outputs, and will most likely carry 1280MB of GDDR5.

A bunch more details have surfaced today on AMD's upcoming "Virgo" PC platform which comprises their next-gen mobile "Trinity" APU using an FM2 package. The latest details confirm that Trinity will in fact be compatible with AMD's current-gen A75 "Hudson-D" chipset, but we are yet to learn whether or not FM1 and FM2 are pin compatible.

AMD's Trinity mobile APUs are 32nm based and run a TDP of up to 35W. The four x86-64 cores used are based on AMD's next-gen "Piledriver" architecture (rumoured to be between 10 and 15% quicker on average when compared to Bulldozer) and these four cores are arranged in two modules. Each of the two modules holds two cores and is given certain shared and dedicated resources.

The new APUs sport an integrated DDR3-2133MHz memory controller, up to 4MB (2MB per module) of L2 cache and Radeon HD 7000 series IGP (said to be about 30% quicker than Llano's iGPU). AMD is talking a 20% performance improvement over current-gen Llano APUs which comprise K10 "Stars" cores. A new 3rd generation form of TurboCore technology will also be included that gives superior power management and overclocking features.