The Nintendo 3DS launches in a few short days, and with it comes the wonderful augmented reality experiences, already demoed at GDC 2011 and the Nintendo Pods available in a major city near you. One of the downsides to the AR games and experiences in the Nintendo 3DS is relying on those AR cards that the player has to carry around with them if he or she wishes to shoot a dragon with arrows or hold an adorably "uncanny valley" cat or dog in hand.

An enterprising individual named Andrew Wilson has developed an Android App (am I allowed to call it an "app" anymore?) that has screenshots of all six AR Cards that come with the 3DS. Players will be able to launch their 3DS AR experiences using only their Android phone, making the augmented reality fun far more portable and accessible. Even better, you can download the app for your Android Tablet as well, making the AR models even bigger!

Here's hoping Nintendo lets this one go- it's not as though people will be able to access the games without a 3DS anyway.

CITA had its mobile focus event yesterday and like CES unveiled it is a small part of a much larger event. The event was held at the Peabody Hotel in Orlando, FL and was a Luau Themed affair.

After you got around all of the finery (if you could call it that) there were several vendors there that had some impressive products for the mobile world. One of these was NVIDIA. After the launch of the first Tegra 2 device at CES they have been hard at work getting a couple of additional devices ready. One of these is an Android based tablet that will be pushed out by T-mobile.

This will have 32GB of storage with room for an additional SD card (the cheap way to go as we were told). We also heard that NVIDIA plans to have the first quad core (ARM based) tablets and phones coming out very soon.

AMD have announced they've hired Mike Wolfe as AMD's chief information officer. Wolfe brings more than 30 years of engineering and information technology experience as well as being vice president of IT for product development and engineering at HP for the past five years.

Wolfe will be responsible for managing AMD's global technology infrastructure and will report to Thomas Seifert whom is senior vice president and chief financial officer and interim CEO.

Seifert said:

Apple have finally confirmed some suspicions people had on the Australian pricing of the soon-to-be released iPad 2, it seems to be slightly cheaper than the original launch last year which is a good thing.

The iPad 2 is set to go on sale this Friday (but strangely at 5pm...) regardless of timezone or city. A breakdown of pricing is below.

It occurs to me that with all of the tablets and post-pc devices landing on shelves in the next few months, tech accessory manufacturers are going to make a killing helping us protect all of our wonderful new gadgets. No wonder Apple made such a big deal out of its iPad 2 case.

ENKI, a delightfully creative tech accessorizer out of Detroit has released a solution to the colorful rantings of yesterday's iPad 2 Smart Cover Fail.

Everyone wants to take down the iPad 2, or at least make it remember them. Samsung's new Galaxy Tabs might at least make a dent with its pricing and size variety. Apple offers two options: extra small or extra large (iPod/iPhone or iPad), but in a year that has been all about the portables, Apple hasn't expanded much beyond the original iPad.

As of this summer, Samsung will offer a 7", 8.9", and 10.1" model of the Galaxy Tab, giving the consumer lighter, thinner, and more diverse selection when it comes to choosing a "post-pc" device (are we allowed to use that term to describe things that don't start with "i"?). With a resolution of 1280x800 (iPad 2 only has 1024x768), and a model that's $50 cheaper than most of the competition ($469 for the 8.9" 16g), this summer could see the iPad 2 take some hits.

Ohai, rest of the world- did you want an iPad 2? You're in luck! It ships this Friday to the following countries:

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

And if you live east of the Urals, sometime in April you can expect the post-PC device to be available in Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and "additional countries" in the coming months. Unsurprisingly, iPad 2 shipments will see delays in Japan, undoubtedly due to the recent disasters.

Research In Motion (RIM), Canadian company responsible for all things BlackBerry, announced its "plans" to make the new BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet available at a slew of retailers in the US and Canada. The PlayBook will be available in three unsurprising models: 16gb, 32gb, 64gb starting at $499 (for all of you keeping track, that's the same price as the iPad 2).

Though a rep at GDC '11 told me he'd lose his job if he told anyone when it was coming out, we now know thanks to Best Buy that it will be shipping April 19th.

Here's a video of some hands-on PlayBook action from GDC '11:

The much hailed, aesthetically pleasing Smart Cover for the iPad 2 doesn't seem to be working as Apple would have you believe. Sascha Pallenberg of Netbook News was very displeased to find that the cover kept his iPad 2 neither clean nor protected after having purchased one at the recent SXSW Interactive event. He had been originally very enamored with the idea and with Apples' pervasive marketing campaign advertising the beauty and simplicity of the cover:

Apple announced the case with almost as much fanfare as it's vessel as the iPad 2 launch, and many have noted that it seemed like the event was tailored more to the various apps and accessories that the iPad 2 was bringing with it, including the HDMI-out cable, the new versions of iMovie and Garageband, and of course the array of Smart Covers specifically designed for the iPad 2.

Apple's website is suspiciously vague on the subject of protection, touting the case's magnetic features as well as its folding capabilities. Netbook News's Sascha Pallenberg was very, very blunt in his analysis of the case, saying

After years of discussion and appeal, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has finally approved the ".xxx" domain suffix for adult entertainment sites. Though it won't be for some time until the 281st domain suffix becomes applicable, the approval has generated quite the controversy nevertheless.

After browsing close to 100 articles on the subject and standing on the sidelines of the numerous anonymous comment wars of tech blogs, the only thing I could glean, for certain, is that the real beneficiary of the dot-XXX suffix would be the company that originally proposed it: ICM Registry. The Florida-based company initiated the process back in 2005, only to be inundated by protests and threats from religious groups and the Bush Administration, who even threatened to enact legislation to override ICANN if it ever approved the TLD suffix. The Obama administration doesn't seem to care, and I'm not entirely surprised.

Red Light Districts exist, whether by name or by principle, in almost ever major city. If you live in a metropolitan area, you're generally aware of those neighborhoods that contain Sex Shops, Adult Bookstores, Exotic Dancing (and in some cases, more lascivious services). Imagine if someone came to your city and built a warehouse that spanned twenty or so square blocks and named it, I don't know, something like The "ALL PORN IN THE HISTORY OF EXISTENCE IS LOCATED HERE, IN THIS WAREHOUSE. SERIOUSLY, ANY PORN YOU WOULD WANT OR COULD FIND OR HAVE EVEN DREAMED OF ONCE WHILE YOU WERE AT WORK OR IN TRAFFIC IS PROBABLY HERE WAITING FOR YOU TO DISCOVER IT" Building. And they wrote that on the top of the building, which you can conveniently see from space.