Belkin now possesses Linksys routers and other Smart Wi-Fi products. They will be managed as a separate brand and product portfolio.

Belkin CEO Chet Pipkin had this to say: “Linksys has a rich heritage, a passionate customer base and a wide product line, all of which fueled our decision to acquire the company and our plan to maintain the Linksys brand. The Linksys portfolio will continue to exist and evolve to include even richer user experiences and network management functionality. Smart Wi-Fi is an innovative and easy way for consumers to stay connected to their home network and we look to continue investing in it by adding more features and products.”

“A lot of exciting things are happening in today’s connected lifestyle segment, and we are honored to continue the Linksys brand and enable new connected experiences,” said Pipkin. “Linksys and Belkin are now one team. We are ready to do fantastic things as a team and deliver products that delight consumers and support the increasingly connected, mobile world.”

Customers can expect more Linksys-branded products coming out of the pipeline, and support for existing products will continue through the existing channels.

Terms of the deal were never disclosed.

Gamasutra reports that the Wii U sold anywhere between 45,000 and 59,000 units in January according to numbers lifted from NPD’s private data. In its first three months on market, the Wii U has sold 38 percent less units than what the Wii did in its first three months.

So, is this a problem? Obviously, and Nintendo has to do something to get more hardware into more homes. Delaying multiple releases later into the year isn’t doing them any favors, and a rough casual market that’s increasingly focused on mobile gaming is definitely hurting them.

That being said, the rumors of Nintendo’s collapse are greatly exaggerated. Of course, this shouldn’t be anything new as industry analysts have predicted the collapse of Nintendo and other console manufacturers numerous times over the years due to disruptions in the gaming industry. Mobile gaming definitely presents the biggest threat yet, but I can assure you that Nintendo has plenty of cash reserves to stay afloat.

So, the Wii U is in a spot of trouble, but what can Nintendo do to get it selling again? First and foremost, it needs killer apps in the forms of software. Software sells hardware – not the other way around. The Wii U, much like the 3DS before it, launched without a killer app. Nintendo Land and ZombiU are both great games, but they aren’t exactly killer apps. Rayman Legends was the closest thing Nintendo had to a killer app, but we all know how that turned out. Now we’ll have to wait until Spring for the next great Wii U games to start trickling out.

Beyond killer software, Nintendo may need to drop the price of the Wii U. The Wii U is the most expensive console that Nintendo has ever produced, and the sales are looking like that of the 3DS when it first launched at $250. Dropping the price may help spur short term sales until killer software comes out that makes people want to upgrade.

For now, Nintendo is trying to spur sales with a ZombiU console bundle. It includes the entirety of the $350 premium console, and packs in a copy of ZombiU and a Pro Controller for $40 more. In all honesty, Nintendo should have kept the price of the new bundle at $350. It’s still a bargain at $390, but consumers don’t see an extra $40 as a deal.

Japanese newspaper Nikkei is reporting that Nintendo plans to unify its hardware divisions under one roof to focus on interactivity between the two devices. The translated report, courtesy of IGN, states that Nintendo “aims to come up with next-generation game systems that will turn heads” in response to “more people using their smartphones and tablets for entertainment via the Internet.”

When combined later this year, the team will be comprised of 280 people from both sides of hardware development. Beyond having the teams work together to come up with new ideas, the report states that the company is hoping the unified team will speed up the development process of new consoles and handhelds. The company also “sees interactions between engineers as a potential hotbed for new ideas.”

So what kind of new ideas can we expect from the unified team? Nothing too revolutionary is mentioned, but a few ideas being kicked around include using the 3DS as a controller for the Wii U and continuing a console game on a handheld device. It should be noted that both of these concepts have been implemented in a few games from Sony with the PS3 and Vita, and Capcom is implementing both in Ultimate Monster Hunter 3 for Wii U and 3DS.

By far, the most interesting part of the report comes near the end when the paper suggests Nintendo may also be looking to further integration with social media and online video sites. The Wii U already has a closed social network in Miiverse, but integration with Twitter would only be a good thing.

In that same vein, Nintendo could integrate YouTube into games allowing players to upload direct video from their games to YouTube. A few fighters on the PS3 and Xbox 360 already offer this functionality so it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of reason to see it being implemented on the Wii U.

The China Times reports that Google has ordered the components for a new series of self-branded Chromebooks. What makes these Chromebooks different from Google’s Nexus hardware is that the company will be building these themselves without the help of OEMs like Samsung. The report says that Google will be relying on Taiwan-based Compai to manufacture the new Chromebooks.

So, what will a Google-made Chromebook look like? The report doesn’t get into specifics, but it mentions that it will have a touch display. It doesn’t seem like Chrome OS would benefit from a touch display all that much, but Google could be going for a redesign similar to Windows 8. If that’s the case, Google could directly compete with Microsoft’s much more expensive touch display notebooks and Ultrabooks.

Speaking of competition, Google would also be directly competing with the current Chromebooks made by Samsung and Acer. Earlier this year, Microsoft made its OEM partners angry by announcing the Surface without telling them about it first. One would hope that Google wouldn’t make the same mistake by being transparent with its partners before launching any new hardware itself.

Current Chromebook makers don’t have anything to worry about yet, however, as Google has reportedly ordered a small amount of Chromebooks. TechCrunch figures that Google could just be internally testing these new Chromebooks while having no intention to ever sell them to the public at large. It’s a likely scenario as companies build new hardware all the time that never actually sees the light of day.

Regardless, Google building its own Chromebook makes a lot of sense. It would let Google undercut the competition from Windows 8 even more, and it may even lead to other self-branded Google products. The company may rely on third-party partners now to build its Nexus line of smartphones and tablets, but we may see a Google-built Nexus smartphone or tablet in the future.

At the company’s TGS press conference, Sony announced a new, smaller PlayStation 3. The new model is 20 percent smaller and 25 lighter than the current PS3 slim. I thought that they couldn’t cram the PS3′s innards into anything smaller, but the technical wizards at Sony have proven me wrong yet again.

The new smaller PS3 will be launching in two flavors across the next two months. A 250GB PS3 will be launching on September 25. It will pack in Uncharted 3 Game of the Year Edition and a $30 voucher for free-to-play title, Dust 514. The bundle will retail for $269.99.

The smaller PS3 will be getting a second bundle come October 30. It will feature a larger 500GB hard drive and pack in a copy of Assassin’s Creed III. This particular bundle may move units as the PS3 version of Assassin’s Creed III is getting exclusive content not found anywhere else. More details, such as extra goodies, will be revealed as we near launch.

On a different note, it should be pointed out that a third hardware revision is unprecedented for Sony. Pushing new hardware this close to the end of the console cycle can only mean that Sony isn’t quite ready to launch the PlayStation 4. The next Xbox will most assuredly be launching later next year and Sony might not be able to make that timeframe. This new model could be their way of trying to extend the PS3′s life.

With that being said, the new hardware revision looks great. The old slim never looked quite as sexy as the original PS3 did. The new hardware brings back the aggressive look that defined the original hardware.

Microsoft officially unveiled the new keyboard and mouse designs that will compliment the launch of Windows 8. The company will be releasing two keyboards and two mice that will compliment either tablets or desktop PCs.

First up is the Wedge Mobile Keyboard and Mouse. Microsoft likes to call them “uber-mobile” devices presumably for their small, light-weight design. The Wedge Keyboard is a fully functional keyboard that connects via bluetooth. It also features a snap on rubber cover that can doubles as a tablet stand when bent in half. The keyboard will cost $79.95.

The Wedge Mouse is the strangest of the Wedge branded accessories. It’s a small mouse that looks more like a doorstop. It’s similar to Apple’s Magic Mouse in that it has no buttons. Everything is controlled through touch. The company also claims that it will work on any surface which is great news for those of us who forget to take a mousepad when traveling. The mouse will be available for $69.95.

For those who want something a little more familiar, Microsoft will also be releasing the Sculpt Mobile Keyboard and Touch Mouse. These peripherals will also work with tablets through bluetooth, but they also seem right at home with Windows 8 desktops or laptops. The Sculpt Mobile Keyboard features a curved design that will help your hands be in a more natural resting position when typing. It will be available soon for $49.95.

The Sculpt Touch Mouse looks more like a traditional mouse. The scroll wheel has been replaced with a touch pad that can scroll in all four directions. Unlike the Wedge Mouse, however, it features a left and right mouse button for more traditional input. The Sculpt Touch Mouse will be available for $49.95.

On a final note, Microsoft notes that they already released a Touch Mouse earlier this year. They will be updating the firmware on the mouse for existing customers that will allow them to take advantage of the new touch gestures in Windows 8. It’s a wonderful gesture on Microsoft’s part to prevent customers from having to buy new hardware just to take advantage of the software. The Touch Mouse is currently available for $79.95.

“So one of the secrets of Google is that rather than employing these mainframe machines, this heavy iron, big iron kind of stuff, if you were to go into a Google data center and look at an example rack, it would look a lot like a PC,” says Cutts. “So there’s commodity PC parts. It’s the sort of thing where you’d recognize a lot of the stuff from having opened up your own computer,and what’s interesting is rather than have like special Googlebot web crawling servers, we tend to say, OK, build a whole bunch of different servers that can be used interchangeably for things like Googlebot, or web serving, or indexing. And then we have this fleet, this armada of machines, and you can deploy it on different types of tasks and different types of processing.”

“So hardware wise, they’re not exactly the same, but they look a lot like regular commodity PCs,” he adds. “And there’s no difference between Googlebot servers versus regular servers at Google. You might have differences in RAM or hard disk, but in general, it’s the same sorts of stuff.”

On the software side, Google of course builds everything itself, as to not have to rely on third-parties. Cutts says there’s a running joke at Google along the lines of “we don’t just build the cars oursevles, and we don’t just build the tires ourselves. We actually vulcanize the rubber on the tires ourselves.”

“We tend to look at everything all the way down to the metal,” Cutts explains. “I mean, if you think about it, there’s data center efficiency. There’s power efficiency on the motherboards. And so if you can sort of keep an eye on everything all the way down, you can make your stuff a lot more efficient, a lot more powerful. You’re not wasting things because you use some outside vendor and it’s black box.”

A couple months ago, Google put out a blog post discussing its data center efficiency, indicating that they are getting even more efficient.

“In the same way that you might examine your electricity bill and then tweak the thermostat, we constantly track our energy consumption and use that data to make improvements to our infrastructure. As a result, our data centers use 50 percent less energy than the typical data center,” wrote Joe Kava, Senior Director, data center construction and operations at Google.

Cutts says Google uses a lot of Linux-based machines and Linux-based servers.

“We’ve got a lot of Linux kernel hackers,” he says. “And we tend to have software that we’ve built pretty much from the ground up to do all the different specialized tasks. So even to the point of our web servers. We don’t use Apache. We don’t use IIS. We use something called GWS, which stands for the Google Web Server.”

“So by having our own binaries that we’ve built from our own stuff and building that stack all the way up, it really unlocks a lot of efficiency,” he adds. “It makes sure that there’s nothing that you can’t go in and tweak to get performance gains or to fix if you find bugs.”

If you’re interested in how Google really works, you should watch this video too:

Google says the average search query travels as much as 1,500 miles.

The Xbox 360 is so old; when it first came out, rainbows were in black and white.
The Xbox 360 is so old; when it first came out, the Dead Sea as just getting sick.
The Xbox 360 is so old; when it first came out, Mad Magazine was only slightly pissed

The Vbox 360 is so old… Okay i’ll stop.

The point is, this current generation of gaming hardware, XBox included, has been around a lot longer than any previous system, including the NES. We were going to check up on Atari but our records don’t go back that far. The Atari is so old… alright, sorry.

It has already outdated all the other systems, and we don’t even know when a new one is coming out. Everything is in the rumor stage across the board. This helpful infographic from Kotaku will show you just how old the XBox truly is.

Click HERE for a version you can actually read.

That is, until today when new job postings went up looking for hardware engineers. The two positions up for grabs include an electronics engineer and a mechanical engineer. These could be for anything as Valve is probably experimenting with hardware all the time. The interesting part comes from the description:

“For years, Valve has been all about writing software that provides great gameplay experiences. Now we’re developing hardware to enhance those experiences, and you can be a key part of making that happen. Join our highly motivated team that’s doing hardware design, prototyping, testing, and production across a wide range of platforms. We’re not talking about me-too mice and gamepads here – help us invent whole new gaming experiences.”

That sounds an awful lot like either a game console or some kind of hardware accessory for the PC. But wait, it gets better. Under the job requirements, the company lists experience with high speed serial interfaces, schematic entry, embedded systems/microcontrollers and circuit simulations” as a must. The recommended is even more telling with the company wanting people familiar with ARM/x86 design experience.

If it’s not clicking with you just yet, this is a full-fledged PC here folks. The inclusion of ARM experience also points to them looking into a low cost/low power version of whatever it is they’re working on. We don’t know yet and Valve’s not saying anything. Unless I’m way off the mark though, this is indubitably the workings of a game console/PC.

Here’s the two job listings. If you really want to know what’s going on, maybe you should apply for the job to find out. I’m sure we would all appreciate finding out what Valve is working on.

Hardware Engineer – Electrical Engineer

Hardware Engineer – Mechanical

Regardless of what they’re doing, Valve is one of those companies that is constantly innovating. It will be interesting to see what Gabe and pals are up to next, besides finishing up Half-Life 3. You guys are making Half-Life 3, right? Right?

[h/t: Develop]

Forget the Box spoke to sources close to the manufacturing of Nintendo products and found that the Wii U’s components only cost about $180. It seems that the tablet controller makes up a decent portion of that cost with its components estimated at a price of $50.

With the components being priced at $180, you would think a launch price of $200 or $250 would be in order. Not so according to these sources who say Nintendo is currently finalizing costs, but won’t go below $300 when the console launches later this year.

Why the high price? It seems that Nintendo is “cutting production costs to maximize profits” and that it’s the company’s “main concern with the Wii U.” This is all to “build back confidence in investors.” The increased costs could also be associated with “including software with hardware, R&D, shipping costs, marketing/promotion, transportation, packaging costs, and carrying/holding costs.”

The rumored price of the components seem to confirm reports that the Wii U is not all that powerful. That claim has also been challenged though with Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford telling Joystiq that the console is “pretty powerful” and that it’s “a really nice bridge to the next generation.”

For those now worried that the Wii U is doomed to be eclipsed by current gen hardware at launch, don’t worry about it. While the sources say that Nintendo chose “an economical GPU and CPU,” they also said that these components could “keep up with the performance of today’s current consoles.”

Interestingly enough, the sources also say that performance wasn’t the main focus of the system. They say that Nintendo now has a bigger focus on “downloadable content, applications, video content, digital distribution and services to create a stream of revenue.” This makes sense as rumors were going around that Nintendo was looking for video content partners.

All of this is just rumor for now though. It’s not worth getting all worried over until E3 comes around and we get our first look at the system in action. It’s going to be nothing but conflicting reports until June, but at least it will provide us with some entertainment.

Do you think Nintendo is wise to price at Wii U at $300? What about the rumored cost of components? Let us know in the comments.