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On opening weekend of the NFL season, I gave NFL Sunday Ticket To Go, DirecTV's NFL game-streaming service, a spin on the PlayStation 3. Or, at least, I tried to: service outages for Sunday Ticket To Go plagued everyone and killed the excitement of NFL game-watching on a console.

Two weeks later (I was tailgating at the Jets-Jaguars game last week), I returned to my first-gen PS3 to give the service a second go. Thankfully, this time it worked as well as advertised.

Sunday Ticket on the PS3 acts and works nearly identically to how it functions on devices like the iPad. After entering login information and waiting several seconds, a dashboard of all the available Sunday games appears for browsing, optimized for use with the PS3 controller (stats and standings can be browsed with the left/right shoulder buttons, but if you use a PS3 Bluetooth remote you'll need to fumble for the equivalent "L2/R2" button). Sunday Ticket starts you off on the Red Zone Channel, which cuts to the most interesting action among all games. From there, clicking on the others will load the appropriate game, after a delay of 10 seconds or so. … Read more

Let the BlackBerry PlayBook sale begin.

Best Buy's Canadian Web site and Staples were the first retailers to offer steep discounts on Research In Motion's PlayBook tablet. Staples is selling the low-end 16-gigabyte model for $299.99 after a $100 discount and another $100 mail-in rebate. Best Buy, meanwhile, is selling the same model for $399.99, but throwing in a $100 store gift card.

The discounts were first identified by BGR, which also reported that Wal-Mart is offering the tablet for $250 in an unadvertised sale.

The new prices mark RIM's and the retailers' latest effort … Read more

ZeptoLab today released its Toy Box update for the incredibly popular physics-based puzzler Cut The Rope (download) on the Android platform. With it, players get 25 new brain-teasing levels as well as a new Save feature that lets you save and restore your progress across devices. Big fans of the title might also be interested to know that the update is being promoted with an Om Nom plush toy giveaway through the Cut The Rope Facebook page.

Cut the Rope for Android is available for 99 cents in both the Android Market and the Amazon Appstore.

Update, 3:10 p.… Read more

Contre Jour is an arcade puzzler that veteran gamers will see as a mashup of game mechanics and inspiration from several other popular titles. That said, Contre Jour is a well-executed melange, a fun and often challenging puzzle game with polished art and sound.

On each short level of Contre Jour, you're trying to get a charming little alien (essentially, a rolling eyeball) to the level's exit. The alien doesn't move on its own, so you need to use attached ropes (some elastic, some not, some with movable anchors), slingshots, malleable ground (which you can shape with … Read more

Research In Motion has a backlog of roughly 800,000 PlayBooks, The Guardian is reporting.

Citing an analyst from Fubon Securities, the U.K. publication reported today that RIM's supplier, Quanta Computer, had shipped 1.5 million PlayBooks to RIM in the first half. But RIM has only shipped 700,000 Playbooks--including 200,000 from the past quarter--to its retail partners.

The massive stockpile at RIM is another illustration of the struggles the BlackBerry-maker has faced in selling the tablet. It also adds a wrinkle to how the company plans to reduce the inventory. RIM has acknowledged … Read more

Apple today released its first major update to Final Cut Pro X with new features it says professional customers have been asking for, along with a new trial version users can test out for free.

Among the biggest new features added as part of a software update that went out to users this morning is support for XML. This adds the option to both import and export projects and events in the XML format, meaning users can take XML formatted projects and work on them in Final Cut Pro X.

"Now you can import and export Final Cut Pro … Read more

Research In Motion will have to learn from the mistakes of the PlayBook tablet if it wants to see any success with its next generation of BlackBerry smartphones.

With disappointing sales and plunging profits, how could the company not feel the urgency to rush out a phone using slick its new QNX software? But that would be a bad idea. As the PlayBook has shown, rushing out a product only leads to more criticism and a poor reception.

"They got to get it right with QNX," said Mike Walkley, an analyst for Canaccord Genuity. "They're better … Read more

After a disastrous first few months, Research In Motion's PlayBook tablet will get a price cut.

During the company's second-quarter earnings call today, RIM Co-Chief Executive Mike Lazaridis said the company would start up several programs to drive PlayBook sales, including an incentive program for businesses, as well as rebates and deals for existing BlackBerry customers. Lazaridis didn't spell out how much of a discount the company would be offering.

RIM is looking to drive demand for the tablets after an extremely weak start. The company reported shipping only 200,000 PlayBooks in the fiscal second quarter, … Read more

Cutting the cable can be done, but one of the toughest challenges is replacing live TV programs, like sports and local news. We've long been advocates of over-the-air (OTA) HDTV to fill the gap, but there aren't many OTA DVRs and the existing models have significant drawbacks, including the Channel Master CM-7000PAL we reviewed earlier this year.

Channel Master has announced a new over-the-air DVR this morning, the Channel Master TV, combining TV recording functionality with the ability to stream Vudu. Unlike TiVo, the Channel Master TV does not require a monthly subscription, instead relying on free electronic … Read more