Check it out for yourselves [iTunes Link] for the not so little £5.99/$9.99.

With images of Gordon Freeman in an Apple logo’d, Mac themed HEV suit and an images of TF2’s Heavy reminiscent of those old iPod ads (iSandvich, anyone?) released by Valve in anticipation of an impending announcement, it seems almost obvious what that announcement maybe. Up until now, Valve and Steam have been exclusively for PC, which sucks for Mac users wanting to get in on the action. But, with GDC around the corner, who knows what Valve has up their sleeves. After all, we may even hear about Portal 2.

[via Kotaku]

The App Store continues to evolve, and as such, we are constantly refining our guidelines. Your application contains content that we had originally believed to be suitable for distribution. However, we have recently received numerous complaints from our customers about this type of content, and have changed our guidelines appropriately.

Oh no! Women in bikinis! I’m scared this will ruin my child’s life! Seriously, who are these people that complain about this? I’m not sure if these people know but there is a parental control system in iTunes and the iPhone to stop your “innocent” child from downloading these apps.

Now, if you search the iTunes store, you’d think that all Bikini related apps have been removed because of these new guidelines. Nope. After searching for apps using the keywords bikini or sexy, the search results came back with: Kim Kardashian photo app, Playboy app, Sports Illustrated Swimsuit App, Bikini Surfing App, and Terror at Bikini Beach.

So, the bottom line is that if you already have a well established name or the women are animated big-boobed characters in bikinis, your app is A-OK. Geeze, Apple, get it together.  It’s just like that South Park episode with Tom Cruise in the closet.  “Either everything is ok to make fun of, or nothing.” So, in this cause, either all Bikini apps are ok, or no Bikini apps are ok. No gray lines.

When the iPad debuted it wasn’t exactly universally praised. Many people derided it as a giant iPod touch, and the name. I mean apple has made few mistakes since the first gen iPod’s but come on. Don’t they do testing to see if the name is going to fly?How could they not see it coming? So with all the backlash it was only a matter of time till someone took their anger at the iPad itself. And Daniel Tosh is that man.  Now, personally I would have gone with a baseball bat bat but to each his own I guess.

The iPad alternative, the JooJoo was also in the news this week with the announcement that it too has an App Store (doesn’t everyone these days?), a webapp store. Fusion Garage argue, quite rightly so, that the iPad has a large advantage provided by the categorised and searchable App Store that Apple established for the iPhone. They plan on making a webapp based store to function in a similar fashion. Let’s just hope they make a better stab at webapps than Apple did when it said webapps are ‘the only apps you need’, ha yeah right.

More sexts got into the news this week too. For those not familiar with the term, a sext is a sexy text often in the news because of minors sending nude picture messages to each other. Idiots. Anyway, one poor bloke from Winnipeg, Canada got caught with some luscious sexts on his phone by his girlfriend, seemingly from another woman. Problem is Darren P, as he was named by local press, didn’t know where they’d come from. Turns out that the pranksters from Virgin Mobile pre-loaded Darren’s new Samsung phone with some pretty innocent texts with things like ‘Booty Call’, ‘Where you at’ and ‘Be there soon’. Now why a phone would come pre-loaded with text messages God knows, but way to overact! It wasn’t until Darren went to the shop and they found the texts on all the phones of the same model that Darren was proclaimed innocent. Not sure whether they reconciled their differences but if I were Darren I’d think twice before taking little-miss crazy back. After all, who in their right mind uses the phrase Booty Call?

Good news for UK Freeview users, as the service is getting two new channels. The space has been made available ahead of the digital switch-over from the BBC by the discontinuation of its multi-screen red button option ahead of its BBC HD launch and from Arquiva through ‘technical improvements’. No doubt the folks behind Dave are eyeing up the opportunity to bring you more of what you’ve already seen.

Nvidia this week launched its new Optimus technology, which allows seamless and automated switching of GPUs between discrete and integrated chips. Great news for laptop wielders as although the technology has been around for a while with manual switching, automated, on-demand switching will make the whole thing a lot smoother, saving more battery life. The power of a dedicated GPU when you need it and the power frugality of an integrated chip when you don’t. Look for Optimus packing laptops to hit the shelves by March.

Of course probably the biggest announcement of this week was from big G, who dropped its newest baby, Buzz, for all the world to see, attempting to muscle in on all this social stuff the cool kids seem to be into these days. Not another Wave I hear you say. We haven’t found a use for even that yet! Hold faith dear readers; one day Wave will make perfect sense, just ask the Tech team hear at PG towers.

In a nut-shell, Google Buzz is another social networking environment where you can share stuff with your friends. But Buzz is a little more than that. Those familiar with FriendFeed and other social networking aggregators, might find that they’ve seen most of it before. Buzz can automatically pull status updates and other things from places like Twitter, Blogger and flickr shoving them right into your Google-sphere experience. Buzz works directly in Gmail, for the time being, allowing you to share stuff with your private and public Gmail contacts, linking public postings in with your Google Profile page for all the world to see. If you happen not to have a Google Profile, Buzz will automatically create you one, leading to yet another way to find you through your favourite search engine.

Google’s big on algorithms, its PageRank system is one of the most complex currently used on the web today. Buzz doesn’t escape this passion either, featuring a recommendation engine that puts ‘Buzz’ from people you don’t follow, that it thinks you might like, in your stream based on what you and your friends follow and comment on. Using further automated processing, Google will try and root out ‘bad buzz’ like the inane ‘I just ate an apple’ or ‘Going to the bog’ updates by automatically collapsing it whilst prioritising your stream for what it thinks is ‘good buzz’. Buzz will even push things into your Gmail inbox when someone comments on something you’ve posted or commented on, and when someone sends you a direct message twitter mention-style with the now synonymous @reply.

That’s not all, because Buzz is mobile too. It’s integrated into the Google mobile home page via a Buzz icon. Tapping on said icon will locate you and try and place you in a real location like a shop, coffee house or pub, whichever fits closest with your geographic location. A mobile Buzz webapp is also available for iPhone and Android which allows you to post to buzz, see updates from people you follow and from those located close by. Those with an Android phone can get even more Buzz in their lives than the rest of us, with its integration into the Google Maps app on the platform. The Buzz layer allows you to snap your location to an address and post to Buzz straight from the Maps app. Other mobile OS are going to see a roll out in the near future, with Blackberry, S60 and WinMob getting in on the act. iPhone users will have to wait for an update before Maps sees any Buzz action.

The launch of Buzz however, hasn’t been Google’s finest hour as you might have read in the press this week. Controversy over several of Buzz’s privacy minefield features such as the publishing of updates, follows and friends on Google Profile pages and the automatic follow and opt-in approach, has seen Google hastily modifying Buzz features and attempting to correct it’s mistakes, even thinking about removing Gmail integration. The main problem with all this is that different from services like Twitter, Buzz uses your Gmail username and therefore email address as your Buzz name. This means your email address is essentially blasted into the open web for anyone to see. If that’s not enough of a privacy nightmare, the auto-follow arrangement with it’s public publishing by default for basically anyone you might have emailed from Gmail, meant that contacts such as your Doctor, who you might not want the whole world to know you’re in contact with, were broadcast not only on your Google Profile but also on your Doctors.

Whilst it’s true that Google has addressed some of these issues, I for one have Buzz turned off, and I’m not going to re-activate it until all the kinks have been worked out and it proves to be of actual benefit. Why Google didn’t do its usual thing of closed, then limited, then open beta God only knows. You would have thought that Google would have at least paid attention to the lessons learned by Facebook over these kinds of privacy issues, but obviously not.

That’s your lot for this week. Thanks go out to all the blogs and news sites that break the news for us, without whom we’d all be flying blind.

There has been a ton of discussion surrounding the iPad concerning both negative and positive impressions. Well let me be one those few whom throw a little more fire into the negative side of things against the gigantic iPod touch device.

Last week Steve Jobs wow’d the rows and tiers of fanboy’s with the “Apple Tablet” starting at $499 when it had been rumored for so long to be closer to a $1000 smackaroo’s. Depending on whom you speak with, this is a great price however still overly priced compared to most netbooks running fully functioning yet productive operating systems.

Here’s the kicker, according to Computerworld, Brian Marshall of BroadPoint AMTech estimates that the cost of goods inside a 16gb Wi-F0 only iPad totals $270.50. This would mean that Apple would make an estimated $208 on every 16gb iPad sold. Of course this doesn’t compensate the R&D, manufacturing, and other added value costs. It would certainly have one thinking if this is really something worth purchasing during an economical down swing.

[via Tom's Hardware]

During the opening of the 52nd Grammys, leader of the Colbert Nation, Stephen Colbert, whips out a real iPad.  This officially makes him the coolest kid on the block.  Even if he was just loaned one and not given one, to pull one out in front of America without wearing a black turtle neck and jeans gives you a lot of geek cred.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Pee Wee is now one of the first people to get the new Apple iPad. Congratulations to him, he gets to experience what it’s like to walk around with an over sized iPod Touch.