There's nothing we love more around here than a bit of surprising news, and next to HP's recent purchase of VoodooPC, Logitech's just-announced acquisition of Slim Devices caught us off guard like nothing has in awhile. According to Slim CEO Sean Adams, his company -- which makes such streaming audio products as the Squeezebox and Transporter -- will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Logitech -- maker of nearly every kind peripheral under the sun -- with the entire Slim team having already accepted employment offers from their new overlord. The newly-swallowed Slim will remain in its Mountain View offices and retain its executive structure for the "foreseeable future," while gaining the marketing power, retail partnerships, and economy of scale benefits enjoyed by larger corporations. As you're probably aware, Logitech has already dipped its toe into the streaming audio pool with such products as the Wireless DJ Music System, so snatching up Slim will give it a better foothold in this market along with the invaluable expertise offered by Slim's employees. For the consumer, this partnership will probably result in lower prices as well as attractive bundles featuring Slim gear and Logitech speakers / remotes, although you can never really predict how an acquisition will affect a company's innovation and product quality. Still, quite the interesting bit of news, and we're excited to see what kind of swag the Slim team will produce now that they have more muscle and capital behind them.

For the purposes of this post, we've going to ignore Microsoft exec Richard Teversham's recent dismissals of the Wii as a glorified GameCube and the PS3 as overpriced, and instead concentrate on his area of expertise: future plans for the Xbox 360. In an interview with entertainment site MCV, Teversham revealed that Redmond has "a number of surprises up our sleeve" in regards to the Xbox division's Q4 strategies, and that they involve "having a variety of pricing on games [and] a variety of pricing on console offers." Since the marketing manager reiterated previous denials of an impending 360 price cut, we have to wonder what exactly he was referring to by that statement on console pricing. The one possibility that springs immediately to mind? Why, bundled HD DVD drives, of course. If Redmond is in fact able to offer 360 bundles with HD optical drives at the same or slightly higher prices than current packages go for, it would certainly take some of the focus off Nintendo and Sony during their respective console launches. On the other hand, he could simply mean that the current bundles will receive an extra game or accessory or something -- which, combined with his slams on the competition, wouldn't really make for an effective marketing strategy at all.

[Via Joystiq]

So instead of revealing that upgraded version of the 770 Internet Tablet as we expected them to today, Nokia flipped the script on us and announced that the Google Talk and keyboard features we had been anticipating will actually be coming in the form of a software upgrade. The good news is that these new features -- part of the company's so-called Internet Tablet 2006 OS -- will be available to current 770 owners through a simple update, although those folks who were expecting a hardware QWERTY option (and not just an on-screen "thumb board") are certainly going to be disappointed. On the plus side, the new OS will support SIP-based VoIP solutions, with Nokia specifically mentioning that a version of the Gizmo Project client is forthcoming. IT2006 will become the default operating system on 770 units, and will be available as a free download to existing 770 users, beginning sometime this quarter.