Smartphone gaming gives Sony a backup plan in case its fancy, dedicated gaming device falls flat, but until now, we haven’t known which devices will run Playstation Suite besides Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play (a.k.a. the Playstation phone).

Enter Nvidia, which says it’ll bring Playstation Suite to Tegra 2-powered smartphones and tablets this year. Nvidia announced the news (via Engadget) in its “TegraZone” Android app, a spotlight for games that take advantage of the Tegra 2 hardware.

Nvidia doesn’t say that Playstation Suite will be available on all Tegra 2 devices, so there are no guarantees for owners of Motorola’s Atrix 4G and Xoom tablet. At the same time, the announcement doesn’t preclude smartphones that don’t run on Nvidia chips. Officially, Sony has only said that Playstation Suite will be available for phones Android 2.3 and higher.

Still, the support from Nvidia is good news for Sony, as the chip maker is finding its way into lots of upcoming smartphones and tablets. If Playstation Suite is going to be a hit, it needs to be ubiquitous.

Unfortunately, Sony’s own plans for Playstation Suite are a bit murky. The company has said that the service will include original Playstation games for sale, but murmurs of support for PSP and Playstation 2 games have been dismissed as unsubstantiated. Sony can’t milk the Playstation 1 forever — the game console debuted 16 years ago — and Tegra 2 can certainly handle newer games. I hope there’s more going on behind the scenes.

To that end, the chipmaker is launching HD3D, an answer to NVidia’s 3D Vision technology that takes an open approach to software and hardware support. AMD already supports 3D in some of its graphics cards, but HD3D is more of a philosophy for how AMD will treat the technology. And for the most part, that philosophy comes down to the kind of glasses you’ll use.

NVidia is firmly backing active shutter glasses — the battery-powered specs that shift between your left and right eyes to create the 3D effect — and the only glasses you can get for 3D Vision are made by NVidia. AMD graphics cards will support all kinds of 3D, including passive polarized and eventually glasses-free displays, and it has no plans to produce its own eyewear. That job will go out to third-parties for consumers to choose on their own.

Suddenly, Oakley’s recent announcement of high-end polarized 3D glasses seems clearer.  At an AMD press event in Los Angeles last week, Oakley Chief Executive Colin Baden showed off the glasses’ high-wrap lenses and three-point fit. With AMD, Oakley will have a bigger market for home use.

Passive 3D requires a different kind of monitor than active shutter, and AMD already pledges to support passive displays from Zalmon Trimon and iZ3D, with more to come. It’s not clear whether AMD will support existing 3D monitors, such as those from Samsung and Acer, but probably not, because they’re intended for use with Nvidia 3D Vision glasses. Most 3D televisions, all of which use active shutter, should work fine using their own proprietary eyewear.

Software makers also professed their love for AMD’s open approach at the recent press event. DDD, for instance, will offer discounts on its TriDef software, which converts 2D games, photos and videos into 3D. Technically, TriDef works with NVidia graphics cards, but with Nvidia pushing its own conversion with 3D Vision, DDD doesn’t have much traction. TriDef supports active and passive 3D, and has already appeared in a couple of AMD 3D laptops.

To tie this whole ordeal together, AMD plans to launch a website at AMD.com/HD3D. It’ll serve as a resource for setting up a home 3D gaming rig, with a list of supported products and the aforementioned discounts from AMD’s partners.

The details on HD3D coincide with the launch of AMD’s Radeon HD 6800 series graphics cards. They’ll be the company’s first to support 3D Blu-ray decoding, and they’re step ahead of NVidia with HDMI 1.4a hardware support for television connections. NVidia’s cards require intermediate 3DTV Play software, as seen Dell’s new XPS laptops.

Laptops, of course, won’t have the same do-it-yourself approach as desktops with AMD graphics cards. Down the line, expect more 3D laptop bundles like the ones we’ve already seen.

Windows 7 battery problem? Nope.

Droid gets Android 2.1 update.

Redact that tweet, Journal editor.

iPhone gets memory card adapter.

What’s Shigeru Miyamoto working on?

Nexus one feature: phone support!

Nexus One double-life battery.

Publishers score e-book pricing victories.
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It’s the same tablet (or slate — I’m as baffled as Harry by the terminology shift) that appeared briefly, of all places, on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, a 7-inch tablet with all the trimmings: Wi-Fi, 3G, Webcam, MicroSD slot, 4 GB of internal memory and, of course, Nvidia’s formidable Tegra chip. An Nvidia representative promised more and better tablets at the company’s booth tomorrow, but I had to take a stab at this one tonight.

The Ultra was a bit buggy, which explains why Nvidia wasn’t making a big deal of it. As soon as I picked it up, it crashed. Then it took a while to load up. Then the touch screen acted a bit dodgy. And yet, I walked away excited.

What most impressed me was the tablet’s speed and smoothness. Maybe it’s the iPhone effect, but lately I’ve become obsessed by this sort of thing. And because I’ve never seen Android running so smoothly — even the Nexus One phone on display elsewhere at the event showed some choppiness — using the Ultra was a pleasure. A 1080p version of Star Trek played without a stutter, and the e-reader function flipped nimbly between pages.

We don’t yet know what Apple has in store — or for that matter, whether Apple has anything in store at all — but even if it’s something completely surprising, I could get comfortable with Tegra and Android as purveyors of working class tabletslates. We’ll see what else is in store tomorrow.

Here’s Intel’s response to the suit, in which it says it was on the verge of a settlement with the FTC, and that it’s the victim of a rush to judgment.

I don’t know enough about the backstory to have an opinion of the specifics of the FTC’s charges, and I like free markets more than government interference, but this I know: Consumers benefit when there are multiple healthy competitors in a category. If PC manufacturers make technology decisions based primarily on fear of Intel–which is what the FTC claims–it’s not good for anybody except Intel.

Unless Nintendo is changing the way it approaches gaming consoles, the underlying technology doesn’t matter as much as the big picture. The Wii staked its reputation on motion controls, not current-generation graphics or processing power. Same goes for the Nintendo DS, which is all about combining a touch screen and traditional button-based gaming on a handheld device.

Besides, the current-generation DS already packs in respectable graphics, and some of the console’s greatest games wouldn’t have benefited from a boost. For instance, the Phoenix Wright series uses 2D animation, never getting in the way of your touch-based sleuthing. New Super Mario Bros. has 3D flourishes, but what really draws people in is the game’s old-school roots. And then there’s Brain Age, which is so simple that I fail to see how a beefer processor and better graphics would improve the experience.

My point is that it’s about the games, not the hardware, and from my experience the Nintendo DS hasn’t suffered from technological constraints.

In any case, I don’t expect Nintendo to move on from its current-generation DS and DSi anytime soon. They continue to sell phenomenally well, with 552,900 units moved in North America alone in August. That’s actually a 6 percent increase from same the period in 2008, and four times more sales than Sony’s PSP.

Continued sales mean that people are going to stay interested in the current-generation Nintendo DS, and all the games it supports, for years to come. If Nintendo does upgrade the DS to a better chip, I won’t be the only one who could care less.

We have yet to hit the holiday shopping season, so you know there will still be plenty of gadget goodness before the year ends. However, there’s also some new behind-the-scenes tech to get excited about in 2009. Here are four enabling technologies to watch out for in the next four months. This tech may not be sexy, but it’s guaranteed to make those shiny gadget toys work better, smarter, faster.

NVIDIA ION Chipset

Since my netbook is clearly not cutting it for a lot of video playback, I’m psyched about new processors making their way into netbooks and small laptops in Q4. Most likely to actually hit the commercial market this year is the NVIDIA ION chipset, which is said to boost graphics power significantly in any Intel-Atom-powered device. According to Brad Linder over at Lilliputing (also heard as afternoon anchor on my local NPR station), two major manufacturers, Lenovo and Samsung, are planning to ship ION-powered laptops in the last few months of the year. And, Brad speculates that the upcoming Nokia netbook, the Booklet 3G, may also sport NVIDIA ION graphics. More info to come at Nokia World on September 2nd.

USB 3.0

If you’re into transferring a lot of media between devices, then the launch of USB 3.0 is right up your alley. Unlike USB 2.0, which transfers data at a rate of 480 Mbps, USB 3.0 boasts a whopping transfer speed of 4.8 Gbps. That’s not just good for moving HD video around, it’s also perfect for large back-up operations to an external hard drive. According to Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM, USB 3.0 will start shipping to device-makers this year, with consumer availability soon to follow.

WiMAX

I know, I know, it’s cool to be down on WiMAX these days, but I’m still excited for it to spread to more cities (including my own Philadelphia) this year. Partly I’m excited about the higher speeds for mobile broadband, but partly I’m excited because of the different pricing options compared to existing 3G services. For example, my employer is unlikely to subsidize mobile broadband at $60 per month, but a $10 day pass is a good bet for reimbursement. Perfect for conferences, and other places where Wi-Fi tends to be lacking. Even an unlimited mobile contract is said to be only $50 per month. (See pricing coverage from Paul Kapustka at Sidecut Reports) That’s a better price and a faster connection.

Upstream Channel Bonding

And while we’re on the subject of broadband speeds, here’s an obscure one: upstream channel bonding. Channel bonding is what’s making it possible for cable operators to offer peak DOCSIS 3.0 speedsof 50-100 Mbps in some markets. To date we’ve only seen downstream channel bonding in the US, but upstream channel bonding is on its way. Karl Bode at Broadband Reports wrote earlier this month that Comcast is exploring upstream DOCSIS 3.0 trials this year, with upstream speeds maxing out at 120 Mbps.

Google Earth honors the fallen.

Read Sprint’s Pre launch guide.

Lenovo to use Nvidia’s Ion.

More about AT&T’s Palm EOS.

Safari 4 practices poor housekeeping.

Goal one for Pre: browsing.

Gotta love the name “Wooo.”

iPhone-painted New Yorker cover.

Iran blocks Facebook. (Twitter? MySpace?)

A more Mac-like Linux.

ViewSonic: from displays to smartphones.

Unhappy laptop owners sue Nvidia.

Adobe helps media player builders.

A Moto G1 from T-Mobile?

Twitter: bigger than NYT, WSJ.

Help! My iPhone is overheating.

Intel’s laptop and netbook roadmap.

Why is Microsoft raising money?

Microsoft tweets about Zune phone?

Apple nixes religious humor app.

Sorry you got a Kindle?