Japanese gaming giant Nintendo has issued a profit warning amid weaker-than-expected Wii U console sales.

Spansion has unveiled what it claims is the industry's first human machine interface (HMI) coprocessor that enables voice-controlled system interfaces. Leveraging Nuance Communications' voice technology, the new product is ideal for voice recognition systems in automotive, gaming and consumer electronics, significantly improving response time and accuracy over conventional voice interfaces by supporting larger acoustic databases.

"We delivered a solid fourth quarter amid challenging market conditions," said company president and CEO John Kispert. "2011 was a year of transition and intense product development. Spansion is now well-positioned for growth in the future in areas such as automotive, industrial, communications and gaming..."

The Black Friday glad tidings from consumer electronics makers continued on Tuesday, with Sony announcing a big rise in US sales and Microsoft reporting a record week for its Xbox 360 console and Kinect controller. The news followed Nintendo's announcement on Monday of receord sales of its Wii and 3DS gaming machines.

An open-source hardware group on Monday announced a US$89 credit-card sized motherboard based on an ARM processor that could be used for robotics, gaming and medical devices.

PlayJam has partnered with one of the most successful casual games developers Slingo, to exclusively deliver an exciting combination of Bingo and Slots to Smart TV via their global gaming platform.

Texas Instruments sounded a warning for the holiday season as it reported lacklustre activity from manufacturers in computing and consumer electronics, including TVs and gaming machines.

The acquisition will give RIM access to Scoreloop's developer toolkit for building cross-platform social mobile games. Scoreloop said it will continue to build toolkits for other platforms but that the experience would be better on a RIM device.

Spansion has entered production of its 1Gb and 512Mb GL NOR flash memory for automotive, consumer electronics, gaming and telnet applications.

Just as tablets with dual-core processors start to hit shelves, chip makers are now shipping samples of quad-core chips that could make the devices even faster. Nevertheless, quad-core chips could be overkill as use of all cores could drain battery quickly...

Motorola accused Microsoft of infringing 16 patents with its Xbox gaming console and in Windows for servers, PCs, and mobile devices, the company said.

According to iSuppli, shipments of game-capable mobile phones will be up 11.4% by the end of 2010 to 1.27 billion, compared to 1.14 billion shipments in 2009. By the end of 2010, it expects console shipments to top 52.3 million units, up just 0.2% compared to 2009's 52.1 million units.

A Wolfson audio chip is included in Samsung's soon to be released smartphones, Wave and Galaxy S. Edinburgh-based Wolfson Microelectronics makes microchips for mobile phones, TVs and gaming consoles.

Mobile analytics firm Flurry has attempted to measure Apple's influence on the portable gaming market, and its analysis concludes that iPhone games now account for about one-fifth of all revenues for portable game software in the US.

Rambus has announced that Samsung Electronics will offer a 1Gb XDR DRAM memory device, which will broaden the availability of XDR technology for gaming, computing and consumer electronics applications.