Sony’s PlayStation Portable is an impressive little gadget, but it won’t give the company any advantage in the battle for the living room, Microsoft’s top Xbox executive said Wednesday. Speaking at a Churchill Club event, Robbie Bach, senior vice president and chief Xbox officer for Microsoft, gave Sony credit for designing a slick handheld game player. But he said whatever success the PSP achieves is unlikely to boost sales for the next version of Sony’s PlayStation living room game console.

Nokia a trio of new phones, including one that can store up to 3,000 songs. The N91 has an integrated 4GB hard disk and supports digital music formats including MP3, M4A, AAC and WMA, Nokia said. Additionally, the handset comes with a stereo headset with remote control. The N91, expected to ship by the end of the year, will also feature a 2-megapixel camera, email support, a Web browser and video-sharing capabilities, the device maker said.

The Hip-e all-in-one computer may have made it into Microsoft’s exhibit of cool hardware, but that doesn’t mean it’s made it back into the company’s good graces. The Hip-e’s maker–Digital Lifestyles Group–got a note last week from Microsoft saying Digital’s license to ship Windows had been terminated because of overdue royalty payments.

Wireless email provider Visto announced on Wednesday that it has signed up Canadian cellular company Rogers Communications as a customer. The deal means that Rogers’ 5.5 million subscribers will have access to email, calendar and contacts applications on their wireless devices via its MyMail service.

Electronic Arts announced that it plans to co-sponsor a scholarship for a female student at a summer program for video game designers at the University of Southern California. The company said Wednesday that any female junior or senior student in high school can apply for a scholarship to attend the four-week Interactive Entertainment summer camp organized by USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. The scholarship covers admission to the camp, room and board at USC, and three college credits for successfully completing the program.

File-swappers who distribute a single copy of a prerelease movie on the Internet can be imprisoned for up to three years, according to a bill that President Bush signed into law on Wednesday. The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, approved by the House of Representatives last Tuesday, represents the entertainment industry’s latest attempt to thwart rampant piracy on file-swapping networks. Movies such as “Star Wars: Episode II,” “Tomb Raider” and “The Hulk,” have been spotted online before their theatrical releases. The law had drawn some controversy because it broadly says that anyone who has even one copy of an unreleased film, software program or music file in a shared folder could be subjected to prison terms and fines of up to three years. Penalties would apply regardless of whether that file was downloaded or not.

PocketMind has released PocketMusic for Windows-powered Smartphones version 2.0. The new release includes HTTP Streaming for MP3 and OGG, crossfading and gapless playback, WMA playback, and much more.

Top mobile phone maker Nokia could start using nanotechnology in its phones within the next two to three years to help keep costs low amid fierce price pressures, a top official was quoted as saying. Nanotechnology deals with manipulating particles one-billionth of a meter in size, and promises benefits from a coating of paint that last decades to faster acting and more effective medicines. The new technology would only be used in phone components like casings in the first stage.

From the world of Verizon Wireless come audible complaints that some of CEO Ivan Seidenberg’s remarks about consumers’ expectations of mobile phone service were over-reported while others were not heard. The San Francisco Chronicle last week quoted Seidenberg as saying consumers have “unrealistic expectations about a wireless service working everywhere. Why in the world would you think your cellphone would work in your house? The customer has come to expect so much. They want it to work in the elevator; they want it to work in the basement.”

Horizon Media announced the launch of a new mobile marketing initiative for The History Channel. The History Channel’s new mobile Web site, developed in conjunction with AvantGo, a service of iAnywhere Solutions, incorporates quizzes with real-time results, daily history trivia, a programming schedule, “what’s on now” updates, and email opt-ins for future information about The History Channel, sent directly to PDAs or smartphones.