Around 10 per cent of Xbox 360s have been suffering from that irretrievable breakdown known as the “Red Ring of Death”, according to the warranty company SquareTrade, although the figure could be much higher.

The problem forced Microsoft to take a charge of more than $1bn for the cost of repairs in its last financial year, but the company refused to reveal what percentage of its consoles were suffering from the failure.

In a blog note, SquareTrade reports a 16.4 per cent failure rate for 360s based on 171 claims made on a sample group of 1040 Xbox warranties that it sold between April and July last year.

There were 102 Red Ring of Death hardware failures among these, with overheating thought to be the main cause.

SquareTrade notes its report only tracks its test group for six to 10 months and “once this same test group is tracked for 24 or 36 months, the fail rate is certain to go up.”

However, Microsoft extended its own warranty to three years for red-ring failures at the time of its writedown last year, so SquareTrade may not be seeing many of the breakdowns that are continuing to occur.

The Zeemote on first use seems to be a solution looking for a problem.

This separate joystick controller for playing games on mobile phones appeared an unnecessary peripheral to me – who wants to carry around something extra in their pocket just to play a few games on their phone, when the regular buttons on the handset work just as well?

I gave it to my nine-year-old son to play with and he concurred. There was nothing he could do with the joystick that he couldn’t do using the normal phone buttons. Even flying was just as easy on the phone.

However, I spoke to Beth Marcus, Zeemote’s chief executive, who provided a few reasons to justify the device, which will be demonstrated at next week’s Game Developers Conference.

Firstly, my son’s hands were a lot smaller than those in the Zeemote’s target demographic – 18 to 25 year-olds – where frustrations abound when a wrong key is pressed. Second, it’s a different decoupled sit-back experience compared to putting the phone in your face in Blackberry-prayer mode. Third, there are moves you can make with the Zeemote that can take you to the next level of a game, which are almost impossible on a regular handset keyboard - I’ll have to trust her on that one.

She expects the Zeemote, which features a thumbstick and four assignable buttons, to be available in the first half of the year for less than $50. It could also be bundled with games and/or a phone and calling plan.

The Zeemote could also find other uses as a remote control and a smoother browser of maps and web pages, but the focus is on games for now.

The chief executive created the first force-feedback joystick for PC games, but there are no rumble effects in the Zeemote, which pairs up with the phone as a Bluetooth device.

“That would have been an extra cost,” she said. “And there’s a motor in phones that can already add vibrations to games.”

Graphics chipmakers are fond of making a case these days that their graphics processing units (GPUs) are becoming as important or more so than the central processing units (CPUs) of the PC microprocessor makers.

As bigger displays in high-definition dazzle consumers, most of the horsepower that drives them comes from the GPU.

Fourth-quarter numbers for the graphics market will begin to leak out after the market closes today. Ashok Kumar, CRT Capital analyst, expects Silicon Valley’s Nvidia to pick up a point or two of market share, to the detriment of its rival, Advanced Micro Devices (incorporating the Canadian graphics chipmaker ATI).

He says 2007 was a memorable year for graphics, with the release of richer interfaces in the Windows Vista and Apple Leopard operating systems, a series of new graphics-intensive PC games, the new DX10 graphics standard from Microsoft and a complete refresh of Nvidia and AMD’s line-ups.

Nvidia released its next-generation graphics chips and cards ahead of AMD, gaining market share.

“AMD had their low point pretty much the middle of last year,” says Dean McCarron of Mercury Research, who releases the fourth-quarter figures today.

He says they recovered in the third quarter as new products were released and describes the latest versions launched over the past week as “process-shrinks essentially” that offer improved performance and have reduced costs.

The ATI Radeon HD 3450, 3650 and 3870X2 boards are based on chips with circuit widths of 55 billionths of a metre, compared to 80 billionths in the previous generation. This allows a smaller die size, greater transistor density and lower costs.

The 3450 and 3650, available this month, are low-power sub-$150 boards, while the 3870X2, announced today, features two GPUs and, at $450, is being priced around $150 below Nvidia’s competing card.

Multi-GPU boards are likely to become a trend, as are hybrid graphics.

The graphics capabilities of low-cost PCs can easily be upgraded by adding a new board. But, in the past, this has meant switching off the integrated graphics chip already included on the motherboard.

With hybrid graphics, the integrated chip stays on and is boosted by the addition of the board. AMD says it is introducing this feature with its new boards, Nvidia says it already has the capability.