Fortunately for the next round of college students, the program is returning this year in a largely similar form. Buy a Windows PC worth $699 ($599 in Canada) or more, get a free 4GB Xbox 360. The deal starts May 20th and can be redeemed at retailers like Best Buy, Fry’s Electronics, and New Egg. (Canadians can take advantage of the offer starting today.)

Microsoft, has been very busy trying to get as many people plugged into its Xbox 360 ecosystem as possible. Its most recent and most interesting attempt came earlier this month when the company announced $99, subscription-subsided Xbox bundle.

There’s no mention of when new student deal ends, but it’s likely to extend well into the summer.

Amazon’s Kindle with Special Offers program has apparently been successful enough that the company is planning to expand it to the Kindle Fire, reports ADAge.

The news comes via two advertisement agency executives, both of whom decided not to work with Amazon due to the general vagueness of its plans. Amazon, for instance, isn’t quite sure whether to offer the advertisements on already-purchased devices or just new ones.

That’s a big detail to work out, as it has major consequences for the general user experience. Unlike with the Kindle with Special Offers, which is sold with the advertisement functionally built in, sending ads to a formerly ad-free Kindle Fire could make a lot of users angry — not just at Amazon but at the advertised products as well. That’s bad news for advertisers.

Offering an ad-sponsored Kindle would also likely allow Amazon to drop the price of the device by a fairly significant margin, making the $199 tablet even more of an impulse buy than it already is.

Sprint, comparatively late to the iPhone party, really wants to steal potential iPhone 4S owners away from the ranks of Verizon and AT&T.

Which is why the carrier plans to offer consumers a carrot: Trade in your current iPhone and get at least $100 towards the purchase of the iPhone 4S. Offered in conjunction with a new line and two-year contract, the deak will run from May 18th to June 30th, TechnoBuffalo reports.

With the $100 discount, the cost of a new 16GB iPhone 4S drops to $99, making for a very tempting buy for those still on the fence. More, that discount could potentially be higher than $100, as Sprint emphasizes above.

Sprint is extending the deal to both new and existing customers, though the offer is clearly all about the former group. The company has to make that iPhone investment pay off in any way it can, after all.

The last time we heard news about Toshiba’s Canvio drives was September 2011, when Toshiba equipped the devices with USB 3.0 and cloud back up software.

Months later, Toshiba is making a few more changes: Both the Canvio 3.0 and Canvio 3.0 Baiscs drives are getting their capacity bumped up to 1.5 terabytes.

Alongside the capacity upgrade, the Canvio 3.0 is also gaining the ability to seamlessly work between Macs and PCs without the need for a reformat. If that’s not a big deal to you, then its probably because you’ve never had the misfortune of attempting to transfer data between the two operating systems. It aint easy.

The 1.5 TB Canvio 3.0, which also features software back up and internal shock sensors, will run for $199. The 1.5TB Canvio Basics 3.0, which offers a more simple (or perhaps basic) set of features, will run for $189.

With just a $10 difference between the two drives, it’s clearly the smart option to ditch the Basics drive in favor of its more capable counterpart. But, then again, thats probably the idea.

Both drives will be available in early June.

That’s the story according to DigiTimes, which says that Amazon could make move as early as the second half of this year.

But the real wonder is that it’s taken this long: E Ink has been promising that manufacturers would adopt color displays since at least 2010.

At last year’s IFA Conference last year, E Ink showed of the latest version of its color screen, dubbed Triton. The screen, which runs of the same low-energy technology as the monochrome E Ink displays, is capable of displaying 4,096 colors.

But there was a problem. As you can see in this video, the most obvious issue with the Triton technology was its fairly lackluster color saturation.

Jeff Bezos agrees — or at least he did last May. In an interview with Consumer Reports, Bezos said that the color E Ink technology wasn’t quite ready to be the centerpiece on an Amazon device. The reason? Blame the colors, which Bezos called “very pale.”

Even E Ink marketing exec Sriram Peruvemba alluded to the technology’s limitations in the above video: “One of the issues with the higher-resolution display is that it reduces the light going into the display material, and therefore the color is not as saturated as we would like,” he said.

So its no surprise to see that a color E Ink device from Amazon or Barnes & Noble has yet to materialize. It can’t be easy to create a high-resolution E Ink display that also offers adequate color saturation. But if the DigiTimes report is true, E Ink is finally getting close.

Mobile hotspots fall into a very particular subset of gadgets that only a very particular subset of people care about. This post is aimed at them.

Sprint on Wednesday announced the Tri-Fi, a wireless hotspot compatible with 3G, WiMax, and LTE connections. Sprint is in a big transition on the network front, and buying the Tri-Fi essentially ensures present and future compatibility with Sprint’s current and future plans.

Sprint estimates that the device’s 3,600 mAH battery will last eight hours on a single charge. The Tri-Fi also features a microSD card slot, allowing it to act as a file host.

The Tri-Fi lands on May 18th, when it will run for $99 after a two-year contract and $50 rebate.

Lenovo on Monday announced the ThinkCentre M92p and M72e, a pair of tiny desktops that are about as thick as a golf ball.

Their diminutive sizes, Lenovo says, make the devices easy to hide, hang, and mount, which is valuable in offices where space is a constant concern.

Both drives come with the option of upgrading to Intel’s latest Ivy Bridge processors. The devices also come with the choice of either plain old HDD or a comparatively more exciting solid state drive. The latter, coupled with Lenovo’s Enhanced Experience 3 for Windows 7, means that the desktops will boast some pretty impressive boot speeds. There are also options for integrated graphics and Wi-Fi.

Unsurprisingly, there are no optical drives built into the devices, though Lenovo did manage to furnish them with five USB ports.

Prices for the M72e start at $499, while the M92p will run for $799. Both devices will be available next month.

The general knee-jerk reaction to Microsoft’s $99 Xbox plan is that it’s crazy, odd, a bad deal.

But the move is really the latest in a long line of similar efforts to get consumers to plunk down cash for things they would otherwise be unwilling to pay quite so much for.

The subsidization model does a few things well. Most obviously, it keeps prices low, reducing the barrier for entry and opening up and increasing the revenue streams elsewhere. We’ve already seen this on multiple fronts, from free-to-play games like Angry Birds and Team Fortress 2, to, most notably, the smartphones industry.

Even Amazon introduced a similar effort last year when it announced the Kindle with Special Offers, an ad-subsidized version of the device that ran for $25 less than the ad-free version. The idea? Amazon takes a hit on the Kindle sale, but gets to put advertisements in front of far more consumers. (Kobo also tried something similar.)

Video game consoles have run on a less overt subsidization model: Sell consoles at a loss and make up the cash on games sales. The $99 Xbox deal pushes that a bit further, cutting the entry price by a significant margin to attract new buyers. The difference here lies in the contract, which binds the consumer to Microsoft for two years. This, as ZDNet’s Mary Jo-Foley notes, makes it more likely that consumers will opt into other purchases.

And then there are the cell phone carriers, which take a hit on cell phone sales in exchange for two-year contracts. Not that it’s been entirely rosy here. Subsides are notoriously disastrous for the profit margins of the cell phone carriers: The more smartphones Verizon and AT&T and Sprint sell, the more they have to shell out to subsidize the purchases. (See: the ongoing snafu over the iPhone.)

This reality prompted T-Mobile Chief Marketing Officer Cole Brodman to publicly decry the carrier subsidization model that his industry has come to rely on. “It actually distorts what devices actually cost and it causes OEMs, carriers — everybody to compete on different playing fields,” Brodman said last month.

Clearly, subsides have been a major double-edged sword for carriers — not that that will prevent other industries from also experimenting with them.

These kinds of subsides work by pushing the complete financial picture far into the general haze of the future, where short-term benefits far outweigh long-term costs: Be happy now, worry about consequences later.

With the $99 Xbox deal, this means that consumers ultimately pay more for something that they can get for a lower price now. But here’s the thing: Most consumers aren’t going to run those calculations; they’ll only see the $99 price tag. And the price difference after two years? That simply becomes the cost of financing.

That’s why subsidies work for both consumers and companies, and also why the model seems like a logical next step for other device’s and industries. Assuming that Microsoft’s $99 Xbox test works out, it’s likely that we will end up seeing similar efforts with the next Xbox as well. And the sky’s the limit from there.

Confirming rumors reported last week, Microsoft today announced that it plans to sell a special subsidized Xbox 360 bundle.

The bundle, which runs for $99, comes with a 4GB Xbox 360, a Kinect, and a two-year $14.99 per-month Xbox Live Gold subscription.

There is, however, a catch: the deal can only be redeemed in a Microsoft Store, which could be a problem for those not living in the vicinity of one.

Here’s the price break down, taken from our previous coverage:

The cost of the rumored Xbox subscription totals $360 over two years, a number that seems too apt to not have been intentional. Add that to the cost of the bundle itself and you’re paying $459 over two years, which is a bit higher than the $418 that customers would pay for a 4GB Xbox, Kinect, and two-years of Xbox Live.

The official confirmation also sheds light on the deal’s early termination fee. Starting at $250 for the first three months of the contract, the fee decreases by $12 each month, eventually dropping to zero by the time the agreement ends.

Of course, while all of this comes a bit too late for those who already own an Xbox, the deal is certainly an attractive one for those who have yet to take the Xbox (or Kinect) plunge.

By itself, Samsung’s recently-announced Galaxy S III is fairly iterative. Samsung hasn’t pushed the design envelope all that far, and instead decided to play it safe with its latest flagship phone. The interesting bits with the phone lie elsewhere.

Many of Galaxy S III’s most interesting features are unique to the phone. Samsung, it seems, is intent on differentiating the device on a variety of levels - from software to hardware to extra unexpected add-ons.

See also: Samsung announces Galaxy S III with a focus on natural interaction

An AMOLED Screen

The biggest pull of the Galaxy S III, at least initially, is its screen. At 4.8 inches, it’s huge, larger than the screen of the Galaxy S II and a tad bit smaller than that of the Galaxy Note.

SmartStay looks into your eyes

One of the more unique and compelling features in the Galaxy S III is Smart Stay, a technology that uses eye tracking to prevent the phone’s screen from dimming while the user is looking at it. It’s a clever feature, and though Samsung will be hard-pressed to be able to effectively advertise it, it’s certainly something that owners of the Galaxy S III will notice and appreciate.

S Voice listens to sound of your voices

S Voice is, in short, Samsung’s answer to Apple’s Siri. Built on voice commands, S Voice allows users to do anything from silence their alarms (say “Snooze”) to call friends while in the middle of texting them. The feature, which understands English, French, Italian, and German, will also be able to tie into other services, giving it a fairly robust potential for expandability.

Dropbox: 50GB free

While more than a few phones have come with free Dropbox space in recent months, none of them have launched with quite so much. There are some question marks though: the free space is only set to last two years, and while that tends to be how long smartphone owners hold onto their phones, it still seems a bit strange that Dropbox would impose such a limit.

LTE support

While the Galaxy S III is set to launch later this month in Europe with an HSPA+ radio, LTE support will also be incoming a bit down the line. This, of course, is a big deal for Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon, all of which are pushing heavily their own 4G LTE offerings. That alone makes it likely that the Galaxy S III will appear on at least one, if not all three, of the carriers when the phone launches in the U.S. this summer.

FlipBoard: Exclusive to the Galaxy S III (for now)

One of the bigger surprises with the phone is that with it would be arriving Flipboard, the social media aggregation app previously exclusive to iOS. Somehow Samsung managed to get exclusive access to the Android version of the app - initially anyway. Flipboard will eventually make its way to other “select” Android phones, but for now, it belongs to the Galaxy S III.

See also: Samsung unveils Galaxy S III phone with quad-core, Android ICS | CNET’s Hands-on First Take | Photos: Galaxy S III is plastic, powerful |Galaxy S III has ears, eyes just for you