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Reuters – Jon Rubinstein, who was instrumental in crafting Apple Inc’s iPod music player, has left Hewlett Packard Co after two years on the job there.

Digital Trends – After a decade of lackluster online support, Nintendo may finally be wising up. During an investor’s briefing today, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announced that its upcoming console, the Wii U, will have two new features: NFC built into the controller and an Xbox Live-like online service called Nintendo Network. Downloadable content, including fullly downloadable retail games is also a possibility. Details below.

Reuters – Jon Rubinstein, who was instrumental in crafting Apple Inc’s iPod music player, has left Hewlett Packard Co after two years on the job there.

Digital Trends – Amidst celebration of a record quarter, during which Apple brought in more than $46 billion in revenue, a stench of worker mistreatment at Foxconn factories in China, where Apple’s popular iPhone and iPad devices are assembled, arose out of the media ether.

Appolicious – Start your weekend with all the best videos the Internet has to offer with Frequency, an iPad app that makes finding and organizing great videos from all over the place a snap. It’s our top Fresh App today, followed by Steam Mobile, an iOS app that ties to the popular digital video game download portal and lets you impulse-buy during Steam’s crazy game sales no matter where you are. A big update with new levels to RAGE HD tops off our games picks for this weekend, followed by a new, free edition to the Baseball Superstars series from Gamevil.

Appolicious – There’s been a second wave of Siri clones on the rise this week, with the launch of Evi gaining plenty of attention. While Android users seek their own version of the popular iPhone 4S artificial intelligence assistant, Evi, SimSimi and others have continued to gain traction in the Android Market. Lookout Labs unveiled a great app for visualizing mobile security threats, giving you deeper insight to malware behavior over time. Apartments.com also broke out with an Android app this week, joining the top real estate resources in the Market.

Appolicious – This week has seen an abundance of strong contenders for the best games of the week list, so much so that we’re holding a few back for next Thursday so that they all receive their dues. In the meantime, amuse yourself with this group of quality titles, starting with Ant Raid, a casual strategy game that first appeared on the iPad and is now available to players on all iOS devices. It offers a lot, whether you’re into action games or strategy games. Check it out, and four other great offerings, below.

AP – Samsung Electronics Co. reported a 17 percent jump in fourth quarter profit on the strength of smartphone sales even as the company battled claims it had copied Apple’s iPhone.

Digital Trends – Launched earlier this week and announced on the Steam site, Valve has started a closed beta for Steam Mobile on the iPhone and Android phones. The mobile application brings a vast amount of core functions found within the PC and Mac version of the Steam software, the most notable being the ability to make purchases through the application. This will allow any mobile Steam user to take advantage of the frequent sales that cut popular games up to 90 percent off. Assuming the user agrees to notifications from the application, Steam will also be able to feed mobile alerts to the user when a game on a user’s wishlist goes on sale. The interface offers the familiar Steam categories of new, featured, popular and specials. In addition, there’s a search interface allowing the user to find games by price, title or genre. 

AP – The federal government’s plan to expand computer security protections into critical parts of private industry is raising concerns that the move will threaten Americans’ civil liberties.