NEW YORK (Reuters) –
Verizon Wireless is due to start selling Apple Inc‘s (AAPL.O) iPhone next year, bringing an end to AT&T Inc’s (T.N) role as the exclusive service provider for the blockbuster device, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

Bloomberg, citing two people familiar with the plans, reported that the iPhone would be available to Verizon Wireless customers in January. Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. mobile phone carries, is a venture between Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ.N) and Vodafone Group Plc (VOD.L).

A representative for Verizon Wireless declined comment. Apple also declined to comment.

(Reporting by Paul Thomasch; Editing by Bernard Orr)

While I was cobbling together my PlayStation Plus review, Hulu went ahead and launched its long-anticipated paid subscription service, Hulu Plus. For $9.99 a month, you’ll be able to stream content to your iOS4 iPhone or iPod, 3D or WiFi iPad, and Samsung Internet-enabled TVs or Blu-ray players.

The big deal: While you can still watch shows freely on Hulu.com, Hulu Plus offers access to additional shows as well as the option to watch them on any of those devices.

The big annoyance: You’re still stuck watching annoying ads. “For our advertisers, who allow us to keep our Hulu Plus price low with the support of ad revenue, we offer one of the world’s most effective advertising platforms, with the ability to speak effectively to users across a variety of devices, anywhere they happen to be,” wrote Hulu CEO Jason Kilar on Hulu’s official company blog.

Conspicuously absent from the launch device lineup? PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 support, listed as “coming soon” for the former, and a bit more specifically, “coming early 2011″ for the latter.

“These are the devices shipping with Hulu Plus today,” wrote Kilar. “But this is just the first step in our mission to bring you TV wherever you are.”

“We are already hard at work on porting Hulu Plus to other devices and platforms, with PlayStation 3 coming soon. But that’s a story for another day.”

A story for another day? Why not a story for PlayStation Plus, Sony’s just-launched “long on hypothetical value, short on actual content” subscriber service?

Okay, so Hulu Plus isn’t available today, so teasing it with PlayStation Plus would have been pointless. And since we don’t have a firm launch date for the service itself–rumor is it’ll be sometime this fall–who knows what the rest of 2010 will bring? I just signed up for the invite-only preview (free? paid?) so with a bit of luck, I’ll have a chance to test drive its ballyhooed 45 current programs from ABC, NBC, and FOX and its “rich library content” comprising some 120 TV seasons and over 2,000 episodes.

But what I really want to see is how well it works on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, how it stacks up against Netflix, and whether–given my strong preference for unparalleled but currently off-Hulu shows like AMC’s Mad Men and Breaking Bad or HBO’s Treme–I’ll care enough to actually use it.

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Hulu launched a preview of a new $9.99-a-month subscription service called Hulu Plus that streams TV content to Web-connected TVs and devices including the iPhone and iPad. The service supports 720p high-definition streaming, and will work across computers, TVs, mobile phones, and tablets.

Users can sign-up for a invitation to the Hulu Plus subscription preview at www.hulu.com/plus; the company has not said when to expect the service to go live in wide release, beyond a vague reference to it happening “in the coming months”. If you don’t get an invite, you can still try the service out using a limited number of free episodes and clips.

first reviewed the site in a quest to find The Best TV on the Web. Now, Hulu aggregates content from 100 providers, including networks ABC, FOX, and NBC. The service is jointly owned by NBC Universal and The Walt Disney Company, among others.

Not only does Hulu’s site provide an easy way to catch up on the current television you missed, but it provides an impressive archive of back seasons of classics. Hulu’s release specifies series like The X-Files, Law and Order: SVU, Saturday Night Live, Arrested Development, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Ally McBeal.

At launch, the service will work with PCs and Macs; via an app for Apple’s iPad, iPhone (3GS and 4), and iPod Touch (third-generation) platforms; and via the Samsung Apps platform on 2010 Samsung connected devices (including Blu-ray players, Blu-ray Home Theater systems, and TVs). In fact, the Hulu Plus app streams over both 3G and Wi-Fi. Between Netflix streaming and now Hulu, it’s clear why AT&T was quick to recently ditch its unlimited data plans.

And looking forward, Hulu notes that Sony PlayStation 3 support is “coming soon,” while in the months after launch the service will work with connected HDTVs and Blu-ray players from Sony Electronics and Vizio. Microsoft Xbox 360 users won’t be left out of this party; Xbox support is slated for early 2011.

When you sign up for the preview, Hulu lists other devices not announced today, including Android, BlackBerry, and Palm for mobile phones, and LG TVs and Blu-ray players. This could be a signal that Hulu Plus will be coming to other devices, too.

(Here is a Hulu Plus promotional video)

The potential is huge- $9.99 for what is the largest television-on-demand archive on the net sounds like a golden opportunity for any television lover. But I wonder about the possibility of renting episodes, too, for local storage on a device. For all of those times we’re out-of-Wi-Fi range, how do we Hulu then?

The other shoe has finally dropped. Meet Hulu Plus, the long-rumored paid subscription version of the once all-free Hulu streaming TV site. It will have more shows and (finally!) support for devices such as the iPhone, the iPad, the PlayStation 3 and eventually the Xbox 360.

Available only by invite for now, Hulu Plus is “not a replacement for Hulu.com,” which will continue to offer the most recent episodes of current TV shows for free, Hulu CEO Jason Kilar wrote in a blog post.

The new $10-a-month service will offer the full current season of such shows as “Glee,” “The Office,” “House,” “Modern Family,” “30 Rock” and “Family Guy,” as well as all episodes of past shows including “The X-Files,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Roswell,” “Arrested Development,” “Ally McBeal,” “Heroes,” “Ugly Betty,” “Quantum Leap,” “Miami Vice” and “My Name Is Earl.” All told, about 2,000 episodes from 120 seasons of shows will be available for streaming.

Will we still have to watch the (non-skippable) commercials interspersed throughout free shows on Hulu.com? The answer, apparently (and unfortunately), is yes: Hulu Plus TV episodes will be an “ad-supported subscription product” that will “keep our Hulu Plus price low with the support of ad revenue,” Kilar writes on the Hulu Blog.

But Hulu Plus will at last offer official support for streaming to devices other than a desktop or a laptop. Expect apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, for example (including streaming over both 3G and Wi-Fi), as well as access via your PlayStation 3 (“coming soon”) or the Xbox 360 (“early 2011″), with all “native” HD shows available at resolutions up to 720p. Other devices will include Net-connected TVs and Blu-ray players from Samsung, Sony and Vizio.

Hulu says it’ll be sending out invites for Hulu Plus in “waves” starting this week. The service will be open to all users “as soon as we’re ready.”

Rumors of a paid subscription version of Hulu have been swirling for months now. Hulu execs periodically piped up to say some kind of pay wall for Hulu was inevitable.

In recent weeks, it started to become clear how Hulu was going to lure users for a paid offering: access via mobile devices like the iPhone or through a Net-connected TV, Blu-ray player or game console.

But the big question is: Will users actually line up to pay $10 a month for mobile and living-room access to Hulu, especially if they’re already coughing up cash for a monthly cable bill? As I wrote just last week, I might be interested in paying $10 a month for Hulu as a substitute for cable, although as a sports fan, I’d be reluctant to lose access to SportsCenter and Monday Night Football (which you can only watch on ESPN’s basic cable channel).

A for-pay version of Hulu could be a boon for the ever-growing number of cord-cutters who are looking to kiss their cable or satellite TV carriers good-bye — provided they have an alternative to a broadband cable modem, of course.

But for those of us who aren’t quite ready to toss our cable boxes, $10 a month on top of a monthly cable bill is probably pushing it, especially given that we could always download TV episodes a la carte from iTunes, Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network for about $2 a pop.

Would you be willing to pay $10 a month for Hulu Plus?

• Hulu blog: Introducing Hulu Plus: More wherever. More whenever. Than ever.

— Ben Patterson is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.

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Serial ATA (SATA) might be one of the fastest interfaces for transferring data, but many computers—and all Macs—lack an external SATA (or eSATA) port. For those who need to connect an eSATA device to their Mac, Addonics Technologies has released an eSATA adapter that lets you connect any eSATA storage device to any USB 3.0, 2.0 or 1.1 port.

The $34 adapter is about the size of a cigarette lighter and is compatible with external hard drives, solid-state drives, or optical drives with an eSATA interface. It also works with SATA Port Multiplier Storage, which means it can turn any eSATA RAID storage into a USB 3.0 external RAID system.

The adapter uses an eSATA USB Hybrid port, and supports a maximum transfer rate of 5 Gbps for USB 3.0, 480 Mbps for USB 2.0, and 12 Mbps for USB 1.1, which are the maximum speeds of the respective ports. Since it’s powered by USB, no additional power supply is needed—in fact, the adapter itself can even provide juice for low-power 5V eSATA devices, such as 2.5-inch eSATA hard drives.

The adapter is compatible with every major OS, including Mac OS X, and no software driver is needed.