Nokia has today announced their third Windows Phone and the first ever LTE Nokia device. Lumia 900 follows the design path of Lumia 800 and N9. The main difference in the design is the size you get with the 4,3 inch AMOLED display.

As with the the previously announced Nokia Windows Phones you get a 1,4 gigahertz single-core processor but they've increased the display size to 4,3 inches. The AMOLED display relies on the Nokia's own ClearBlack technology. Battery is said to be 1830 mAh which is quite a bit more than with Lumia 800 (1450 mAh) or Lumia 710 (1320 mAh).

The phone also packs a Carl Zeiss camera with large aperture (F2.2) and wide angle focal length (28mm). It produces 8 megapixel stills and 720p/30fps video.

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The district court of Helsinki has ordered one of the Finland's largest internet service providers to seize access to the popular filesharing site The Pirate Bay. Extending the original ruling in October last year the court has specified the domain names and IP addresses that are to be blocked.

Block has only been forced on the ISP Elisa which is said to be the most frequently used ISP amongst TPB users in Finland. In the press release by Elisa, the company calls the block temporary and has already appealed.

The ISP refused to block the filesharing sites under the original ruling because of not specific enough terms. Now that the domain names and IP addresses have been named the block is in effect.

Included in the blocked addresses are most of the domain names and IP addresses owned by The Pirate Bay as well as at least one URL which now redirects to Electronic Frontier Finland (EFFI) foundation. The domain in question (piraattilahti.fi) has previously redirected to thepiratebay.org but is operated by an individual not connected to The Pirate Bay.

One of the world largest software download sites, Download.com, has been found to add bloatware to their downloads. The files come with a proprietary Download.com installer that tries to push you with toolbars, as well as change home pages and default search engines in addition to installing the software itself.

According to CNET they bundle the software for the good of the users which is hard to imagine. It's not only annoying for the users but violates distribution terms and conditions of some of the software. This is ingeniously bypassed with the terms of service for Download.com.

Currently not all the files are wrapped in the installer but each new version will be. You can identify a bloatware download by the filename beginning with "cnet_".

Some of the software developers have already started to protest. UltraVNC creators have added a warning to their download page encouraging people to avoid Download.com.

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Nokia unveiled ealier today the company's first MeeGo touting handset. As previously leaked in the pictures the phone comes in a slate form factor and is called Nokia N9. The phone features a 3,9 inch AMOLED display with 854 by 480 pixel resolution, a single-core one gigahertz CPU, up to 64 gigabytes of storage, and runs MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan.

The slate previously dubbed as codename Lankku was indeed released under the name N9, even though rumors from months and months back had N9 in a QWERTY slider form factor. Adding to the 1GHz CPU the MeeGo phone comes with gigabyte of RAM memory, pentaband WCDMA and quadband GSM, 8 megapixel AF camera with dual LED flash, and all the necessary connectivity features including NFC.

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On behalf of the whole AfterDawn staff congratulations to our very own web designer Teemu and his wife Katariina who just became parents of a newborn boy!

Nokia has officially announced partnership with Microsoft and will adopt its smartphone platform Windows Phone 7. According to the press release, Nokia has selected Windows Phone 7 as the primary platform for its upcoming smartphones.

Nokia says partnership between the companies will combine the strengths of the companies. They believe that Nokia's strengths in manufacturing and the software prowess of Microsoft will "jointly create market-leading mobile products and services designed to offer consumers, operators and developers unrivalled choice and opportunity."

The software side of the joint cooperation will now largely fall into Microsoft's hands. However, Nokia's Ovi Store will be integrated with the WP7 Marketplace and Microsoft's Bing will get location and map data from Nokia-owned NAVTEQ. Marketplace will also benefit from Nokia's operator billing platform.

Despite the shift towards Windows Phone 7, Nokia will continue to develop Symbian and MeeGo. Lower end smartphones will likely have Symbian in the future as well and MeeGo will remain as a test platform for future developments. Nokia still has plans to unveil its first MeeGo handset during 2011.

The next generation iPhones and iPads are rumored to have Apple's new System on a Chip, which will feature the much more powerful dual core SGX543MP2 graphics chip. It is also said that the chip would enable four times the pixel count of previous iPad. The new iPad 2 Retina display would have a resolution of 2048 x 1536.

The more advanced SoC will also add support for HDMI as well as 1080p Full HD video playback. However, it is not yet certain in which iOS devices you will see these, if any. According to AppleInsider, there will be multi-core ARM Cortex A9 CPUs in the SoC quite like in Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip.

It certainly does sound like the new iOS devices will have a ton more horsepower than the predecessors.

The Japanese police carried out raids all over the country last week. They managed to arrest 18 people who have allegedly uploaded copyrighted movies, music, games, and software to the Internet.

Anti-Counterfeiting Association (ACA) which consists of many of the influential trade groups had been monitoring the Internet use in Japan for weeks to spot the possible copyright infringements. They handed out the information to police who started the operation last Tuesday.

The police searched a total of 50 locations and found 18 individuals who are waiting to be prosecuted. One of the ACA partners, Recording Industry Association of Japan, has released details of the arrested.

Even though the operation was quite a large one, none of the accused pirates are big time crooks. Even the worst of the bunch shared only a couple games or music tracks.

Last week Google announced the removal of H.264 support in its Chrome web browser. A questionable move got a follow-up yesterday when Google said in the Chromium blog that they will be releasing WebM plug-ins for Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Both of the companies have been strongly supporting H.264 and denied the support for WebM in their web browsers.

Google prefers their own royalty-free WebM technology that is backed up by browsers Firefox, Opera and Chrome. Apple and Microsoft are behind H.264 that has a larger supporter group and move established community because of its longer history.

Forming the future standard for HTML video tag is no closer than before. Google won't be giving up easily, Apple and Microsoft on the other hand really want their money. Well, at least now it seems that each of the browsers will be soon supporting WebM. That should be a good thing, right?

After a flood of piracy allegations, the file locker site MegaUpload has stood up against the music and movie industry. In an interview for TorrentFreak the company says RIAA and MPAA are directing them with some "grotesquely overblown allegations".

Just a couple days ago Anti-fraud firm MarkMonitor claimed that upload sites are "on a par with peer-to-peer sites when it comes to piracy." MarkMonitor's stats say that RapidShare, Megaupload and Megavideo alone account for more than 21 billions visits to illegal files per year.

We provide connectivity between end users and storage capacity in the cloud, but no content – just like e.g. ADSL providers and hard drive vendors.

MegaUpload however reminds that the service is actively fighting against sharing of copyrighted material and that vast majority of its traffic is legitimate. They also provide services for employees at most of the Fortune 500 companies. MegaUpload reminds copyright holders that they work in a similar way to many unquestionably legal companies.

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The recent rumors from Boy Genius Report's Apple sources say that the Cupertino-based company will remove the home button from their future iPad models. It does sound like a strange move, but the iOS developer release for iPad suggests that there will be support for multitouch gestures that allows navigation to the home screen and other views.

According to the sources, Apple will be removing the home button from iPhone as well. They have already been testing the buttonless handsets that are likely to arrive in stores next summer.

In addition to button removal, 9 to 5 Mac talks about a new camera. The iOS 4.3 developer release hints about a new camera with four images seen below. The shutter images are sized at 1024 x 768 pixels, which also suggests that the iPad 2 will have the same resolution display as its predecessor.

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Sony calmly informed last March that it'll be removing the Other OS feature from PlayStation 3. The feature that allows users to install additional operating systems to their PS3 was removed by a firmware update in April. Users who use their game console as a Linux computer were not amused, to say the least. Actually, after the removal of the feature consumers filed lawsuits against Sony in the US and Australia.

Now according to News.com.au, the first Other OS class action suit has come to a conclusion. Mr. Michael Trebilcock from Adelaide, Australia wanted 800 AUD in compensation for the removal of an important feature. He said it was one of the reasons he bought the PS3 and won't be able to use it as a computer anymore.

The Holden Hill Magistrates Court dismissed Trebilcock's claim. The court was told by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission that Sony did nothing wrong when they released the firmware update.

Sony will continue fighting in court over their game console. On upcoming Friday, there will be a court hearing in a case concerning the thumbdrive mod called PSJailBreak where modchip sellers OzModChips, Mod Supplier and Quantronics take on Sony.

Apparently Facebook has hit the user limit and crashed. Or it might be some other issue but currently millions and millions of Farmville addicts are cursing as Facebook seems to be down in its entirety.

According to Downrightnow.com, Facebook has been offline for couple hours and the hundreds of millions of users around the world are missing their hourly dosage.

The downtime not only affects the site itself but a lot of its partners and sites that use Facebook to spread their word -- such as your beloved AfterDawn.com. There has been no confirmation from Facebook why the site is inaccessible but it definitely is no intended maintenance break. Hopefully, Facebook will be able to straighten out their problems soon.

For now, liking things is on hold.

PlayStation 3 has given modders and hackers a run for their money. For nearly fours years hackers have tried to create a working mod that would bypass the PS3 software protection and run homebrew applications and backups. However, there has been no real breakthroughs, until now, if you believe what PS3News has to say.

According to the site, a product called PSJailBreak will allow owners of any version of PS3 to run backups of PS3 games as well as homebrew applications. The $170 mod is a piece of software stored in a USB drive. By inserting the thumb drive to your PS3 you'll be able to install and run the launcher application in seconds without permanently modifying the console or its software.

The PSJailBreak application also includes a backup tool which allows users to backup their game discs to the PS3 hard drive. Movies whether DVD or Blu-ray, or previous generation PlayStation games aren't supported by the tool. The backup manager can also be downloaded for free.

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Nothing new under the sun one might say. Nokia dominates its homeland with a huge margin to its nearest competitor. However, the most popular handset in Finland was not the Nokia N95 or Nokia 6300 -- both of which did fairly well though -- but a Nokia 2760 (pictured) clamshell dumbphone.

Aalto University (School of Science and Technology) in Finland did a study (pdf) on handset population in Finland. The data was collected from the reporting systems of the largest mobile operators in Finland. Therefore the results indicate not how many units are sold but the percentage of handsets in use.

According to the study, nearly 90 percent of all mobile phones in use are Nokia, Samsung comes second with a mere 5 percent share. Nearly half of the handsets sport S40, which is used in Nokia's feature phones. For the first time ever Symbian surpassed the old Nokia OS in 2009 with a 22 percent share.

The top 15 handsets had a total of five 3G phones, two Eseries and two Nseries phones, and four handsets that do not support packet data at all. The top 15 handsets accounted for nearly 40 percent of all handsets in use. Now, here's the full chart.

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