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Barnes & Noble has announced that the highly-anticipated launch of the Nook e-reader will be pushed back one week due to overly high demand, with the gadget now hitting retail shops on December 7th.

Just last week the book retailer announced that the Nook was out of stock and any consumer purchasing after the 20th would not receive their device until January 4th, or even later.

B&N also notes that there will be a "very limited number" of Nooks in stores and that most of their current supply will be shipped out to those who pre-ordered online. The device costs $259 USD.

The Nook is the first e-reader that is expected to significantly compete with market leader Amazon's Kindle, and the Nook has superior hardware including Wi-Fi, a microSD slot for added memory and a second touch screen, in color, which is used for control and navigation. The Kindle has none of those features, but does have superior battery life.

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The European Commission (EC) has accused six TV and monitor companies of running a cartel in the cathode-ray tube (CRT) market, charging the companies after a two-year long investigation.

The companies in question are Philips, LG Electronics, Chunghwa Picture Tubes, Matsushita, Samsung and Toshiba.

The complaint is that the manufacturers colluded in an effort to keep CRT screen prices artificially high in the midst of falling demand. CRT TVs and monitors have almost completely left the market, at least in western Europe, and the Japanese and North American markets, replaced by thinner LCD sets.

However, the CRT sets are "still widely used in Southern and Eastern Europe, especially for TVs," as well as "still made for a couple of emerging markets," says EC spokesperson Jonathan Todd, via CW.

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Psystar, the Mac clone maker that was taken down earlier this month, had some very ambitious plans it appears for their illegal Mac clones, suckering venture capitalists in with expectations that were overly bold.

According to slides Psystar showed off to potential investors, the company expected to sell 12 million systems in 2011 for their "aggressive growth model" or 1.45 million systems that year for their "conservative growth model."

Other predictions were as follows: "Under its conservative projections, Psystar told investors it would sell 70,000 computers in 2009, 470,000 systems in 2010 and 1.45 million machines in 2011. The firm’s aggressive growth model, however, put those numbers at 130,000, 1.87 million and 12 million during 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively."

In comparison, Apple, selling legal Macs, sold only 10.4 million systems for the 12 months ended September 30, 2009.

For 2009, Psystar sold 768 computers, a joke compared even to their conservative 70,000 unit prediction.

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Windows 7 has surpassed the Mac OS X in market share, moving to almost 6 percent in its first month of release. All Mac OS X versions combined have an estimated 5.27 percent market share, according to Net Applications.

"It's safe to say that Windows 7's daily share did peak above Mac's weekly share," said Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president at Net Applications, to PCWorld.

Overall, Windows market share increased marginally to 92.64 percent for the week ended November 21st, up from 92.52 percent.

"We may be seeing an uptick in overall Windows share this month," added Vizzaccaro. "This isn't too rare, but if we see three or four months in a row of Windows regaining market share, that would be a significant trend change."

Windows 7 market share has been growing steadily since launch, increasing over 20 percent each week.

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Popular DVR maker TiVo and ISP Virgin Media have announced a partnership this week, one that will see TiVo develop Virgin's upcoming HD set-top boxes.

TiVo will create a custom interface and in exchange Virgin "will be the exclusive distributor of TiVo service and hardware in the UK," says Electronista. Virgin has been losing market share to rival BSkyB in the UK and the company hopes the new generation of HD boxes will help them compete.

The boxes, besides playing back SD and HD streams from Virgin, will include online services such as the BBC iPlayer and itv.com.

The set-tops should go on sale in 2010.

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The once-giant torrent tracker Mininova has removed all illegal torrents this week, following the ruling of a Netherlands court that told the tracker that it must begin removing links to unauthorized downloads.

Mininova used to have a "notice and take down" policy in which copyright-holders would have to flag the content before it would be taken down. The court ruled that policy insufficient.

The tracker is now only host to a limited "featured content" service which offers legally licensed files.

Adds Tim Kuik, director of BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy group: "We applaud the fact that Mininova now uses the BitTorrent technology for legal business. We are not against the technology but only against the use of that technology for illegal purposes."

Mininova did say they are still considering an appeal but at this point it seems less and less likely.

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The huge launch of Modern Warfare 2 has helped the popular Call of Duty franchise to reach a new milestone, passing the $3 billion USD revenue mark, says publisher Activision.

Overall, the six CoD titles have sold 55 million units with Modern Warfare 2 crushing recent entertainment launch records by taking in $550 million USD in its first five days of availability.

In just its first day, the game sold 4.7 million units in the US and UK markets. The new milestone has Activision Blizzard CEO Robert Kotick calling the franchise one of the "greatest entertainment franchises of all time."

"If you consider the number of hours our audiences are engaged in playing Call of Duty games, it is likely to be one of the most viewed of all entertainment experiences in modern history," he continued..

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Lenovo, the world's fourth-largest PC manufacturer, has announced today that it will be purchasing back its recently sold mobile phone business, in an effort to push into the smartphone market.

The company had sold the unit last year for $100 million USD to focus more on PCs but now that the "technologies are now converging," says the AP, the mobile business area is creating a "significant growth opportunity."

Lenovo will pay $200 million to buy the unit back from the group of investors it sold it to last year.

"The Directors now consider that it is appropriate to move aggressively to capture the opportunity in the mobile internet business," says the company.

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The strong sales of the newly launched DSi LL in Japan have given the overall hardware charts a boost this week, according to Media Create's latest figures.

The larger, updated handheld sold 100,553 units in its first week, less than the DSi's launch of 170,000 but significantly higher than the PSPgo's launch week of 28,000.

Added to DS Lite and DSi sales, total Nintendo handheld sales amounted to 137,674 for the week. PSP sales were 37,326 units with most coming from the PSP-3000 model.

Wii sales increased to 32,844, but still lagged behind the momentum-building PS3 at almost 35,000. The Xbox 360 continued its slow sales in the nation, at 4085 units.

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According to Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime, the Wii has dominant control over the female home console "primary players" market in the United States, totaling 80 percent.

As reported by Kotaku from the BMO Capital Markets event today, Fils-Aime showed a chart with the Wii at 80 percent of the market, the Xbox 360 at 11 percent and the PS3 controlling the rest of the pie. Handhelds and PC gamers were not included.

The definition of "primary players" is those that are the main users of the console in a household, and Fils-Aime said there were 11.7 million female primary players in the US, with 9.36 million of those playing the Wii.

"This didn't happen by accident," Fils-Aime added. "It's the result of a deliberate attempt to expand the market."

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One day after announcing that an upcoming firmware update would add native PDF support and improve overall battery life by over 80 percent, Amazon has announced that the Kindle update is now live and available for download.

The update is free and can be downloaded via the Kindle's built-in wireless connection.

Additionally, Electronista adds that "users can now manually rotate their screens as they see fit in the smaller Kindles, with they five-way controller switching up its functions to suit."

The update is live for the Kindle 2 and Kindle DX, although the DX already had native PDF support. For the DX, however, PDFs will be more efficiently cropped and the screen save will go on after 20 minutes of viewing time instead of the previous five.

The original Kindle will get native PDF support "soon" with no set timetable.

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The Royal Navy's Weapons Engineering School has purchased 230 PSP handhelds which they will load with training programs for officers, reports The Times.

The console is seen as equally effective as textbooks and more portable. Overall, the Navy has cut training costs down to GBP 200 per hour.

The first officers to receive the training PSPs are" marine warfare engineering technicians, who are responsible for radar, sonar, VHF radio and communications systems."

"You have a voiceover as well as a presentation to explain it, instead of having to sit there and read it from a book and fix it in your own mind," adds leading engineering technician Chris Colpus. "As soon as people know they are going on a course, they are going to want to get their hands on these as quickly as possible so you can get a heads-up on the maths."

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Goldstriker's Stuart Hughes has showed off the most expensive phone ever created today, the iPhone 3GS Supreme, with a value of $3.2 million USD.

The mobile took 10 months to create and was commissioned by an "Australian gold mining magnate" who clearly had a lot of money on hand now that the value of gold has reached new all-time highs.

The Supreme has 22K solid gold casing, and the front bezel is studded with 136 diamonds. Hughes adds that the "rear logo has 53 flawless diamonds and the front navigation button is home to a very rare diamond at 7.1 cts."

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Italian police targeted a factory manufacturing counterfeit discs intended for export around Europe last week. The Italian Fiscal Police (GdF) raided the Bologna-based plant, which was producing unlicensed box sets that included music, films and TV programming. The raid followed an investigation into an unlicensed box set "Masterbox", which contained music by international artists such as Bob Dylan, Depeche Mode, Eminem, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Tiziano Ferro.

Masterbox box sets had previously been manufactured in Poland, but the operation moved to Italy following raids by Polish police in February 2009. At that point, nine million copyright infringing albums in total were estimated to have been distributed around Europe, with an estimated trade value of around €19 million being put on the previous 15 editions of the box set series produced in the plant.

FPM worked with the Italian Fiscal Police to investigate the manufacturing plant that was producing new editions of the Masterbox series, while IFPI coordinated industry enquiries across Europe in support of the official investigation.

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