News written by Matti Robinson (April, 2008)

Nokia's hyped all-you-can-eat music service, Comes with the Music, has backfired in a devastating manner. Comes with the Music was launched as a service that would allow new mobile phone buyers to download unlimited amount of music to their device. The service was hailed to be one of the most impressive moves in a while -- one that could even challenge Apple. According to The Register however, some Nokia execs made one of the worst kinds of deals with the record labels and it will eat the profits.

Nokia has been said to perform a single-payment for every sold cell phone to the record labels, but according to insider sources there is a ceiling of 35 songs per user -- after which Nokia pays the price of every single song. Obviously this will come extremely pricey for Nokia.

"It will cost Nokia a fortune - it's a reckless business move," said an insider. The former Managing Director of Nokia Music Ed Averdieck was the first one to leave Nokia for this mistake and another Nokia Music boss Tommi Mustonen has been given a "punishment that fits the crime".

The Ireland's largest internet service provider Eircom has stood up against the five big record companies. Eircom was sued by the Irish RIAA for allowing illegal sharing to happen in their networks. The companies claim that Eircom's networks are being used "on a grand scale" for sharing copyrighted material.

According to Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA), the rapid growth of broadband internet connections in Ireland has explosively increased the amount of illegal downloads. The big four -- EMI Records, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music and Warner Music -- are carrying the suit under the Copyright and Related Rights Acts 2000. They claim that Eircom is responsible for the illegal action and should use a filtering or blocking system, such as CopySense Appliance by Audible Magic. Eircom has so far refused to use any filtering technology and says that they have no legal obligation to monitor the traffic.

Driver Heaven has released an in-depth analysis on HD video playback by ATI's Avivo HD and nVidia's PureVideo HD. The main difference between this analysis and regular benchmarking software and even the high-definition HQV Benchmark is that the guys at Driver Heaven have not jumped into any conclusions just by calculating image quality or playback performance but have actually analyzed the differences themselves. What's even better, you can see the comparisons and analyze them yourself.

Not many of us have the opportunity to try out both high-definition video processing units in identical systems, and therefore we are forced to trust blindly on either benchmarks determining quality and performance by numbers or the opinion of -- in most cases -- a single person without any examples.

The 18-page review which was done with the help of a top-notch system (specs below) can be found at DriverHeaven.net.

Test system:

Intel QX9770 3.2GHZ 1600FSB
XFX Nforce 790i Ultra SLI
GeForce 9600 GT
Radeon 3870 X2
SuperTalent DDR3-1800 7-7-7-21
Akasa 1000w PSU
LG GBW-H10N Blu-Ray Writer
Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive
Soundblaster X-Fi
Belkin Wireless-G PCI card
3x WD Raptor Hard Drives
1x Hitachi Deskstar
Arctic Cooling MX-2 Paste
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
Windows Vista Ultimate 64Bit + SP1
Forceware 174.74 WHQL
Catalyst 8.3 WHQL
DirectX 9.0c/DirectX 10
PowerDVD 7.3 (3730)
Casino Royale European Blu-Ray
Planet Earth US HD-DVD

The first-of-its-kind satellite was launched into the space Monday afternoon. The 19-story and $500 million rocket took the several ton DVB-SH satellite above the United States. Once the satellite takes its final place and comes operational it will distribute between ten and fifteen mobile TV streams.

The satellite, built by ICO Global Communications, is powerful enough to not require a dish and due to its new and improved DVB-SH mobile TV technology it will have better coverage and improved building penetration compared to DVB-H. Currently there are no compatible devices for the DVB-SH system, but this should change by the launch of the service in 2009.

Last June Apple was the number three music retailer behind dominant brick and mortar retailers Wal-Mart and Best Buy. According to Ars Technica some Apple employees received an email today which included a spreadsheet of NPD Group's latest research of top ten music retailers in the United States. Apple had become the number one music retailer in the US.

The NPD MusicWatch Survey makes it official, the first time in chart's history, Wal-Mart has been surpassed. To make it more revolutionary, it's a retailer that doesn't sell physical copies of music. This definitely proves that music industry is on the verge of change, whether the industry giants want to believe it or not.

The survey's top ten was dominated by Apple's iTunes with 19 percent of the total sales, Wal-Mart with 15 and Best Buy with 13. Amazon hasn't seen growth and has held the fourth place with 6 percent. The bottom six included such retailers as Borders, Circuit City, Barnes & Noble, and at the tenth place Rhapsody with 1 percent.

Google has decided to challenge Boeing with its new airplane. The airplane is yet to be constructed, but you can find the prototype version of the airplane on Google Docs. According to AfterDawn CTO, Jari Ketola, the paper-folded version of the airplane is easy to fold, but does need some improvements on stability and flight coordination before it is ready for mass production.

"Being a first-timer in aviation business the effort was pretty solid, and the instructions were easy to follow," said Jari Ketola. He didn't however recommend Google to move away from the search engine business yet. There were some unexpected problems during the maiden voyage and the sudden stop in a collision with office wall was considered by Ketola to be a too radical landing strategy.

The airplane can be printed through your Google Docs account. Select New -> Document and once the document is open select File -> New airplane. You can also simply click here for a full-scale PDF version of the airplane and print it.

More than a year has passed since PlayStation 3 was released. The whole time hackers have been busy trying to break into the system and run Homebrew, without any luck -- until now. First homebrew software was run on a Firmware 2.20 PS3 yesterday. A simple "Hello World"-program was created by a known PSP hacker Dragula96 and run through a vulnerability in the system architecture.

Dragula96 claims that this is no April Fools joke and that it works on both 40GB and 60GB models with firmware 2.20. There has been no details yet on how he managed to do the trick. For the next step Dragula96 will try to run a pong game successfully on a PS3.