News written by Petteri Pyyny (August, 2017)

comScore has released its latest chart showing which apps are the most used ones in the United States. As the American mobile phone culture differs quite a lot from other Western countries, the chart is quite interesting one.

First and foremost, the difference between the U.S. mobile phone usage and, say, European one, is the fact that iPhone has significantly higher market share in the U.S. than it has in most other countries - over 40 percent according to one statistic.

However, the list is mostly full of non-surprises, as both Google and Facebook dominate the charts.

In Finland, the Helsinki district court has ruled that two of the three founders of The Pirate Bay must pay over 400'000 euros to music industry for making their copyrighted material available to public without permission.

The case dates back to 2011 when Finnish legislation stated that in order to stop a website that breached copyrights was to sue its owners. IFPI Finland that represents Finnish and international music industry in Finland, sued three Pirate Bay founders, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Warg and Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi in 2011.

Since the case began, Finland has changed its legislation and nowadays the access to accused pirate sites can be - and is - blocked by ISPs. All three major ISPs in Finland block the access to official Pirate Bay site and users who wish to access the site must use one of the several proxy sites (or VPN) to do so.

The ruling was made with the defendants being absent from the hearing, as the court hasn't been able to reach the defendants Neij and Warg. The case against Kolmisoppi is still in process and the ruling is expected later.

The exact amount the defendants Neij and Warg must pay to the copyright holders is 405'678.91 euros (appx. $477'000).

Nintendo's latest gaming console, Nintendo Switch, has been near impossible to get in some parts of the world for some time now. In July, Nintendo finally managed to produce more units for retailers - and the results were impressive: Switch outsold both PS4 and Xbox One in July.

NPD Group, who tracks the console sales, says that two factors were there to push Switch to the #1 spot: first of all, the supply of the units hasn't been on par with the demand and now that problem has finally been solved by Nintendo. Secondly, Splatoon 2 has gained massive momentum and has made the console interesting even for the "hard-core gamers".

At the same time, the upcoming SNES Classic is already sold out - the year 2017 seems to treat Nintendo pretty well.

HMD Global who currently has the rights to use iconic Nokia brand in its phones, released its latest Android flagship phone just moments ago.

New Nokia 8 is a direct challenger to other Android-based flagship models in the market and is priced accordingly - and packs pretty familiar features, too.

Nokia 8 has a heatpipe-cooled Snapdragon 835 chipset, 4GB of RAM memory and a 5.3-inch QHD (2560 x 1440px) Gorilla Glass 3 display. It ships with 64GB of internal storage which can be expanded with microSD memory cards.

According to HMD, the phone is meant for "content producers" - not meaning people who write blogs for living, but people who use social media actively and post lot of a/v content to net. This means that HMD has made an extra effort to make sure all the audio and video features of the phone are on par with the top models in the market.

Both, front and rear camera can record video and capture still images at the same time without video recording suffering from this. Both cameras can be operated at the same time and can be viewed on screen simultaneously. To enhance the "multi-dimensional" video recording, Nokia 8 also supports Nokia OZO surround audio recording.

Mobile payments have been the de facto method of making person-to-person payments in developing countries for more than a decade now - and the rest of the world is catching up, it seems. Obviously, the fact that most people in developing countries don't have a bank account, but most of them have access to a mobile phone has created such seemingly weird disparity between the industrial countries and developing countries.

Now, tech companies around the world have finally decided to jump he bandwagon before the market has matured. Facebook introduced payment transactions to its Messenger app in United States and is rumored to expand the service to India soon.

Facebook's other messaging product, WhatsApp hasn't made such move previously - until now. People have dug through the latest Android beta version's code and have found out that the app has hidden feature to support UPI payment model, standardized in India.

Beta version has TOS clauses that ask user to approve WhatsApp's payment policy and user's own bank's payment policy before proceeding with transactions.

Microsoft has announced a new edition of Windows 10, aimed for power users. The new version, Windows 10 Pro for Workstations has four major selling points over existing editions.

Firstly, there is ReFS (Resilient file system), a file system that provides cloud-grade resiliency for data on fault-tolerant storage spaces and manages very large volumes with ease. Using its integrity streams, ReFS detects when data becomes corrupt on one of the mirrored drives and uses a healthy copy of your data on the other drive to correct and protect your precious data.

Second major selling point is the support for NVDIMM-N memories that allow super-fast read and write times - and are non-volatile, meaning that the memory keeps the data even when the power is switched off.

Thirdly, Windows 10 Pro for Workstations adds a new, faster mechanism for sharing files called SMB Direct, which promises to improve speeds of sharing large files. SMB Direct requires network adapters to support Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). It will reduce the load sharing the files puts on CPU and moves that load to the network adapter instead, resulting faster sharing and lower latency.

Browser war veteran, Norwegian Opera browser has been updated. New version, Opera 47, brings only handful of improvements, as Opera - just like all other browser vendors - have shortened their release cycle recently.

New features include the ability to export bookmarks, a pretty standard feature among browsers, but one that as been missing from Opera for some time now. Also, Opera 47 promises a smoother video playback for Windows 7 and macOS users.

Furthermore, the "recently closed tabs" list has increased to list 32 recently closed pages from the previous limit of 10 pages. Other improvements are merely cosmetic - some fine-tuning of colors, brightness, etc of the browser's user interface.

You can download the latest version of Opera from our download section. Download links:

Opera, 64-bit Windows version

Opera, 32-bit Windows version

Opera, macOS version