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According to none other than Nintendo, the PS Vita is being outsold by pretty much everyone in Europe.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata says the data is "based on sales information by market research companies in each European country" and includes consoles and handhelds.

The Sony PlayStation 3 came out on top, followed by the 3DS and Xbox 360 fighting for second. The Wii came in fourth as sales reach almost complete saturation, while the aging Sony PSP beat out its upgrade, the Vita.

Sony is only selling 25,000 Vita per week, compared to 70,000 of the 6-year-old PS3.

Analyzing the data, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata had this to say: "The UK market is virtually the only market in Europe where the Xbox 360 has a strong presence. In fact, it dominates the PlayStation 3, and it is in stark contrast to the other European markets. The top-selling titles for the Wii tell us that dance games continue to be popular this year. Although there are six titles for the Nintendo platforms, the two Mario titles for the Nintendo 3DS have the smallest presence in the world. We need to promptly improve this situation."

Mozilla has officially "retired" Firefox 3.6, forcing users to upgrade next month.

The browser will be automatically upgraded to Firefox 12, two years after its initial release in 2010. Mozilla made a similar move to kill Firefox 3.5 last year, updating it to 4.0.

Mozilla says the decision was made to keep users safe while they browse. Security updates for the old browser ended in January, leaving 3.6 users open to vulnerabilities found after that date.

If users do not want to upgrade to Firefox 12, they can also update to Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR), a new release that Mozilla has created to soothe customers (especially IT admins) who do not, or cannot update every 6 weeks when Mozilla updates.

FESR is based on Firefox 10 and only receives security updates for one year with no need to update.

Of course, if you are enamored with Firefox 3.6, you can keep it forever by removing updates totally. To do so, head to Tools->Options->Advanced->Firefox/Automatically check for updates and uncheck it.

Knowyourmobile has posted an unconfirmed picture of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S III, which they claim will have a 4.8-inch screen.

If accurate, the screen will be one of the largest seen yet on a smartphone, larger than the Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Nexus but smaller than the massive Galaxy Note and its 5.3-inch screen.

Earlier this week, Samsung showed off the processor that will run the next phone. Called the "Exynos 4 Quad," the chip runs at 1.4GHz per core and is based on the ARM Cortex A9 SoC. The processor will be first seen in the upcoming device, and is currently being sampled by other major phone makers for phones into the future.

According to the latest data by comScore, the Amazon Kindle Fire now accounts for 54 percent of all Android tablets.

The data is accurate as of the end of February, and the Kindle is far above the next closest Android tablet, the Samsung Galaxy line (with multiple devices) which came in at 15 percent.

Amazon takes about a $10 loss on all Kindle Fire sold, but it is clear that there is a significant demand for low-priced alternatives to the Apple iPad. Amazon is willing to take the loss as they expect to make up the difference (and then some) through content sales via their vast ecosystem of music, movies, apps, ebooks and cloud storage.

Additionally, the name "Kindle" brings significant loyalty and recognition, just like the iPad.

Amazon's time on top could be cut short in 2012, however, as Google is expected to release their "vanilla" Nexus Tablet in June, at a price that undercuts even the $199 Kindle Fire pricetag while bringing top features like Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Nvidia has announced this weekend the availability of the world's fastest consumer graphics card, the Geforce GTX 690.

The card is powered by dual Kepler architecture-based GeForce GPUs and has a new "industrial design."

CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang made the announcement at the NVIDIA Game Festival in Shanghai, and it came as a surprise to many who expected the card to be released later in the year.

The company notes the "exterior frame is made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, providing excellent strength and durability and the fan housing is made from a thixomolded magnesium alloy, which offers excellent heat dissipation and vibration dampening."

Overall, the GTX 690 is powered by 3,072 NVIDIA CUDA cores and the card can deliver close to double the frame rates of the closest single GPU product, the GTX 680. The card is also said to be more power efficient and certainly quieter than its predecessors.

Adds Brian Kelleher, senior vice president of GPU engineering at NVIDIA: "The GTX 690 is truly a work of art -- gorgeous on the outside with amazing performance on the inside. Gamers will love playing on multiple screens at high resolutions with all the eye candy turned on. And they'll relish showing their friends how beautiful the cards look inside their systems."

Amazon reported strong quarterly earnings this week, thanks mainly to strong digital sales.

Net income for the quarter was $130 million, a decline from last year but well above what analysts were expecting from the company. Earlier this year, Amazon itself said it could see a large loss of $200 million as it continues to spend on a digital expansion and new centers to ship goods.

Revenue grew 34 percent to $13.18 billion, continuing its trend of strong growth.

CEO Jeff Bezos would not apologize for his company's expenditures, which seem to always depress profits while planning for the future and a growing audience.

Digital, for its part, seems to be paying off. Revenue from media, including ebooks, music, movies and apps grew 17 percent to $2.2 billion.

As is their policy, the company did not reveal how many Kindle Fire tablets have been sold, although that number is expected to be above 5 million.

Over the past few months, it has been rumored that the upcoming generation of consoles from Sony and Microsoft will block used games from playing, a move that would kill the entire second market and likely bankrupt retail companies like GameStop.

Rasmus Hojengaard, the director of creative development at Crytek, seems to feel that rumor should become fact: "From a business perspective that would be absolutely awesome. It's weird that [second-hand] are still allowed because it doesn't work like that in any other software industries, so it would be great if they could somehow fix that issue as well."

If not completely banned, the exec appears to at least want the used game sales truncated.

"The worst thing that can happen is they [console makers] make something that's very complex for developers, regardless of how awesome it might theoretically be. So getting hardware that allows you to quickly get prototypes up and running, and any kind of scalability they can offer will be great as well, as long as everyone has that scalability and not just a select few."

Microsoft, who was long a supporter of the CISPA bill, has now done an about-face.

The software giant has said they can only support laws that allow "us to honor the privacy and security promises we make to our customers." Additionally, the company wants to "ensure the final legislation helps to tackle the real threat of cybercrime while protecting consumer privacy."

In November, when CISPA was introduced, Microsoft VP for government affairs Fred Humphries publicly stated they wanted to "commend CISPA's sponsors and Microsoft applauds their leadership." He later added: "This bill is an important first step towards addressing significant problems in cyber security." Clearly they are no longer as excited by the law.

Microsoft's new statement (via Cnet):

"Microsoft has previously stated support for efforts to improve cyber security, and sharing threat information is an important component of those efforts. Improvements to the way this information is shared would help companies better protect customers, and online services in the United States and around the world from criminal attack. Microsoft believes that any proposed legislation should facilitate the voluntary sharing of cyber threat information in a manner that allows us to honor the privacy and security promises we make to our customers.

According to multiple sources, Apple has been in discussions with Epix in an effort to bring the streaming movie channel to Apple TV users.

The talks are ongoing and are in early stages.

If the deal were to be signed, Apple TV set-top box owners would be able to stream films through a new Epix app. Additionally, you will have to have an Epix subscription, which depends on your cable service. Dish, Cox and Verizon are amongst those that offer the service.

Epix is a joint venture between Viacom, Paramount, MGM and Lion's Gate.

Netflix currently has a deal where they can stream Epix films 90 days after they first air on the pay-TV premium channel and that deal is until the end of 2012.

In just one year, the battle between Apple and Samsung has now reached 50 lawsuits in 11 countries.

The word comes via Florian Mueller who has kept a detailed list of the "massively escalated, planet-spanning dispute."

Perhaps even more notably, Mueller believes the number will go even higher: "After an initial filing, lawsuits can be consolidated (which effectively happened to the first two lawsuits the parties filed against each other in California) or, which happened far more frequently, split up into multiple lawsuits by the courts. For example, German courts usually look at only one patent per litigation, and sometimes assign more than one case number per patent if there's a delay with serving the complaint on one of two or more defendants. Also, these parties tend to appeal each and every decision, and the list below doesn't contain cases before appeals courts."

This will be negated if the two companies can come to an agreement, as at least one judge hopes. Earlier this month, Federal Judge Lucy Koh ruled that Apple and Samsung's CEOs must meet in a mandatory mediation session to try to settle their handful of smartphone patent disputes. The judge gave the execs 90 days to meet in a conference with Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero.

Google has taken time to respond to the criticism that it takes too long for the company to roll out stable updates for its Nexus devices.

The Nexus devices, such as the Nexus S and newer Galaxy Nexus, are the only pure "vanilla" Android phones, meaning there are no carrier or manufacturer interface overlays installed.

So far with Ice Cream Sandwich, there has been issues with the update, which has angered owners who purchased the phones to have "timely" updates. For the Nexus S, which was supposed to be the second device to get 4.0, the update still remains elusive to most, 5 months after its release.

Even the Galaxy Nexus has not been getting the updates as quickly as most would hope, after Google makes it available.

Google engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru explains why: "I'm very glad that Google is back in the business of selling phones directly without any middlemen to interfere, and I'll be even happier when I see that program expanded to more countries. Writing the software doesn't mean that Google can deploy it immediately, there are operator approvals for devices that are sold and/or supported by operators."

Workers at a Foxconn factory in China have threatened jumping off the roof in protest over wages just a month after the company signed an agreement to improve working conditions.

200 workers from the plant in the city in Wuhan were protesting concerned workplace adjustments for new workers to the plant.

Foxconn says the situation has been handled: "The dispute has already been settled after some negotiations involving the human resources and legal departments as well as the local government."

The recent agreement to improve working conditions came together after years of worker suicides at various plants. Apple, whose products were being built at many of the factories, took a stand with the manufacturer, leading to the deal.

Even before the deal, Foxconn workers were seeing raises regularly, with salaries jumping 21.2 percent in 2011, alone.

Yahoo has added two patents to its lawsuit against Facebook.

The expansion of the suit will now equal to 12 charges of intellectual property theft of Yahoo patents.

Notes Yahoo: "Today's filing underscores the breadth of Facebook's violation of Yahoo's intellectual property."

Yahoo sued the social networking giant last month. At the time, Yahoo said the patents were related to methods and systems for advertising on the Internet. "Unfortunately, the matter with Facebook remains unresolved and we are compelled to seek redress in federal court," Yahoo said in a statement last month.

The web portal company said it began by seeking licensing fees from Facebook over the patents relevant to the case, and pointed out that other companies had already agreed licensing terms with Yahoo. Talks were held between both firms but quickly collapsed, leading to the original suit.

In response to the expansion, Facebook added: "We remain perplexed by Yahoo's erratic actions. We disagree with these latest claims and we will continue to defend ourselves vigorously."

A leaked internal HP document has showed off the company's plans for business tablets based on the upcoming Windows 8 operating system.

The HP Slate 8 will have a 10.1-inch display, "enterprise level docking," and Windows 8 Professional.

In the slide, the tablet is shown next to an EliteBook, suggesting the tablet will be part of the Elite line products, the highest-end models available by the company.

Slash explains the tablet will have "HP ProtectTools, TPM embedded security, and support for Computrace incase you lose the unit in a strange place."

Additionally, the tab will have the ability to use a capacitive pen tool for notes and drawing.

On the spec side, the Slate 8 will have 8-10 hours of battery life and weigh 1.5 pounds with a thin 9.2mm full aluminum body.

According to iSuppli and Strategy Analytics, Samsung topped mobile phone shipments for the Q1 2012, beating out rival Apple.

Samsung controlled a massive 30.6 percent market share for the quarter, up from 12.2 percent in the same quarter in 2011. Apple saw strong growth, as well, to 24.1 percent from 18.1 percent.

Overall, global smartphone shipments grew 41 percent year-over-year to reach 145 million units in the Q1.

Says Strategy Analytics of the data: "Samsung and Apple are outcompeting most of their major rivals and the smartphone market is at risk of becoming a two-horse race. Samsung's global smartphone shipments rose 253 percent annually...as demand surged for its popular Galaxy models such as the Note, S2 and Y."

Nokia saw a striking decline, from 23.5 percent to just 8.2 percent as they discontinued their Symbian devices and only just began offering Windows Phone 7 devices. Adds the research firm: "Nokia's new Microsoft Lumia portfolio has recently gotten off to an encouraging start in the critical United States market, but shipments there are not yet large enough to offset the firm's tumbling Symbian volumes in the rest of the world."