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Sony has given a revised forecast for their fiscal year today, adding a large loss resulting from the earthquake and tsunami tragedy in Japan and the security breach of the PlayStation Network.

The company says the PSN breach will cost Sony $171.1 million and the earthquake will cost them a devastating $1.8 billion.

PSN costs were mainly attributed to the cost of the free 1-year of ID theft protection the company is offering all affected, as well as the free games/PlayStation Plus and customer support costs.

Adds Sony (via Gamasutra):

So far, we have not received any confirmed reports of customer identity theft issues, nor confirmed any misuse of credit cards from the cyber-attack. Those are key variables, and if that changes, the costs could change.

In addition, in connection with the data breach, class action lawsuits have been filed against Sony and certain of its subsidiaries and regulatory inquiries have begun; however, those are all at a preliminary stage, so we are not able to include the possible outcome of any of them in our results forecast for the fiscal year ending March 2012 at this moment.

Nokia has said this weekend that it has selected Qualcomm as the chipset supplier for its first Windows Phone 7 smartphones.

The company is also negotiating with other chipset makers for future devices.

Says a spokesman:

The first Nokias based on Windows Phone will have the Qualcomm chipset.

Our aim is to build a vibrant ecosystem around Nokia and the Windows Phone OS and with that intent we are naturally continuing discussions with a number of chipset suppliers for our future product portfolio.

Other possible suppliers are ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments.

China Telecom Chairman Wang Xiaochu has confirmed this weekend that his company is actively speaking with Apple in an effort to bring a CDMA iPhone to China.

Rival China Unicom, which is the largest carrier in the nation, has had an exclusive contract with Apple but that deal expires this year.

Wang would not comment on the progress of the discussions.

Overall, China has 866 million mobile phone users and China Telecom is the third largest carrier in the country.

Telecom has 103.10 million mobile phone users including 17.84 million 3G smartphone users.

Earlier this week, Liberty Media offered $17 per share, or $1 billion for giant book retailer Barnes & Noble.

Shares of the company, however, jumped to $18.33 by the close on Friday, as Wall Streets expects a competing bid.

Furthermore, many believe the bid undervalues the company, which has been struggling for years now.

Liberty is bidding for the company in an effort to continue the strong sales and growth of the Nook e-reader and Nook Color e-reader/tablet.

Finally, the offer is conditional on founder and current Chairman Leonard Riggio keeping a stake in his company and staying involved in running the company.

Barnes & Noble has around 30 percent of the e-book market, has 720 superstores, and has been up for sale since August.

Google has confirmed today that Android users with rooted devices will not be able to rent movies via the Android Market.

The search giant introduced the feature this month at the I/O Conference.

Says the Android support page entry:

I see "Failed to fetch license for [movie title] (error 49)” when I try to download a movie.

You'll receive this "Error 49" message if you attempt to play a movie on a rooted device. Rooted devices are currently unsupported due to requirements related to copyright protection.

For now, the issue is not widespread as the rentals are only available to Android 3.1 Honeycomb users (less than 1 percent of all devices) but it will become a bigger issue when the rentals make their way to Android 2.2 devices in the coming summer months.

Playboy has gone around Apple's "no nudity" App store stipulations and made its full archive of magazines available for iPad users, via the i.playboy.com site and not through the store.

The site will cost $8 per month, or $60 per year, or a highly discounted $100 for 2 years.

In early January, founder Hugh Hefner tweeted that the archive would be available online by March, so it appears the plans saw unforeseen delays.

In addition to the standard photos of naked women, the web pages will also include exclusive videos and content recommendations from a group of "high-profile panel of celebrated individuals from art, design, fashion, media and technology."

Those members will make new suggestions each month starting in June.

The site will be formatted in HTML5.

According to a new BBC documentary called "Secrets of Superbrands," MRIs of Apple "fanboys" and people who consider themselves "very religious" were very similar, with the same part of the brain being lit up for both.

In short, Apple "fanboys" and religious zealots have the same cranial reactions.

Furthermore, the documentary goes as far as to compare Apple Stores to cathedrals:

Apple stores often feature stone or other types of austere, simple flooring like a church with products mounted on pedestals like individual altars.

Apple Store launches can also be like religious experiences (via BI):

The scenes I witnessed at the opening of the new Apple store in London's Covent Garden were more like an evangelical prayer meeting than a chance to buy a phone or a laptop.

Inside the store, glassy-eyed staff were whipped up into a frenzy of excitement, jumping up and down, clapping and shouting. When the doors finally opened, they hysterically "high-fived" and cheered hundreds of delirious customers flooding in through the doors for hours on end.

OnlinePhotographer recently spoke to a SanDisk engineer who dropped an astonishing tidbit of info.

The engineer says that at any given time, 30 percent of all SanDisk memory cards being used in the world are fakes.

Most of the cards are no-name brands being sold with SanDisk stickers and packaging.

Many of the cards also offer worse performance than the buyer would assume, for example, Class 4 SD cards being sold as Class 10 cards.

Additionally, a separate report states that eBay is a lead marketplace for the counterfeit goods, with around 70 percent of all memory cards being sold on the auction site being seen as fake or rebranded.

Google has confirmed that it will stop digitizing old newspapers, blaming publishers who were looking to make money off the archives instead of just leaving them free online like Google wanted.

All old digital articles will be found at news.google.com/archivesearch but the collection will not grow starting today.

Says Google of the move:

We work closely with newspaper partners on a number of initiatives, and as part of the Google News Archives digitization program we collaborated to make older newspapers accessible and searchable online.

"We don't plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives, and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing.

There are currently 3.5 million issues available in the collection, from 2000 different newspapers.

A March 23rd, 1752 edition of the Halifax Gazette in Nova Scotia is the oldest issue available.

In April, the MPAA surprised no one by filing a copyright infringement suit against streaming site Zediva, claiming the site does not have proper licenses from the studios.

Zediva launched in January and has become very popular because it streams new releases and does not have delay windows like Netflix and Redbox do for physical discs.

The company "rents" users a DVD player and DVD and allows them to control it via online streaming, for the cheap price of $2.

Today, Zediva has countersued the MPAA whilst demanding a judge sanction.

Zediva has claimed it does not need licenses because it is just "like" a brick-and-mortar rental company. When a customer rents a DVD, it takes it out of circulation, and does not create any digital copies.

Reads the countersuit (via Wired):

The only difference between watching a rented DVD on the DVD player in one’s living room and watching a rented DVD using Zediva is that rather than connecting to the DVD player with a short cable, Zediva lets users connect to the DVD player over the internet.

According to Bloomberg, Apple is all set to launch their iTunes cloud service, having secured licensing agreements with three of the Big 4 labels.

Apple has reached agreements with EMI, Warner Music Group and Sony Music and is close to a deal with Universal Music Group, the largest label in the world.

The new cloud offering would let users save their music on Apple's servers and access it from their iOS devices, wherever they have Internet.

Differentiating the iCloud service from rival offerings by Amazon and Google, is the fact that about 10 to 20 seconds of the music will be saved internally to your device, meaning no delay at all when starting streaming.

Apple, although unconfirmed, may be ready to launch the service at their developer's conference, starting on June 6th.

It appears that Verizon will finally go through with killing off their smartphone unlimited data plans, moving to a tiered structure like rival AT&T's.

Additionally, the carrier will start "Family Data Plans," which will let families on the same plan share data for a cheaper price just like they do with voice minutes and texts.

Adds a spokesperson:

I think it's safe to assume that at some point you are going to have mega-plans (for data) and people are going to share that mega-plan based on the number of devices within their family. That's just a logical progression.

AT&T's plans are currently $15 for 200MB and $25 for 2GB.

Research firm Gartner has spelled out Android and Apple's dominance in the global smartphone market, revealing the Q1 sales figures today.

Android moved to 36 percent share from 9.6 percent in the Q1 2010, with sales increasing to 36 million from 5 million year-over-year (YoY).

Symbian, the now defunct smartphone OS, fell from 44.2 percent share to 27.4 percent, even though sales increased to 27.6 million from 24.1 million. Symbian should eventually fall to 0 as Symbian has been left for dead by Nokia as they move on to Windows Phone 7.

Apple's iOS saw 16.9 million sales and 16.8 percent share, up from 15.3 percent share and 8.4 million sales.

RIM, despite growth for its BlackBerry smartphones, saw market share collapse to 12.9 percent from 19.7 percent. Sales increased to 13 million from 10.75 million.

Microsoft saw a weak introduction for its Windows Phone 7 line and market share fell to 3.6 percent from 6.8 percent. Sales saw a minor fall, from 3.7 million to 3.66 million.

Research firm Gartner has reported today that Nokia's market share continues its multi-year decline, falling to 25.1 percent, its lowest reading since 1997.

In the Q1 2010, Nokia's share was 30.6 percent, so the drop was very steep.

Samsung held its second spot, at 16.1 percent, followed by LG at 5.6 percent.

Apple moved to 3.9 percent share, the only manufacturer in the top 5 to see a gain year-over-year.

Overall, mobile phone sales were up 19 percent YoY, and smartphone sales amounted to 23.6 percent of all phones sold.

Smartphone growth topped 85 percent, YoY.

Complaints have started to come in that the new blockbuster game "LA Noire" is causing overheating issues for some Xbox 360 and PS3 owners.

Those users have experienced continual freezing during gameplay.

Rockstar initially said it might be issues with Sony's recent firmware update to 3.61, but Sony was quick to turn on the blame back on the developer:

Rockstar have now updated their FAQ on the matter, and have admitted that it is a fault with their latest title LA Noire.

There is no word on when Rockstar will release a patch, but they have posted a temp fix for the time being if you are one of the few affected.