Nokia loses ground in smartphones

Nokia has issued a fourth quarter operating profit of EUR884 million, down 23% year-on-year from EUR1.1 billion, reveals Computing.co.uk.

However, net sales for the same period were up 6%, and up 23% on Q3 2010.

The company is losing ground in the burgeoning smartphone sector, and Gartner analyst Nick Jones argued that the company must begin to compete with Apple and Android devices in the high-end smartphone market. It also needs to define its tablet strategy, he said.

Five men have been arrested over a spate of recent Web attacks carried out in support of WikiLeaks, says the BBC.

The five males are being held after a series of arrests at residential addresses in the West Midlands, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Surrey and London.

The men were arrested in relation to "recent and ongoing" attacks by an online group that calls itself 'Anonymous'. Targets included the Web sites of PayPal, Mastercard and Amazon.

Microsoft beat Wall Street's expectations yesterday with its fiscal second quarter earnings, reports CNet.

For the three months ended 31 December, Microsoft earned $19.95 billion in revenue, or 77c per share, on $6.63 billion of net income. Analyst estimates from earlier in the week had pegged the software giant's revenue at 69c per share on $19.2 billion in revenue.

The star of the quarter was Microsoft's Entertainment and Services division, which saw a 55% growth, bolstered by breakout sales of the Kinect, at more than eight million units, and the Xbox 360 console, which topped 6.3 million unit sales.

A federal judge ordered prolific hacker Geohot to turn over his computers and hard drives and to stop publishing the tools used to root Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) after finding his hack was likely a violation of US copyright law, writes The Register.

It's a major victory for Sony and a setback for hacker hobbyists who believe they should be permitted to modify hardware they legally own.

It comes in a lawsuit Sony filed two weeks ago against New Jersey-based Geohot, shortly after he deduced the security key Sony used to lock down the PS3.