Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker, said Friday it was joining forces with U.S. giant Microsoft in a major corporate strategy shake-up that left investors disappointed.

The Finnish phone maker said Microsoft's Windows Phone would now serve as its primary Smartphone platform in a "broad strategic partnership" destined to regain market share from competitors Apple and Google.

Yahoo! is building a digital newsstand called "Livestand" that will turn tablet computers into personalized magazines rich with stories, images and video suited to individual tastes.

Livestand will launch by July with content from Yahoo! websites along with an undisclosed array of partners, chief product officer Blake Irving said on Thursday.

Sales of tablets and Smartphones will outnumber personal computers this year as consumers begin using a wider variety of devices to access the Internet, according to a study by the Deloitte consulting firm.

"Deloitte predicts that in 2011 more than 50 percent of computing devices sold globally will not be PCs," Deloitte said in its latest Technology, Media & Telecommunications Predictions report.

Worldwide mobile sales increased 32 percent last year and Smartphone shipments surpassed those of personal computers for the first time in the fourth quarter, according to tracking firms.

Technology research firm Gartner said Wednesday that mobile device sales rose 31.8 percent last year to 1.6 billion units over the previous year.

Google software that turns iPhones into interpreters became available at Apple's online App Store on Tuesday.

"The new app accepts voice input for 15 languages, and - just like the web app - you can translate a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages," Google engineer Wenzhang Zhu said in a blog post.

Smartphones have become prime targets for hackers and spammers, computer security firm McAfee said in a report released Tuesday.

The number of pieces of malicious software, referred to as "malware," surged 46 percent last year as compared with 2009, according to a McAfee Threats Report for the final three months of 2010.

Facebook on Tuesday announced plans to move its fast-growing operations to a sprawling Silicon Valley campus once home to Sun Microsystems.

Facebook, which turned seven years old this month, has seen its ranks of employees increase by about 50 percent annually and is already cramped in the space it moved into in the city of Palo Alto in early 2009.

Pundits might put a different spin on how and when it will happen but all see a struggle for survival by traditional booksellers thanks to a growing shift to electronic books and Internet sales.

And eyes are on the current woes of large U.S. book retailers for how best to face the challenge.

Nokia, the world's leading mobile phone maker, said Monday that its new E7 business Smartphone, whose release had been delayed from the end of 2010, will be on sale in "select markets" this week.

The E7 "will begin arriving in stores in select markets this week, with broader availability building up quickly in several markets," the company said in a statement.

Software hacker group "Anonymous" launched attacks Sunday against the Italian government's website citing political grievances, ANSA news agency reported.

"Anonymous" announced its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults earlier in the day, saying they were launched because "the political and economic situation in Italy has become unstable."