The takeover of the number three mobile carrier in the US will make Softbank one of the world's three biggest mobile phone operators, with 96 million users.

Shares in China Mobile, the world's biggest phone carrier by subscribers, have fallen more than 5% after second-quarter profits disappointed investors.

Nokia said on Friday it had agreed to close its Salo plant in Finland after talks with union representatives, and repeated it aims to cut 3,700 jobs in its home country.

Chinese telecoms outfit ZTE has hit back at rumours suggesting it will respond to sliding market share and a scary balance sheet by shedding 12,000 staff. Instead, the company says, we can expect a graduate hiring spree.

Nikia will squeeze the current four big sales regions into two sales areas in China, namely the North and South sales regions, after its sales in the country dipped 18% to US$6.7 billion in 2011 compared with a 23% rise in 2010.

As a result of the planned changes announced today, Nokia plans to reduce up to 10,000 positions globally by the end of 2013.

Microsoft and Samsung continue to fend off rumors that they have any intention of purchasing cell phone maker Nokia.

STMicroelectronics is the first company in the world that mass-manufactures MEMS microphones in plastic packages. The patented technology breakthrough saves space and increases durability in consumer and professional voice-input applications, from mobile phones and tablets to noise-level meters and noise-cancelling headphones.

Huawei plans to give contracts totalling US$6 billion to US mobile technology companies Qualcomm, Broadcom and Avago.

Stephen Elop, the first non-Finn to run Nokia, on Sunday quashed rumors the cellphone maker could move its headquarters to the United States from Espoo, a suburb of the Finnish capital Helsinki.

Nokia is to move its head office to London as part of the turnaround of the struggling Finnish firm.

Samsung won't be leaving the mobe sector in a hurry, as it's now making more than half its money on smartphones, according to its third quarter results.

Sony Ericsson broke even in its third quarter and announced it will solely focus on smartphones from next year.

Previously, Tirri was Head of Nokia Research Centre, Nokia's forward looking research facility. He joined Nokia in 2004 as a Research Fellow before leading NRC Systems Research laboratory in 2007.

The database tapped by hackers includes member e-mail addresses and, in some cases, personally identifiable information such as birthdates, homepage URLs and screen names from messaging services such as AIM, Skype and Yahoo.

Standard & Poor has downgraded Google's stock rating from "buy" to "sell" over a lack of confidence in the Motorola Mobility acquisition.

OmniVision is promising an quarter-inch, 8-megapixel OV8850 CMOS sensor that the company says is 20% slimmer than any competing 8-megapixel module.

Toshiba is planning to withdraw from its mobile phone joint venture with Fujitsu in the first half of 2012, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported Wednesday.

STMicroelectronics fell the most in a decade in Paris trading after CEO Carlo Bozotti said there will be a "correction" in sales and gross margin in the third quarter because of difficulties at customer Nokia.

Samsung Electronics, maker of the Galaxy mobile phone, may have surpassed Nokia and Apple in smartphone sales for the first time on demand for devices that run on Android software, a research company said.

"While our Q2 results were clearly disappointing, we are executing well on the initiatives that are most important to our longer term competitiveness," CEO Stephen Elop said. "Some progress is already evident, and thus we are targeting to end this year with more net cash and liquid assets than at the end of Q2 2011."

Sony Ericsson has blamed the the Japanese earthquake for a EUR50 million (US$71 million) loss during the three months to June.

Judge E. James Gildea found that Apple infringes US Patent No. 6,658,146 directed to systems and methods for compressing images and US Patent No. 6,683,978 directed to image data formats, both of which belong to S3 Graphics. In the industry, that technology is known as S3 Texture Compression (S3TC).

Nokia said the staff reductions will happen in phases until the end of 2012 and all the employees concerned can remain with the company until the end of 2011. Nokia previously said it plans to reduce its Finnish workforce by 1,400 people.

Apple agreed to pay the mobile phone maker a one-time sum, which was not disclosed, to settle a long-standing patent disputes.

The fact that Nokia's new chief had to deal with a long-shot of a rumor regarding a supposed buyout deal from Microsoft - at a big discount to its current valuation - shows how far the world's largest mobile phone company has fallen.

Apple has proposed a standardized SIM card smaller than those it currently uses in the iPhone and iPad in order to be able to produce thinner devices, an Orange executive was quoted as saying in a Reuters report.

Nokia board chairman Jorma Ollila said Tuesday that he would leave his post by the year 2012 as expected, but that he would not "throw in the towel" at the world's leading mobile phone maker before then.

The worldwide mobile phone market grew 19.8% on year in the first quarter of 2011 fueled by high smartphone growth, especially in emerging markets, and gains made by market challengers, according to IDC.

Nokia, the struggling market leader in mobile phones, has said that it intended to cut costs by nearly 20% over three years, a move that will likely eliminate thousands of jobs as it enters an alliance with Microsoft.

Zoom Technologies has signed a licensing pact with chipmaker Qualcomm, allowing the Chinese mobile phone maker to develop and sell 3G devices using Qualcomm's chip patents.

Nokia workers are bracing for what may be the steepest job cuts in almost two decades as the company prepares to start a partnership with Microsoft. A reduction in R&D activities is set to be announced by the end of April, with as many as 6,000 jobs under threat.

Renesas is in talks to outsource production of auto microcontrollers to Globalfoundries Singapore, and some mobile phone semiconductor production to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), Shino Inokuma, a spokesman for Renesas, said by telephone.

ZTE and Huawei both entered the ranks of the world's top 10 mobile phone manufacturers last year. ZTE, ranked fourth, saw its global market share rise from 2.3% in 2009 to 3.7% last year, while third-ranked LG Electronics' global market share slipped from 10.1% to 8.4%.

China's Huawei has won a preliminary injunction that blocks technology giant Motorola from transferring particular mobile phone networking technology to Nokia Siemens in a $1.2 billion deal that's been percolating for the better part of a year.

The company didn't even come close to its 2010 mobile phone target of 140 million units, shipping only 116.7 million, which was down slightly from the previous year.

In a sign of the rapid shift away from non-smartphones, Apple has recently become the number-one provider of mobile phones, finally surpassing the Finnish giant Nokia as "feature phones" fall out of fashion.