Micron executives' comments about limited visibility of consumer PC demand and higher-than-ideal inventories of DRAM chips sparked a Friday sell-off in stocks linked to personal computers.

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.

Nokia has completed a deal to outsource Symbian software development to Accenture, including the transfer of 2,800 workers to the global management-consulting firm.

IC Insights forecasts 1.55 billion cellular phones will ship in 2011, a 9% increase over the 1.4 billion shipped in 2010.

Marvell Technology's CFO said Friday the company is providing chips for some of Research In Motion's (RIM) next-generation BlackBerrys, adding that the handset maker's latest struggles won't hurt Marvell more than previously projected in the near term.

Apple ramped up the rhetoric in its patent infringement battle with Samsung on Thursday, filing an amended complaint that includes more allegedly infringing devices and stronger accusations that the company copied the look and feel of its iPhone and iPad.

Samsung's request "is not a good faith attempt to obtain information needed to defend against a preliminary injunction", the documents say. "Rather, it is a transparent and improper attempt to harass Apple by demanding extremely sensitive trade secrets that have no relevance to Apple's infringement claims or to Samsung's defenses to a preliminary injunction."

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

After holding the top spot in the global smartphone market for years, Nokia may soon lose its dominance to Samsung and Apple, according to an investors' note from Nomura Securities.

An official Nokia statement said he had left to resolve a "personal matter" and gave no date for his return. However, a Finnish newspaper quoted sources inside Nokia saying he had left because of differences over strategy and would not return.

IDC expects Android, which passed Symbian as the leading operating system worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2010, to grow to more than 40% of the market in the second half of 2011.

The acquisition will give RIM access to Scoreloop's developer toolkit for building cross-platform social mobile games. Scoreloop said it will continue to build toolkits for other platforms but that the experience would be better on a RIM device.

The speculation comes a week after Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop described as "baseless" a blog report that Microsoft wanted to buy the Finnish company, which has been rocked by a recent profit warning and downgrades from ratings agencies.

Texas Instruments has lowered its revenue forecast for the second fiscal quarter due to lower demand for its products from Nokia.

The number of internet connected devices is set to explode in the next four years to over 15 billion - twice the world's population by 2015. Cisco predicts the proliferation of tablets, mobile phones, connected appliances and other smart machines will drive this growth.

Some observers think the company would be better off focusing all its resources on a successful smartphone portfolio first, then worry about a tablet down the road.

HTC Chief Executive Peter Chou took the stage at Qualcomm's Uplinq conference in Sad Diego today to talk about Android and Windows Phone 7, but not before tooting HTC's own horn.

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.

Kim Jong-kap, the former head of Hynix Semiconductor, has been named as new CEO and chairman of Siemens' Korean affiliate.

Nokia's Windows Phones will start coming out at a relatively rapid clip after the first one appears later in 2011, said Jo Harlow, Nokia's executive vice president of smart devices.

Near Field Communication (NFC) connectivity technology transforms smart phones and other mobile devices into wallets, tickets and keys. Infineon Technologies backs this development and is launching its latest security microcontroller for NFC applications.

The acquisition, valued at US$2.3 billion including net debt, will substantially enhance the scope of Toshiba's Smart Grid and Smart Community businesses and position the company as a global competitor with world-class capabilities.

Spreadtrum Communications has launched two low-cost multimedia chipsets for multimedia-rich mobile phones. The SC6610 and SC6620 possess Spreadtrum's highly integrated design, and combine PMU, multimedia accelerator, touch screen controller, backlight controller, 16M/32M pSRAM and up to four SIM card interfaces into one chip.

Sequans Communications has shipped its ten millionth 4G chip. Today, Sequans' chips are inside leading 4G devices, such as the HTC EVO 4G smartphone launched by Sprint in USA and the HTC EVO WiMAX smartphone launched by KDDI in Japan.

Microsoft will buy Nokia's mobile division for US$30bn, and the deal will be completed this year because "both companies are very much in a hurry."

Samsung Telecommunications America (Samsung Mobile) has selected ST-Ericsson's Thor advanced HSPA+ modem to bring lightning-fast connectivity to its new Infuse 4G smartphone for the US market.

The HTC Puccini, a rumored 10-inch tablet, will feature Android 3.01 and powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor. As some of you may recall, the rumors of a larger tablet first surfaced earlier in the year when it was whispered that HTC was working on three devices.

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.

Toshiba is near an agreement to buy Landis+Gyr, a Swiss electronic-metering company, for more than US$2 billion, said two people with knowledge of the matter.

This acquisition will expand the breadth of Rambus' breakthrough technologies available for licensing with complementary technologies from CRI that include patented innovations and solutions for content protection, network security, anti-counterfeiting and financial services.

Cisco Systems is expected to cut thousands of jobs in possibly its worst-ever round of layoffs to meet CEO John Chambers' goal of slashing costs by US$1 billion, according to analysts.

Smartphone vendors shipped a total of 99.6 million units in the first quarter of 2011, nearly double from 55.4 million units a year ago.

HTC, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson drove Android shipments in the first quarter, with each vendor shipping well over three million devices, said Canalys Principal Analyst Pete Cunningham.