The shares represent about 0.28 percent of common shares outstanding as of June 24, RIM said today in a statement. The company is buying the stock from an unnamed third-party financial institution, according to the statement.

According to reports, the German interior ministry has asked government departments to avoid using BlackBerry because of a "dramatic increase in cyber attacks", and instead opt for Simko devices offered by Deutsche Telekom.

The company will ship the dual-core QSD8672 chip with CPU cores running at up to 1.5GHz, said Mark Frankel, vice president of product management for Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. The chip could go into smartphones, tablets and low-cost laptops, he said.

During a question and answer session on Twitter, company executive vice president Niklas Savander made it clear that the company won't be turning to Android to reinstate its ailing market position.

The OMAP4430 chip will deliver double the performance of existing single-core chips from the OMAP3 family. This will allow applications to run faster on mobile devices, said Robert Tolbert, director of product management for the OMAP smartphone business at TI.

Menlo is a prototype mobile device with a capacitive touch screen (4.1-inch diagonal, 800x480) running Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 which incorporates a Bosch BMA150 3-axis accelerometer and Bosch BMP085 digital pressure sensor (barometer)

Indonesia has no plans to ban services for RIM's BlackBerry services, according to a Wall Street Journal report Thursday, citing an information ministry statement, whch said it has "no plan whatsoever to implement the banning policy which is being undertaken by United Arab Emirates, as we haven't seen any urgency ... also because there's no specific regulation regarding this issue," according to the report.

Android isn't only about smartphones - not for long, anyway. Google's mobile operating system is set to make its way onto all sorts of high-tech stuff, ranging from the mundane and to the just plain strange.

This week RIM delivered on both these key requirements with the launch of the BlackBerry Torch 6800 - the first touchscreen "slider" BlackBerry and the first to run BlackBerry 6, the latest version of RIM's smartphone operating system.

The report notes that the Google Android platform continues to show rapid growth and over the past six months has edged past the Apple iPhone platform with new subscribers.

Two Gulf states have announced bans on some functions of the Blackberry mobile phone, claiming security concerns. The United Arab Emirates is to block sending emails, accessing the internet, and delivering instant messages to other Blackberry handsets. Saudi Arabia is to prevent the use of the Blackberry to Blackberry instant messaging service.

Motorola reported a six-fold increase in second-quarter profit, largely driven by its lower-profile non-cellphone units, as the company took several key steps toward its planned split early next year.

Amazon.com introduced two new versions of the device today, including a US$139 model that works with Wi-Fi. A second version, with 3G mobile technology as well as Wi-Fi to download books, costs US$189.

A new study to be released in September shows that Verizon Wireless smartphone users have overtaken AT&T iPhone customers in terms of data use.

SK Telecom posted a net profit of 364 billion won (US$306.5 million) in the three months ended June 30, largely thanks to increased sales of its wireless data services. Its net profit was 311.6 billion won in the same period a year earlier.

The chat service is tapping Cisco and ShoreTel to help it sell telecom to big business.

LG Electronics, the world's third-biggest mobilephone maker, reported a 33% drop in second-quarter profit after it lagged behind Apple and Samsung Electronics in offering smartphones.

The video posted on the web page showed that several bars on the new Droid X dropped (sometime even to zero) when held with a normal grip.

Despite losses at ST-Ericsson, STMicroelectronics' revenues for the second quarter of 2010 totaled US$2.531 billion, up 8.9% sequentially and 27% on year. ST reported net profits of US$356 million for the quarter, compared to profits of US$57 million in the prior quarter and losses of US$318 million in the year-ago period.

Ericsson, the world's largest maker of telecom network equipment, said Friday that an industry-wide shortage of key components had contributed to an 8 percent decline in sales in the second quarter, echoing concerns raised earlier this week by Nokia.

Nokia's smartphones outsold the iPhone by 8.4 times. The Finnish company sold 14.5 million smartphones that quarter. And remember, that was only a fraction of their total mobile phone sales...

A record 3.2 million iPhone activations helped boost AT&T's second-quarter earnings 26% yoy.

Half a billion people around the world are now using Facebook on a monthly basis. That means Facebook has a slightly smaller population than the continent of North America. The social network also has enough users to put 75 people on every one of the over 6.6 million square miles of Russia, the largest country in the world by landmass.

Raytheon, which makes the Patriot missile defense system, is developing software which could enable a soldier to find enemies in his or her surrounding terrain using a mobile phone running Google's Android operating system.

Apple posted a video demonstrating the antenna issues in Nokia's smartphone. The phone drops from seven bars to two when held in a similar manner to the grip that causes problems on the iPhone 4.