On July 19, Verizon Wireless struck a licensing pact with Broadcom, the victor in a patent-infringement suit against Qualcomm that has led to an import ban on all new phone models containing Qualcomm's next-generation wireless chips. Under the deal, Verizon Wireless agreed to pay Broadcom a US$6-per-device licensing fee, subject to certain caps, to bypass the ban and continue importing new phones. The arrangement is unprecedented. No wireless chipmaker has ever charged a service provider for royalties on phones containing its components.

okia launched on Thursday a service that it said will cut the time a GPS-enabled cell phone takes to pinpoint its whereabouts. Nokia hopes the service, available for people who own its flagship N95 smart phones, will cut the start-up time to one minute, from up to three minutes currently. The slowness has so far hampered interest in cell phone navigation.

Motorola posted its second straight quarterly loss after customers bought phones from Samsung Electronics, which stripped the company of its rank as the world's second-largest maker of mobile phones. Phone shipments slumped by about a third as Chief Executive Officer Ed Zander failed to introduce a device to compete with Apple Inc.'s iPhone, which debuted June 29, and new BlackBerrys from Research In Motion.

The Commission said on its Web site that DVB-H "appears to be the strongest contender for future mobile TV deployment in Europe" and is already the most popular standard in Europe. The Commission said it "will continue to monitor the situation in the E.U. and may come forward with proposals in 2008 including, if appropriate, making this open standard mandatory.”

The European Commission said on Wednesday it had closed its antitrust case against Vodafone in Britain and Germany, as well as O2 and T-Mobile in Germany related to wholesale roaming charges.

The board of directors at troubled Motorola has begun exploring options for the succession of embattled Chief Executive Edward J. Zander.

n the wake of the demise of SunRocket, a well-financed VoIP startup, a number of VCs and analysts agree that standalone VoIP service may no longer be a viable business in the United States. Three-year-old SunRocket has terminated its operation but still has not officially informed its 200,000 subscribers. SunRocket's much larger rival, Vonage, has said it is near bankruptcy.

It will be sold unlocked from a specified carrier's service for US$299 to $349, although HP plans to work with carriers to bundle the phone with their services, an HP official said in February.

Motorola said on Tuesday it was reorganizing its operating units to include its network equipment business with its television set-top box division in its quarterly financial reporting.

Deutche Bank Securities analysts Bryan Modoff and Jonathan Goldberg tried the "how much worse could things get?" argument this morning as the firm upgraded Motorola to a buy, saying bad news is already priced into Motorola's (MOT) stock.

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Ericsson and Samsung Electronics have signed a mobile telecommunication cross-licence deal and agreed to drop ongoing patent suits between the two companies.

In May Broadcom won a major US patent infringement case against Qualcomm for the design of its 3G mobile-phone chips and the ITC banned the import of phones using the Qualcomm chips.Broadcom subsequently offered Qualcomm a deal whereby a $6 royalty would be paid to Broadcom on each Qualcomm handset sold using the technology, which extends the battery life of phones. Qualcomm rejected the offer and has since sought a presidential veto on the ban.

Nokia and Motorola said Chinese authorities in the southern province of Guangdong found four counterfeit battery models used in their handsets that may explode.

Google's buy of the small Unified Communications (UC) tech company GrandCentral is a sign that voice communications will soon become a big part of Gmail.

EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding backs the DVB-H, developed in the EU and partly funded by EU money, but said the Commission's official decision was due in mid-July.