Iwate Toshiba Electronics will start to ramp-up production lines from March 28. However, Toshiba Mobile Display (Saitama Pref.), a wholly-owned subsidiary and manufacturer of mid- and small-sized LCD displays, expects to take about a month to secure recovery of its manufacturing line. Toshiba has started to supply some products alternatively from the Ishikawa Works, the company's another production facility located in Ishikawa Pref..

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%.

Japan's biggest-ever earthquake halted production briefly at Toshiba's chip plants on Friday and could delay crucial shipments. Toshiba and SanDisk share cutting-edge facilities in Yokkaichi, where they make NAND chips increasingly in demand by Apple and other mobile device makers.

Cheap sensors and network availability are not only making individual cars smarter, but they're also boosting the brainpower the environment cars drive in.

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.

Toshiba has developed a new flip-flop circuit using 40nm CMOS process that the company claims will reduce power consumption in mobile equipment. Measured data verifies that the power dissipation of the new flip-flop is up to 77% less than that of a conventional flip-flop and that it achieves a 24% reduction in total power consumption when applied to a wireless LAN chip.

Losing the deal to Google could have landed a fatal blow to Microsoft's chances in the mobile market.

The chipmaker made the announcement Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress, where it also introduced mobile communications chips for phones. Medfield is Intel's second smartphone processor. The first, Moorestown, did not have much success in the market due to power consumption too high for smartphones.

Just as tablets with dual-core processors start to hit shelves, chip makers are now shipping samples of quad-core chips that could make the devices even faster. Nevertheless, quad-core chips could be overkill as use of all cores could drain battery quickly...

What Intel CEO Paul Otellini said would rejuvenate his company, Cisco CEO John Chambers thinks could kill everything in its path.

"We would've loved if they would have chosen Android; they chose the other guys," Schmidt said during a keynote presentation here at Mobile World Congress. "I think we were pretty straightforward. We would like them to adopt Android at some point in the future; that offer remains open."

Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith reiterated that the chip giant will be a strong player in the fast-growing mobile device market despite early struggles. Intel, which provides microprocessors that run about 80% of the world's computers, has been slow to gain traction in the smartphone and tablet markets. Products based on ARM Holdings PLC (ARMH) architecture have dominated the industry, with the chips seen as much more power efficient than Intel processors.

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 the last few years, mobile phones have become status symbols. Use a fancy one and people will think you're cool. Use a more traditional one and folks stare as though you just pulled up to the party in a Buick.

TriQuint Semiconductor's (TQNT) fourth-quarter earnings more than doubled as revenue jumped by nearly one-third, but results still fell short of analysts' forecasts. "With the world transitioning to a mobile Internet, I expect a strong market and see another solid growth year for TriQuint in 2011," said company president and CEO Ralph Quinsey.

Flash memory specialist SanDisk topped Wall Street's estimates with its fourth-quarter results, boosted by strength in Asia and its mobile business.

The mail order smartphone business didn't work out so well for Google with its Nexus One. But that doesn't mean the idea of carrier independence can't succeed with an established direct sales leader.

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.

The Mobile Internet and Digital Home Business Group will be run by Liu Jun, formerly president of Lenovo's Product Group.

The agreement extends access for ARM to assure early time-to-market readiness of the necessary platform of physical and processor IP solutions for nodes ranging from 20nm through 14nm.

Nokia will terminate its free service of music downloads for mobile phones, Ovi Music Unlimited, in the UK and 26 other countries. The service allows Nokia mobile phones' customers to download unlimited music for free. By the end of the year, the service will be discontinued in all but six countries.

Ingenic-designed MIPS-based SoCs are, for example, built into Velocity Micro's Cruz Tablets. The connection represented by MIPS-Ingenic-Velocity Micro illustrates an emerging paradigm in the consumer electronics market: A China-developed processor is driving a host of new consumer devices, while a big ODM community based in greater China (i.e. Foxconn) designs and manufactures them, which are, then, promoted by US-based marketing companies like Velocity Micro, who cultivate channel connections with top retailers.

The pending acquisition of Motorola's mobile telecom equipment arm by Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), which is pending approval by China's Ministry of Commerce, would make it more difficult for domestic rivals Huawei Technologies and ZTE to enter the US market, an analyst said.

China Unicom, which only sells iPhone handsets bundled with mobile service contracts at present, will sell the 8GB version of the iPhone 3GS with no contract for CNY3,999, said the spokesman for China United Network Communications.

Broadcom now expects fourth-quarter revenues to reach about US$1.9 billion, the top end of its previous forecast range. "Our increased revenue guidance reflects stronger-than-expected demand for products in our Mobile and Wireless markets versus our initial expectations entering the quarter," said company president and CEO Scott McGregor.

"We are working on LTE device for next year, 2011. We think the US mobile operator will be taking some leading and pushing the LTE 4G in the US market, but however, we are seeing the rest of world will be deploying LTE network elsewhere in 2011, could be second half of 2011," said Peter Chou.

Everybody knows BlackBerry OS 6 is a stopgap. It's a way to keep the business going (and keep enterprise customers attached to their BlackBerry Enterprise Servers) while RIM works on the world-beating next big thing, which seems to involve a QNX core, TAT interface, Torch Mobile Web browser, and dual-core processors.

RIM announced it is buying The Astonishing Tribea Swedish mobile software design house, which is known for making shiny, slick interfaces for a variety of phone makers, especially for Android-phones

Nokia and HTC said they persuaded a court to void parts of a mobile phone patent that IP holding company IPCom GmbH claimed the two device makers infringed.

It should come as no surprise that Apple and Android are the two "most desired" smartphone systems, according to a new Nielsen survey of mobile phone users. But the results vary a bit based on the people who were surveyed.