A key battlefield is emerging for suppliers of mobile chips - the low-end smartphone market in developing countries.

The latest installation figures from the German Federal Network Agency show that the country's mid-year subsidy change for rooftop installations has caused a surge in solar demand for the first half of 2012, with more than 4.3GW installed in a period of just six months.

Nokia's Lumia smartphones struggled to lift the Finnish handset provider's market share in China, while domestic vendors ZTE, Huawei Technologies and Lenovo overtook Apple in smartphone shipments in the second quarter, according to research firm Canalys.

It's a little too soon to write off HTC.

A scheduled workers' protest at China's four largest solar panel companies against the filing of an anti-dumping complaint in the European Union was called off Thursday morning.

A reactor at South Korea's Younggwang nuclear power complex automatically shut down Monday afternoon after detecting signs of malfunctioning, an official at Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., or KHNP, said Tuesday.

One more analyst house, Canalys, has released its numbers on global smartphone sales in Q2, and unlike Strategy Analytics and IDC, it has focused on sales by platforms rather than OEMs. In that light, Google's Android (GOOG) was the clear, all-out winner: in a market that saw 158 million smartphone shipments worldwide, Android accounted for 68% of them, with its 108 million units an increase of 110% over the same period a year ago.

Chinese smartphone manufacturers, not international vendors, are driving growth in the domestic market, resulting in China becoming the top single country market with 27 percent of the 158 million global smartphone shipments in the second quarter of 2012.

A senior executive at Lenovo dismissed market speculation that the company was interested in buying struggling Finnish cellphone maker Nokia as a "joke."

In an ironic scenario, just as India marked its 1GW milestone for solar photovoltaic installations, the nation was left "powerless" for two days in a row.

"Shipments will start in August," Sharp's new president, Takashi Okuda, said at a press briefing in Tokyo on Thursday after the company released its latest quarterly earnings.

The future of TV, movies and home entertainment feels like it's changing by the day, thanks to the impact of the digital revolution. Netflix is the top dog thanks to its $8 subscription streaming service, but your viewing choices are severely limited. For a la carte, pay-as-you-go services, Apple's iTunes has been the default choice for many when it comes to buying, renting, and viewing videos.

E-readers have been around long enough now that the novelty has largely worn off. To be sure, we still get the occasional article or blog post celebrating the smell of "real books" and denouncing the disembodied fakery of text on a screen, but not nearly as many as in recent years. E-readers are simply part of the reading landscape now -- the first Kindle was released almost five years ago -- and it's time for a midterm progress report. How is the technology developing? What has been accomplished and what remains to be done?

Beijing-based Xiaomi sells an Android smartphone called the MI-One. When the phone went on sale last fall, Xiaomi received 300,000 preorders in the first 34 hours. Less than a year after launch the company has sold more than 3 million MI-Ones and counting. The phone is hot. Red-hot. Apple hot.

RIM announced that during its most recent financial results that BlackBerry 10 would be delayed until the beginning of 2013. On top of that, RIM announced that further layoffs at the company would be necessary, with thousands of jobs already having been cut. A source speaking to Cantech Letter has now revealed that 3,000 employees at RIM will lose their jobs on August 13th.

Memory maker Spansion, which reported strong second-quarter earnings today, has an "aggressive" roadmap to boost its product-introduction rate and break its latest design-win record.

Toshiba said Tuesday that it swung into a net loss in the fiscal first quarter as restructuring costs and the high yen outweighed profit growth from its conventional power plant business.

German chipmaker Infineon Technologies said Tuesday it will reduce its investments to safeguard operating margin after it dropped in the fiscal third quarter.

The term "smart TV" was first used by Samsung back in 2011 and has been widely adopted by other TV manufacturers.

LG Electronics is adding 3D-enabled gaming to its smart TVs with the arrival of five titles in its app store, the company said on Sunday.