Nokia

Despite joking a while back that it would not pull an Apple and set loose the bloodthirsty legal beagles over the leak of its N8 phone to a Russian website, Nokia seems to have changed its mind, and is indeed legally pursuing Eldar Murtazin, the blogger who laid the phone bare for all to gawp at.

In an attempt to shed some flab, Finnish phone maker Nokia is selling off its wireless modem business unit to Japan’s Renesas Electronic for $200 million.

It was hardly heart stopping news to discover Finnish phone maker Nokia had decided to dump its antiquated Symbian operating system for future high-end smartphones in favour of its sleeker, Linux-based MeeGo mobile OS.

Intel and Nokia’s Meego operating system is not looking too shabby at all, at least not on a recent Intel YouTube video showing off the OS on an unspecified tablet.

We love companies with a sense of humor, and Finnish phone maker Nokia had us chuckling this morning with its amusing little dig at Apple and Steve Jobs’ arrogant statement that reception problems on iPhone 4 were down to the way people held their phones.

While Smartphones are mostly snagging the headlines thanks to their enormous growth in market share, feature phones which run a non-smart OS and are Java enabled seem to be fading further and further from public consciousness.

Max, Micromax, Karbonn, Lava, Lemon, Spice – the world is not yet familiar with these names which have recently cropped up in the Indian telecom league. But these local manufacturers with completely indigenous marketing strategies added up to 14% market share by revenue in India’s mobile handset market in 2009-10, according to the Voice & Data (V&D) 100 Indian Telecom Survey.

Although CommunicAsia in Singapore was a bit more low key to shows like Mobile World Congress in both Asia and Europe, the event still managed to draw the crowds and the vendors, although some big names like Nokia and Sony Ericsson decided to stay out of show and exhibit in neighboring hotels instead.

A recent study by Forrester claims that in two years time tablets will surpass the sales of netbooks.

It seems that after a decade of traveling, itinerary management app maker WorldMate may finally be arriving at a rather lucrative destination in the shape of a buyout by either Travelport or American Express.

Nokia is doing a bit of early morning house cleaning, it seems, closing down its Ovi store for an indeterminable period of time.

Despite the well-publicized spat between Apple and Google, mobile advertising company Smaato’s monthly metrics shows that Symbian devices continue to dominate the US mobile advertising market.

Japanese Nikkei Business Daily reported Friday that Fujitsu Ltd and Toshiba Corp are in the final stages of talks to merge their mobile phone businesses. The combined operation would become Japan’s second largest handset maker after Sharp Corp.

Satnav software maker Telmap is a company that clearly knows which direction it’s going in. The privately held white label mapping and navigation firm has recently been undergoing a strategy shift, transforming itself from a subscription company into one offering LBS (location-based services) to operators like the Orange FT Group, Vodafone, Vodacom, SFR, O2, Telefonica, AOL, Pelephone, Carphone Warehouse and more.

Taiwanese phone maker HTC has splashed out $13.2 million for Paris based mobile software company Abaxia which specializes in portals, search apps and idle screen usage.

At a recent Google event the search engine giant’s co-founder raised an important issue that is still very much an unsolved problem for the mobile industry.