Cell Phone, Smartphone | featured news

Soaring sales of smartphones lifted Samsung Electronics's profit to a record and apparently pushed the South Korean company past Nokia as the world's biggest cellphone seller—and perhaps past Apple as No. 1 in smartphones.

When Verizon Wireless started selling the iPhone, AT&T sounded a defiant note, saying that its customers would remain loyal. A year later, it's clear that the Verizon iPhone has crimped AT&T's stride. Verizon had little problem attracting new customers before it started selling the iPhone. In fact, it was the only wireless carrier that managed to keep up with AT&T's iPhone-fueled growth.

While the company's new Lumia line of smartphones is gaining traction, those using the older Symbian operating system have lost their appeal.

Nokia says that a bug is causing its latest smartphone to occasionally lose its data connection and is offering customers $100 (£63) in call credits. The Finnish manufacturer said a fix for the Lumia 900's "memory management issue" would be issued on 16 April.

Nokia and Microsoft joined forces to make the Lumia 900, a top-of-the-line device. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people will flock to it.

Blackberry manufacturer Research in Motion reports a quarterly loss, due in part to falling revenues on the back of weak smartphone shipments... The firm also suggested it would refocus on the corporate market rather than on individual consumers.

HTC’s Thunderbolt, Verizon’s first 4G LTE enabled smartphone, shipped one year ago this month. That’s pretty insane when you think about it. The Thunderbolt was laughably immature, had a battery life of about 40 minutes, and here we are, one year later, and both AT&T and Verizon have a wide portfolio of Android smartphones that can use 4G LTE in most parts of the country while also being able to last for at least an entire work day. According to the bean counters at Strategy Analytics, 6.8 million 4G LTE handsets were sold worldwide during calendar year 2011. Know how many they think will be sold this year? An astonishing 67 million.

Oleg Kostour moved from Canada to Mountain View to build a 3D software startup. Instead, he built an app to stay in touch with the girlfriend he left behind in Canada. The iPhone app, Pair, launched in the app store this week. It creates a private shared timeline for couples that allows them to easily swap SMS messages, photos, videos and locations.

As unlimited data plans fade away, services and applications are being designed to help users manage their consumption.

AT&T Inc. backed away from an unpopular service policy after smartphone subscribers complained that the company placed unreasonable limits on its "unlimited data" plans....