Sharp Corpsaid Monday that it wants to grab about a 30% chunk of Japan's smartphone market with its new models offering functions and features that specifically cater to local needs.

China, the world's largest producer of rare-earth metals, will speed up exports of the minerals after delays disrupted supply, according to Japan's Trade Minister Akihiro Ohata.

Instead of using China as a production base, Hynix in its early days produced a wide range of high-tech products in South Korea that it then exported to China and other countries.

Citigroup analyst Timothy Arcuri asserted in a research note that Samsung is pushing out US$750 million to US$1 billion of equipment orders targeted at DRAM capacity expansion. Lam is the company most exposed to the move, Arcuri said.

The sale of new tablet PCs and smartphones with solid-state storage technology is compensating for weak demand for memory cards and USB flash drives, and has led to a 17% quarter-to-quarter increase in NAND flash shipments and an average price drop of about 9%.

New suggested pricing for the Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA SSD is now US$199 for an 80GB drive. Users can double the storage capacity with a 160GB X25-M drive for US$415. The company has also added a new 120GB version of the Intel X25-M for US$249.

Engadget has published what it claims are photos of the unannounced, unreleased Nexus S Android handset from Samsung.

"initial supplies are tight", says Microsoft. Is demand really that strong or is the software holding back shipments artificially?

Earlier this year, TeliaSonera picked the same two companies to supply its faster networks using the Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology in Sweden and Norway.

The independent consumer watchdog magazine scored smartphones based on voice quality, ease of use, battery capacity, camera quality and other criteria.

Motorola accused Microsoft of infringing 16 patents with its Xbox gaming console and in Windows for servers, PCs, and mobile devices, the company said.

Trina Solar said it is interested in teaming with or investing in developers in Europe, where solar-panel makers have extra capacity.

Nokia reabsorbs Symbian, and Microsoft ships Windows Phone 7 -- two big yawns. How they became the mobile industry's elephants in the room.

It is making room for 3 new WP7 deviecs ahead of the holiday shoppoing season.

"We're close to 60 million BlackBerry subscribers now and if we continue to perform moderately, we'll be 100 million (subscribers) in couple of years...two years," said RIM Co-Chief Executive Jim Balsillie.

A good interview with Jo Harlow, the head of Nokia's smartphone business. ZDNet UK spoke to Harlow at the Symbian Exchange and Exposition 2010 and talked about Nokia's plans for the world's most widely deployed smartphone platform.

So how does 40,000 Window 7 phones measure up? Google said last month that it was selling 200,000 Android phones a day. And Apple has said that its iPhone sales rate was 270,000 a day.

Nokia has taken over the Symbian Foundation and announced plans to downsize it and turn it into a licensing organization.