Japan-based NEC is considering selling its ailing mobile phone unit, a new report claims. NEC is looking to sell off its mobile phone unit to Lenovo, Reuters is reporting today, citing people who claim to have knowledge of the discussions. The company is also talking with other Japan-based companies about selling off its mobile phone …

A prominent organization that advises major shareholders in public companies how they should vote in corporate elections has told MetroPCS owners to vote against the T-Mobile merger. Institutional Shareholder Services wrote to shareholders yesterday, saying that seeing their company merge with T-Mobile would not be in their best interests. According to The Wall Street Journal, which obtained a copy of …

Ericsson is in talks with Microsoft to buy the software giant’s mobile-TV service, according to a report. Microsoft for years has operated a software division that provides mobile carriers with the technology to deliver television service over their connections. The company is now in talks with Ericsson to sell the division so it can focus on delivering this service through …

Evernote Premium, the paid service from the productivity app maker, is coming to all of Deutsche Telekom’s customers in Germany. Evernote announced the deal today, saying that all of Deutsche Telekom’s nearly 60 million customers will receive a one-year Evernote Premium subscription. Evernote has signed similar deals with a host of other international carriers, including NTT Docomo in Japan and …

The Google Play marketplace could be getting a visual overhaul soon. The folks over at Droid Life yesterday published photos of what they claim, is the latest version of Google Play, 4.0. The screenshots that the Android-focused site published show off several alleged design tweaks, including what appears to be a streamlined design aimed at making pages in the mobile …

Digital wallet operators, like Google, PayPal, and others, should be charged a fee for offering such a service, according to Visa CEO Charlie Scharf. Speaking at the Barclays Emerging Payments Forum yesterday, Scharf said “it is totally appropriate” for credit card companies to charge digital wallet operators a fee on all transactions, according to Reuters, which was in attendance. Scharf’s …

Nokia has won a patent infringement suit in a German court, but the companies can’t quite agree whether it’s a major victory or not. According to Foss Patents’ Florian Mueller, the Mannheim Regional Court today ruled that HTC is infringing a Nokia patent related to saving battery life by identifying packets of data that can reconstructed through the use of …

ARM Chief Executive Warren East will retire on July 1, leaving the company in the hands of its president. The news came down today from the company, saying that Simon Segars, ARM’s current president, will succeed East. The company’s current chief executive joined ARM in 1994 to head up its consulting business. He became chief executive in October 2001. East …

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins thinks it’s about time Apple starts innovating again. Speaking to the Australian Financial Review in an interview published today, Heins acknowledged that Apple “did a fantastic job in bringing touch devices to market [and] they did a fantastic job with the user interface,” but he thinks the company might have become too complacent. “History repeats itself …

Samsung mobile chief J.K. Shin offered some less-than-stellar observations about Microsoft in an interview published last night. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Shin said his company sees “lackluster demand for Windows-based products in Europe.” And elsewhere around the world, he said, Microsoft’s software efforts in smartphones and tablets are not going so well either. “Smartphones and tablets …