Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest consumer electronics maker, reported a record second-quarter net profit Friday on the continued strong sales of its smartphones. The South Korea-based company said net profits for the three months ending June 30 rose to $4.5 billion, an increase of 48 percent over the year-ago period, in line with guidance the …

Cisco Systems plans to reduce its global workforce by about 2 percent, or 1,300 positions, as part of the company’s continuing restructuring to cut costs and increase profits. The layoffs are “part of our plan to drive simplicity, speed of decisions and agility across Cisco,” spokesperson Karen Tillman said in a statement today. “We routinely review our business to determine …

Samsung’s chief executive predicted last month that sales of the Galaxy S3 would hit 10 million by the end of July and the smartphone appears to have passed that milestone a little early. Shin Jong-kyun, the president of Samsung’s information technology and mobile communication division, told reporters that the Android-powered smartphone surpassed the 10 million sales mark but did not …

A jury has found Research In Motion liable for $147.2 million in damages for infringing on patents owned by Mformation Technologies. Jurors in U.S. District Court in Northern California determined late Friday that RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server — software that lets companies remotely manage employees’ devices — infringed on Mformation patents and awarded damages of $8 for each of the …

Amazon is already testing a smartphone with Asian component suppliers that could be in production as early as this year, the Wall Street Journal reports. The smartphone that Amazon is currently testing has a screen size of between four and five inches, one of the Journal’s sources says. The report seems to support a Bloomberg report last week that the …

As Apple and Samsung spar over universal search in the new Galaxy Nexus, it appears Samsung has quietly removed the feature from the Galaxy S3 in an effort to keep the new smartphones on retailers’ shelves. Soon after a U.S. judge denied Samsung’s request earlier this month to suspend a ban on U.S. sales of its Galaxy Nexus phone over …

In a sweet treat for modders and developers, Google has released the source code for Android 4.1, aka Jelly Bean. The source code for the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system was released today as part of the Android Open Source Project, Jean-Baptiste M. “JBQ” Queru, lead engineer on the project, said in a company blog post. “We recommend …

A group of former Nokia employees has formed a company with the goal of bringing to market a smartphone powered by software discarded by their former employer. The Finnish startup Jolla plans to base its handsets on the defunct Meego operating system, which was developed in partnership with Intel but was essentially left for dead when Nokia opted to drop …

Research In Motion finally has some good numbers to offset its recent wave of bad ones. The handset maker announced Friday that its BlackBerry App World had reached the 3 billion download mark — a billion of those in just the last six months. To reach that number, customers were downloading app at the rate of about 2.5 million per …

Wireless carriers say they received 1.3 million requests last year from law enforcement agencies for subscriber text messages, caller locations, and other information, reflecting a steady increase during the past five years. Carriers’ responses to a congressional inquiry, as reported by the New York Times, reveal that thousands of records were turned over on a daily basis in response to …