Hedge fund manager Philip Falcone is expected to eventually step aside as the public face of LightSquared in an effort to keep the foundering wireless broadband effort from defaulting on debt, The Wall Street Journal reports. The move is expected to prompt the company’s lenders to approve a debt extension that would keep the company …

Nokia is reportedly looking to sell its luxury brand Vertu to a private equity group for about 200 million euros, or about $265 million. The once-dominant cell phone maker is in advanced negotiations with Permira to unload the U.K.-based subsidiary, which is best known for offering $20,000 cell phones, the Financial Times reported today (subscription required). Goldman Sachs was reportedly …

Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest consumer electronics maker, reported a record quarterly profit Friday on the strength of its smartphones. The South Korea-based company said net profits rose 82 percent to a record 5.05 trillion won, or about $4.45 billion, for the fiscal first quarter ending March 31, compared with 2.78 trillion won a year earlier. Samsung also recorded record …

Samsung is hoping to generate some consumer buzz for its Galaxy S 3, the next version of its Android-based line of smartphones, with a countdown clock. The company’s mobile division kicked off the effort this morning by tweeting the cryptic message, “Destination: tgeltaayehxnx” — apparently an anagram for “The next Galaxy.” The Verge discovered that tgeltaayehxnx is also a Web …

Samsung has quietly bestowed a name to its flexible AMOLED technology, an indication that we may soon see it on retailer shelves. Youm is the name chosen by the electronics giant for its thin, next-generation screens, which are so malleable they can be bent into a wave or arc. Samsung claims it is “unbreakable.” CNET got a look at the …

Research In Motion has accused Apple of trying to unfairly sway the vote on an upcoming vote on new SIM card technology standard. The Cupertino company is trying to skew the results by having company representatives change their company affiliation when they cast their proxy votes, according to a letter RIM sent to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the …

Dell is putting its U.S. smartphone effort on hold. The PC giant has ceased sales of its Venue and Venue Pro smartphones in the U.S. and no replacements have been announced. A Dell representative said the phones were discontinued because they had reached the end of their lifespans. “Mobility products have shorter lifecycles than laptops and desktops,” a company spokesman …

A nationwide outage has left Virgin Mobile customers in the U.S. without text or data services. The company confirmed the disruption in a tweet this afternoon and said that engineers were working on the issue but did not give any indication what caused the outage or when it is expected to be resolved. We’re currently experiencing a national data & …

The bad news keeps coming for LightSquared. Sprint Nextel plans to terminate its 15-year contract with the foundering wireless broadband effort on Friday and return $65 million in prepayments. The deal’s cancellation–first reported by the Wall Street Journal–would leave LightSquared without a major partner for its effort to build a national wireless broadband network using satellite spectrum. Sprint confirmed the …

It looks like Google is making plans to expand its Android menu. The Web giant has chosen the codename “Key Lime Pie” to follow the “Jelly Bean” version of its operating system, a source tells The Verge. However, there was no indication of when the new OS will appear or what its version number will be. The Key Lime Pie …