Apple’s share of China’s smartphone market dropped by almost half to 10 percent in the second quarter from the previous one, research firm IDC told Reuters today. The numbers suggest the company’s customers are either waiting for the next iPhone, expected in September, or have jumped ship entirely in favor of rival smartphones. The shift …

Roger Cheng/CNET Nokia is sticking with Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, the mobile phone maker’s chief executive, Stephen Elop, has said, with a new smartphone expected soon. “In today’s war… [between] Android, Apple and Windows, we are very clear, we are fighting that with the Windows phone,” Elop said, according to Reuters. Elop also said that Nokia will launch its next …

Jacqueline Seng/CNET Asia Research In Motion’s upcoming operating system, BlackBerry 10, could soon be made available for non-BlackBerry devices, according to the company’s chief executive, Thorsten Heins. Heins told Bloomberg that QNX, the software that BlackBerry 10 is based on, is “already licensed across the automotive sector… we could do that with BlackBerry 10 if we chose to.” “The platform …

The worldwide mobile phone market shrank in the second quarter of this year, with sales falling by 2.3 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago, according to research company Gartner. The reason for the decline was the “challenging economic environment,” Gartner said, as well as phone owners holding out for high-profile device launches later this year such as …

Google has confirmed that Motorola Mobility will cut 20 percent of its workforce — around 4,000 people — and close up to a third of its offices around the world. The cuts, first reported by The New York Times yesterday, were confirmed by Google earlier today. “Motorola is committed to helping them (the employees) through this difficult transition and will …

Ice Cream Sandwich’s share of the Android market continues to grow rapidly, with the operating system now present on nearly 16 percent of all Android phones. Ice Cream Sandwich has more than doubled its distribution share over the space of a single month — variants of Android 4.0 have risen from a combined total of 7.1 percent to 15.9 percent, …

Samsung Galaxy Tab CNET Apple lawyers walked away from a U.K. court and breathed a sigh of relief following a judge’s decision to grant a stay on an earlier ruling forcing the Cupertino, Calif.-based company to publicly state Samsung had not copied the iPad’s design. A London court said today that Apple will not have to immediately place the notice …

Samsung Galaxy Tab CNET A German court has ruled that an existing ban on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 that prevented the device from being sold in the country should be extended across the entire European Union — although the larger Galaxy Tab 10.1N can remain on sale. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 7.7, the smaller version of the popular tablet, had …

Screenshot by Crave UK Nokia, the once-proud Finnish mobile phone giant, is still sinking. In its second-quarter earnings report, the company posted a net loss of $1.74 billion, with overall sales down 26 percent year over year. Smartphone sales were down by a third in the quarter. There are two rays of sunshine amid the dark skies over Espoo. Nokia’s …

Josh Lowensohn/CNET It may be “good to talk,” as telecom giant BT’s ads put it in the early ’90s. But two decades on, the U.K. has evolved into a nation of texters. According to research published Monday by U.K. communications regulator Ofcom, text messaging is outstripping actually making a call. Last year 58 percent of people communicated via text messaging …