Speaking to reporters on Thursday, LG CEO Koo Bon-Joon said it would be difficult to turn around the company’s current struggle in the handset business during the second quarter. LG reported poor handset sales during the first quarter of the year — phone sales were down 9.2% year-over-year and 14.3% quarter-over-quarter, and shipments were down 10% year-over-year. Gartner also recently noted that LG’s share of the mobile phone market dropped two percentage points to 5.6% year-over-year. LG̵...

Android’s U.S. market share is continuing to grow at the expense of RIM, Microsoft, and Palm, according to a new report from comScore that took a snapshot of the mobile phone market during the March quarter. The report found that Android powered 34.7% of all U.S. smartphones, up 6% from December 2010. RIM’s BlackBerry OS market share fell 4.5 points to a 27.1% share of the market, while Microsoft’s Windows and Palm’s webOS each saw a 0.9 percentage point decrease. Apple’s iOS mar...

On Friday, Facebook began rolling out its revamped mobile website located at m.facebook.com. The social network says that the updated version of its mobile site should be easier to use on thousands of different devices. Facebook’s head of mobile, Erick Tseng, told AllThingsD that it pulls in about 250 million mobile users per month, and the majority of those users are visiting through Facebook’s mobile website — not through standalone applications. Keeping that in mind, Facebook built the new si...

Following on the heels of AT&T and Verizon Wireless today, MetroPCS has announced that its customers can send free text messages and place free phone calls to landlines in Japan. MetroPCS says the offer extends throughout the next 30 days, and that it will “support free calls to mobile numbers in Japan for a timeframe to be determined.” It’s unclear if that means calls to mobile numbers in Japan will be free for more than, or less than, 30 days. (more…)

Toshiba and Fujitsu confirmed on Thursday that the two Japanese companies will be merging their mobile phone business units. As part of the merger, Toshiba will spin off its mobile division into a new company with Fujitsu acquiring a majority stake in this newly formed venture. The resulting company will become Japan’s second largest mobile phone maker with an estimated 18.7% market share. Details are expected to be finalized in July with the merged company beginning operations in October of this ...

The electronics industry is going ga-ga over 3D. By the end of 2010, we will have 3D in our televisions, 3D in our portable gaming devices, and — if Sharp has its way — 3D in our mobile phones. By way of press release, Sharp unveiled the world’s first HD-quality, 3D camera module targeted towards mobile devices, digital cameras, mobile phones, and smartphones. The module will utilize two separate cameras to take 3D images at 720P resolution, and multiple levels of software processing, to com...

An eagle-eyed reader spotted a new feature potentially coming to Verizon Wireless’ website. For at least the past week, Verizon has been testing user submitted reviews on its staging “testman” site. Similar to AT&T, which has had this feature for a while, customers will be able to submit reviews and rate handsets they own on a star scale. Sorry, no monkeying with the new review system as you have to log in to your Verizon Wireless account to leave a review. It looks like the Verizon Wire...

Every once in a while a startup comes along and offers a service that makes you sit back and think, “why didn’t I think of that?” Such is the case with Rentobile, a mobile phone rental company based in New Jersey. The premise is simple – people like new toys. Rather than sit around and wait for your 2-year contract to expire so you can purchase a new handset at an affordable price, Rentobile provides a wide variety of handsets on a per-month basis. Simply order up a new rental, pop in ...

A South Korean blog has leaked what it claims to be spy shots of the rumored new Casio Exilim phone headed to Verizon Wireless. The new CDMA Casio handset with Exilim branding recently made its way through the FCC not too long ago and all we could really tell from those FCC documents is that the handset will support dual band CDMA, EV-DO Rev. A and bluetooth. The new images and leaked information suggests that the Exilim phone will be based on the Casio W53CA Exilim flip phone with a touch of Verizon love. It...

It looks like Radio Shack isn’t the only green game in town when it comes to swapping out your unused gadgets for some cash. California-based Flipswap has just received a whopping $14 million in venture funding to help expand its cell phone and iPod recycling program. Pretty impressive for a “green” company in this uncertain economy. With all of you buying or planning to buy new handsets this winter season, we figure there are a lot of older, now unused handsets floating around. Yeah, some o...