Asia, Cell Phone | featured news

Apple's China sales rose at a healthy clip in its latest quarter, but the numbers belied growing concerns as the bonanza in high-end smartphones started winding down.

Bharti Airtel's mobile-tower unit plans to raise around $800 million by selling a 10% stake via an initial public offering next month... Bharti Airtel, India's largest mobile-phone-services company by revenue and users, and other investors in the mobile-tower unit are looking to capitalize on improving foreign sentiment toward India. This follows steps announced by the federal government in September, aimed at encouraging foreign investment in sectors like retail and insurance.

India is becoming a critical testing ground for Facebook as it strives to capitalize on growth in emerging markets and better target mobile-phone users—two increasingly pressing goals for the social-networking firm.

Three Indian lawmakers resigned Wednesday after they were filmed allegedly watching porn on a cell phone during a heated debate at a state assembly in Bangalore, southern India.

China has passed the U.S. in the third quarter to become the world's largest smartphone market by shipments, but may find it tough to hold the position in the next two quarters, according to a research firm. China's smartphone shipments reached 23.9 million units by the end of the third quarter, according to Strategy Analytics. This put the country just ahead of the U.S. where 23.3 million smartphones were shipped in the quarter.

Sporadic outages of BlackBerry messaging and email service spread to the U.S. and Canada on Wednesday, as problems stretched into the third day for Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa.

While the tech world may have been watching the lines outside of Apple stores and gauging response to the launch of the next generation Apple tablet, most of the eyes of the world were on Japan.

Acclaimed South Korean film director Park Chan-wook is wielding a new cinematic tool: the iPhone.

East Asia is the world's electronics factory, yet unless they are Japanese, producers are largely anonymous. Now HTC Corp., a Taiwanese maker of smart phones, is moving out of the shadows and trying to establish its own brand name as it competes with Apple's iPhone.

India said it withdrew a threat Monday to ban BlackBerry services for at least two more months after the device's maker, Research In Motion Ltd., agreed to give security officials "lawful access" to encrypted data.