Nokia

We’re big fans of Nokia’s ultra-affordable Lumia 520 here at Neowin. For the price – as low as $79 off-contract in the U.S. and £99 in the U.K. – very few other devices come close to what it offers.

Evidently, we’re not the only ones to have been won over by the cheap and cheerful Windows Phone. We reported recently that the 520 now represents over 20 percent of all Windows Phones in use around the world, and Microsoft has since shared another little detail that underlines just how popular the device has become.

Former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has moved into a commanding position as the overwhelming favorite to win the chief executive's chair at Microsoft, according to online bookmakers.

Just over a week ago, U.K.-based Ladbrokes had Elop at 5 to 1 in its listing of potential CEO replacements for outgoing chief Steve Ballmer. As of Sunday, however, the odds had shortened dramatically: Elop, still the favorite, was at 1 to 4.

Remember when Apple lived and died by vertically integrated software and hardware, while Google and Microsoft stood their philosophical ground and created open and not-very-open software (respectively) in order to proliferate across myriad devices and gobble up market share in the doing?

Microsoft and cellphone maker Nokia were in advanced talks about an acquisition of the Finnish company's device business, but the discussions have broken down, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Such a deal might have improved both companies' ability to compete in a world dominated by smartphones offered by Apple, which makes both hardware and software, and by Google, which relies largely on third parties for devices that run its Android OS.

Nokia's smartphone market share fell in the first quarter as Samsung and Android continued to dominate, the latest statistics from Gartner have shown.

Gartner's figures showed that Nokia's share of the mobile phone market dropped 4.9 percent over the three month period, despite the firm managing to shift 5.1 million Lumia devices during the quarter. This saw Nokia losing its spot as the eighth most popular mobile phone maker, falling into the number 10 spot.

Finnish handset maker Nokia Oyj yesterday said that five of its Taiwanese Web sites were hacked earlier this month, giving hackers access to the personal data of local consumers.

No classified data of Nokia’s local consumers were involved in the incident. No credit card details, ID numbers or medical information were leaked, the company said in a statement.

Microsoft officials said in November last year that the 7.8 update would be preloaded on new Windows Phone handsets aimed at specific markets, and then pushed to existing Windows Phone 7.x handset users in "early 2013."

If you are a Windows Phone user with a different handset, when will you get the update? I asked Microsoft and officials declined to comment. I'm guessing this lack of comment is because Microsoft isn't controlling when the carriers will push this. But otherwise, all I can say is SIGH!

A few months after jumping in to the free music streaming sector, Nokia is getting ready to give its Lumia-only service a jump-start with a premium upgrade.

Nokia Music+, an upgrade to the free Mix Radio service that Nokia launched last September, will offer Lumia owners unlimited skips and unlimited downloads, the Finnish handset maker announced in a company blog post today. The service also will offer higher-quality streams, allowing downloads at eight times the existing quality.

Buried deep within Nokia's press release about its financial results, there's a line that pretty much signals the end of one of the most popular and successful mobile operating systems in history. With Nokia retiring its use, Symbian is no more.

Beleaguered phone maker Nokia this morning published its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2012, reporting a $584 million (439 million euros) operating profit on $10.7 billion in net sales (8.041 billion euros).

This compared to a $754 million (576 million euro) operating loss on $9.49 billion in net sales (7.239 billion euros) in the previous quarter. Nokia says it sold 4.4 million Lumia devices, up from 2.9 million in Q3.