Finland

A new miniature greenhouse gas sensor called MINIGAS is being developed by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The super-sensor will be less than an inch long, twice as sensitive as current sensors and cheaper too.

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Nokia, the world's leading mobile phone maker, said Thursday that it had added EMI and smaller record labels to its "free" music package to challenge Apple's dominance in the digital music market.

Nokia said Carphone Warehouse, the exclusive retailer in Britain for the first mobile phone to include the "Comes with Music" package, will sell it for pound(s)129.99, or $230, starting Oct. 16.

Vodafone announced the reorganization of its business structure and top management Tuesday, splitting in two its emerging-markets division and appointing a new boss for Europe.

Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone operator by revenue, said it had appointed Michael Combes, the former finance director of France Telecom, as the new chief executive for Europe and said Paul Donovan, chief executive of the emerging-markets division, would leave.

Nokia smartphone users can now set up and manage e-mail choices, receive alerts for conflicts in meeting times, and gain access to a global company directory to find colleagues. No additional fees are required.

Finland-based Nokia said it is expanding its service by offering Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync for all Nokia S60 third-edition devices and enabling nearly 80 million mobile-phone users to connect to e-mail accounts on Exchange servers.

The U.S. may be winning world speed records in swimming at the Olympics, but not in average Internet speeds. According to a new report, the country that invented the Internet has now sunk to 15th worldwide in the percentage of the population subscribing to broadband.

According to the recently released Second Annual Speed Matters report from the Communications Workers of America (CWA), the U.S. has "not made significant improvements in the speeds at which residents connect to the Internet" over the past year, and continues to fall behind other countries.

A Sample of 230,000

The legal salvos between Nokia Corp. and Qualcomm Inc. stopped months ago, part of what officials at the wireless industry heavyweights described as a truce in a long-running battle that spanned three continents.

Peace came Wednesday as the two sides prepared for a courtroom showdown. Nokia, the world's largest handset maker, and Qualcomm, the world's largest maker of chips that run cell phones, agreed to settle a high-stakes licensing dispute and drop all legal complaints against each other in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Nokia expects the mobile phone industry to weather any global economic slowdown because the devices have become such a part of people's lives, the company's finance chief said Thursday.

Nokia, the world's top cell phone maker, saw its shares rise 8 percent Thursday after posting better-than expected results for the second quarter and upgrading its forecast for the global handset market.

"With half a year visibility, we're able to say growth will be 10 percent or more," Nokia's Chief Financial Officer Rick Simonson told The Associated Press.

The hype that began with Apple's iPhone 3G launch Friday continued through the weekend and was almost as loud on Monday, with Apple adding to the fire. The company said it sold more than one million iPhone 3Gs and users downloaded more than 10 million applications from its App Store.