Samsung's sales of mobile phones have overtaken ailing Nokia, the one-time dominant player in the market.

Nokia ditched its sales chief and promised to slash more costs yesterday, as the Finnish cellphone maker posted a loss for the first quarter.

Plummeting sales, including for smartphones, have helped push Nokia to a net loss of €929 million (£760 million) in the first quarter, the firm has announced.

Despite the notion that modern technology changes in the blink of an eye, time passes so slowly in some of the corporations that are supposed to be at the cutting edge.

Nokia shares crashed 15 per cent as the Finnish mobile phone company admitted its profits will be hit by competition from Asian rivals such as China's ZTE.

Outlook Nokia was once a dull Finnish industrial conglomerate. Perhaps it should have stayed that way. The problem with the technology industry is that unless you operate an effective monopoly à la Microsoft, you're always running the risk that in the next six months to a year someone else will come up with better, brighter and (crucially) cooler products than you have.

Despite the huge strides forward made by e-reading technology, one obvious failure to emulate newsprint is the inability to playfully thwack someone around the head with an e-reader. It would hurt more than you intended; it would also shatter and stop working. Which serves you right for being so violent.

As a species, we don't really need any more social networking. But do our buildings?

The leaders of an ambitious Russian project to create a "Silicon Valley" outside Moscow have dismissed fears that it is difficult to do business while Vladimir Putin is running the country.

Leaders of a project to create a Silicon Valley near Moscow have rejected fears it is difficult to do business while Vladimir Putin runs Russia.

When haughty people say they don't buy stuff on the basis of a brand, what they tend to mean is that they buy stuff on the basis of a slightly more rarefied brand. I am one of these people. I sneer at those grotty teenage boys who buy Lynx deodorant because they think it will make them irresistible to women, but I buy Apple products, nominally because they work really well and are aesthetically pleasing, but probably really because I believe they imbue me with an appealingly hip kind of efficiency that I would otherwise altogether lack.

Mobile phone maker Nokia Corp. posted a fourth-quarter net loss of €1.07 billion ($1.38 billion) as sales slumped 21 percent even as the company's first Windows smartphones hit markets in Europe and Asia.

Nokia still sells more phones than anyone – but after being outwitted by Apple, BlackBerry, Google and Co, the Finnish company's future rests on the success of a new model. By Tim Walker

Finnish firm Nokia still sells more phones than anyone – but after being outwitted by Apple and co, the firm's future rests on the success of a new model.