Nokia's net loss more than tripled in the second quarter on sagging sales of smartphones, a market in which the company is struggling to regain ground lost to rivals including Apple and Samsung.

Nokia is to slash 10,000 – or one in five – jobs and sell its luxury mobile phones brand Vertu to EQT Partners in the latest blow to the once-mighty Finnish telecoms company.

Nokia has announced it will lay off 10,000 workers worldwide by the end of 2013 in a further drive to save costs.

Latest Galaxy to launch late May with 4.8 inch touch screen and 8 megapixel camera

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.