Andy Rubin's Essential Secures Funding From Amazon, Promises Phone Release Date Next Week

Essential, Android creator Andy Rubin's smartphone startup announced its phone earlier this year but has yet to say when it will actually become available. 

In the time since, the company has announced retail partners and exclusive carriers for each region including Sprint in the U.S. and TELUS in Canada. Now the company announced it secured investment funding from a few investment giants including Amazon and Tencent Holdings.

The $300 million infusion was confirmed by Essential to the Wall Street Journal. Essential also announced that Amazon and Best Buy will be launch partners in addition to Sprint being the exclusive carrier for the Essential Phone in the US, though all versions will be unlocked and usable on all U.S. networks.

Nokia’s Normandy Android Phone Rumored For This Month

Nokia could finally show off those Android-based “Normandy” smartphones we’ve been seeing surface lately. The company will debut its rumored fork of Android later this month at Mobile World Congress, according to The Wall Street Journal. The event kicks off in two weeks in Barcelona, Spain, and runs through February 27th.

Nokia, whose devices and services division was acquired by Microsoft, Nokia had been working on Android phones ahead of the acquisition, WSJ says. Nokia has been the primary handset maker for Windows Phone OS-based smartphones since dropping its own Symbian OS years ago. 

Samsung looking To Acquire Companies For Better Software

J.K. Shin, president of Samsung’s mobile business, sat down with The Wall Street Journal and revealed that the South Korean manufacturer has begun aggressively hiring foreign software engineers in an effort keep pace with Apple’s iPhone. Samsung, which has traditionally developed its own hardware, is also embracing the possibility of making key acquisitions in the mobile space. “The technology industry is growing very quickly and it is too much of a burden to try to do everything in-house,” Shin said. “There are many qualified workers from India that are very skilled in software. And there are small companies that we can acquire that have good research and development capabilities.”

Shin did not name any potential targets, however, and was quick to shoot down rumors regarding an acquisition of Canada’s Research in Motion. While Google’s purchase of Motorola Mobility has Samsung on edge, the company’s senior vice president of sales and marketing Younghee Lee, maintains that Samsung will continue to work with Android because it is currently the most popular platform.

Shin called the company’s latest flagship smartphone the Galaxy S III an example of Samsung’s renewed focus on software. While the phone is based on Google’s Android operating system, Shin highlighted how Samsung engineers were able to write new software and enable unique features such as the Galaxy S III’s face-detection and eye-tracking capabilities, which control various functions on the handset based on whether or not the user is looking at the display.

Facebook Seeks $85 Billion To $95 Billion Valuation For IPO

Facebook will set its share price range between the high-$20s and mid-$30s when it makes its initial public offering later this month, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. According to the paper’s unnamed sources, the company is seeking a valuation of between $85 billion and $95 billion.  following a series of meetings with investors, and it could raise as much as $10 billion according to earlier reports. Facebook’s IPO is expected to be the largest such offering in history by an Internet company, besting Google’s $1.9 billion 2004 offering by a wide margin.

Google Considering Selling Motorola Handset Division To Huawei

It has been better part of a year since Google announced its intent to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion.  While we're still waiting for various governmental departments to officially approve the purchase, rumors have circulated as to what Google plans to do with the division.  Did Google pick them up just to rope in a ton of patents and protection?  Will they continue to let Motorola operate as a separate entity?  Would they consider selling off to another hardware maker in the end?  The answers to these questions are a little bit of 'yes'on all fronts.

Dennis Berman of the Wall Street Journal recently spent a few weeks working with people inside both Google and Motorola camps trying to figure out what's going to happen in the end.  He finds that Google definitely has their work cut out for themselves as they walk the fine line with partners in the Android space.  Leaning too far in one direction could alienate other hardware makers.

Google To Begin Selling Tablets Directly To Consumers This Year

We've been hearing rumors that a Google Nexus-branded tablet was coming, but Mountain View may have even more ambitious plans in store. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google will open up its own online store, where it will market and sell tablet devices directly to consumers. In an interesting twist, it's said that the company won't actually manufacture any of the offered hardware itself, instead leaving that duty to partners (Samsung and Asus are both named). The tablets will reportedly feature official Google co-branding, however. Google is even said to be considering subsidizing the cost of the tablets, in order to make them price-competitive with the Amazon Kindle Fire.

The move comes in attempt to counter the massive success of both Apple's iPad as well as the Fire, the latter of which has achieved success not seen by other Android tablets. Of course, Google tried a similar strategy when it offered the original Nexus One directly to consumers, an approach that didn't work in the company's favor. While there's no exact launch date provided, the WSJ states that Google hopes to open the new store within the calendar year.

Microsoft and Nokia also casually considered jointly buying RIM

Amazon casually considered a bid for troubled BlackBerry maker RIM this summer, and apparently it wasn't the only one. Now, the Wall Street Journal's anonymous sources report that Microsoft and Nokia "flirted with the idea" of teaming up to buy RIM, too. The Journal suggests that this wasn't anything more than a simple idea that came up at one of the regular meetings between senior executives from all three companies — perhaps it could have even been a joke — but it's still pretty crazy to imagine Microsoft and Nokia executives pondering how profitable it might be to divide RIM's businesses and intellectual property among themselves