Amid record cell phone sales—led by its high-end Secret, Viewty and Venus models—South Korea's LG Electronics said Monday that second-quarter net profit surged 84 percent from the same period last year, the Associated Press reports.

The company said it sold 27.7 million handsets during the quarter. That's probably good enough to catapult the company ahead of Motorola into the number three spot for global handset sales, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs. Nokia and Samsung are number one and number two, respectively, worldwide.

It's a good time for LG, but a bad one for Motorola, who has been steadily—and rather quickly—losing market share in comparison.

Motorola is suing former executive Mike Fenger, FierceWireless reports, in a claim that he's violating a two-year non-compete agreement by joining Apple and becoming the head of global iPhone sales—along with recruiting two other former Motorola employees in the process.

The report said that Motorola filed the suit against Fenger, who quit in March as senior VP of mobile devices for Europe, Middle East and Africa. In an interesting twist, the suit not only alleges a breach of contract but also claims Fenger used Motorola trade secrets—without giving any specifics. "It's not that he stole any documents, but the information in his head seems to be enough to violate Motorola's trade secrets," the report said. Here's how the lawsuit explains it: "In his new position...he cannot perform his duties for Apple without inevitably disclosing Motorola's trade secrets."

These non-competes puzzle us. Stealing trade secrets is one thing—that makes perfect sense. But the way they're being enforced lately means that essentially, you can't get another job in your field—the one you've built up years of experience in—at all. We assume Motorola expects this executive to go flip burgers somewhere for two years instead of finding another wireless industry job.

Holy cow, that's gotta hurt. As Engadget reports, some analysts are saying that with spin-off plans looking less and less likely, Motorola may revert back to its original idea: sell the handset division outright.

However, Envisioneering Group's Richard Doherty says that at this point, the division "would be lucky to fetch $500 million." As BusinessWeek pointed out separately, that very same analyst valued the business at $8 billion only one year ago. Meanwhile, the report said that Nomura analyst Richard Windsor even went further, saying that Motorola "might actually have to pay someone to take the division off its hands."

A couple of weeks after Motorola announced it was halving its research unit, the company is now shuffling its executive lineup around the globe. According to RCR Wireless News, Motorola is replacing top executives in key markets as its share of worldwide cellphone sales falls to new lows:

"In an internal memo circulated last week and obtained by Crain's Chicago Business, Motorola named new leaders for its cellphone businesses in China, India, Europe and North America. The moves come amid growing doubts about Motorola's plan to turn around the business and spin it off as a stand-alone company."

The report pointed out that Motorola's global market share has plummeted to 9.7 percent, which is exactly half what it was one year ago. Analysts weren't particularly bullish about the latest moves either.

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Motorola, the third largest (for now) cell phone manufacturer, announced Friday that it would roughly halve the size of its research labs to about 300 people, Reuters reports, as the troubled company plans to halt some projects and move 180 people to other divisions:

"The loss-making company, which is planning to spin off its cell phone business amid huge market share losses and sharp criticism of its phone designs, said 180 research labs workers would be moved to its three business units, effective July 1."

A company spokesperson said in the report that Motorola employed 66,000 people as of the end of 2007, and that they're looking to fill as many positions as possible within the company.

Fortune is reporting that after a fourth-month search, Motorola is in late-stage talks with a few candidates about running its troubled cell phone division, according to a person close to the process.

This comes as the company's handset market share is in freefall, largely due to the lack of a competitive product line-up, or at least a home-run product or two in the vein of its last hit, the 2004 RAZR.

"First on the to-do list of the new head of the handset division: Visit all the carriers, and mend relationships with their execs," the article said. "The last few years were filled with so many broken promises that top executives at the carriers privately say they feel burned."

"No phone maker has ever had problems as deep as this," said Citibank analyst Jim Suva in the article. "The bet now is whether Motorola's mobile business will completely go away or not."

So it was with the 1990's StarTAC, so it is with the RAZR. With a greater than 50 percent slide since its 2006 level of market share, Motorola is on track to fall to the back of the five-player pack this year as its first-quarter phone sales fell to 29.9 million units, Fortune reports.

Motorola's phone business "has tumbled since the RAZR phone fell out of fashion in 2006," the report said—which is essentially exactly what happened with the StarTAC years ago. "The company plans to spin off the money-losing business to shareholders sometime next year. And it's little wonder why. The former top phone maker has seen Nokia and Samsung take the No.1 and No.2 spots in the industry. And Motorola's time as No.3 seems limited—LG is hot on its heels with 8% of the market, up from 6.2% in the year-ago period."

The fact remains that Motorola needs more than one striking design every few years to be a contender. Motorola's various recently-introduced handsets "were not competitive enough to maintain its place in the market," says Gartner's Carolina Milanesi in the report.

Thought you were safe opening e-mail attachments on your cell phone? Guess again, friends. CNET News reports that a vulnerability has been discovered in garden-variety Motorola RAZR handsets that could allow a hacker to send a corrupt JPEG image, via Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), that could be leveraged to run malicious code on the phone. You'd have to accept the image for download before that could happen, however.

"Although the possibility of this vulnerability occurring is very remote," a company statement said, Motorola has now fixed the vulnerability in all new releases of the RAZR and urges people with older devices to download the latest software from its Web site, according to the report.

Consumer media equipment company Motorola says young adults are influencing their parents' technology decisions more than ever before, according to a new MediaPost report. Here are some stats quoted from the article, regarding a study of 16 to 27-year-old "millenials:"

- 75% of young adults influence their parents' technology purchases;

- 71% hold sway over cable, DSL and dish-satellite services;

- 62% impact buying a HDTV set and TV programming packages;

- 70% say their "expectations are far greater than their parents'" when it comes to better media experiences and mobile broadband access.

The study also found, interestingly, that millenials expect to be able to pause a TV show in one room and then resume it in the other, and they also expect to be able to transfer a show they're watching on their DVR to their mobile devices.

Your handset business is tanking and bringing the rest of the company down with it. What do you do to make things better? Well, if you're Motorola, you develop a service for...downloading movies onto cell phones? Huh?

According to MocoNews, which cites an NMA.co.uk report, Moto is teaming with Paramount on an online store where users can download movies to a PC and then sideload them onto a compatible Motorola phone.

Motorola really seems to like this movie-on-mobile concept - last year it pre-loaded "The Bourne Identity" on its Z8 handset and the Z10 is due to launch in the UK in the next week pre-loaded with "The Ultimate Bourne Collection."

The rumored service is expected to launch as early as next month. Moto is also reportedly in talks with other studios about signing on.

What we really want to know is this: Has anyone ever watched a full-length action flick on a cell phone and why would they want to?