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Motorola has made it official and announced it will proceed with laying off 4,000 workers in 2009 (3,000 directly from the mobile phone division). This will continue with the layoff streak as Motorola tries to find itself. We heard just a few days ago that this coming year they will reduce the number of phones they produce to 12 and focus their smartphones on Google’s Android platform.

Steve Jobs is a creative genius and a true fighter. He has had many battles in life from business to his personal health. Today he has stepped down as CEO of Apple for six months to focus strictly on his health, returning in June. In his place will be Tim Cook.

On January 5th he released a statement that said “a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy”. Today a release was issued saying “I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.”:

“Team,

I am sure all of you saw my letter last week sharing something very personal with the Apple community. Unfortunately, the curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well. In addition, during the past week I have learned that my health-related issues are more complex than I originally thought.

In order to take myself out of the limelight and focus on my health, and to allow everyone at Apple to focus on delivering extraordinary products, I have decided to take a medical leave of absence until the end of June.

I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for Apple’s day to day operations, and I know he and the rest of the executive management team will do a great job. As CEO, I plan to remain involved in major strategic decisions while I am out. Our board of directors fully supports this plan.

I look forward to seeing all of you this summer.

Steve”

If you were obsessed with Tetris you’ll love the new mobile game called “Tiltris” for your BlackBerry Storm.

The music is  a blast from the past. When the pieces fall either swipe your find across the screen or use the accelerometer to muscle the pieces into place. The best part of this is that it’s free and can be downloaded OTA (Over the Air) from this link wap.getjar.com simply use quick download code 40256.

Here is a video of this in action:

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Toronto-based Nortel Networks, North America’s largest telecom equipment maker, has filed for bankruptcy protection today. This comes of a staggering 25% stock drop yesterday. At one time this Canadian business icon was one of Canada’s largest company with a $366-billion market capitalization and 95,000 employees. A person close to the Nortel daily plans said “It is an iconic Canadian name and there will be a great national grieving over this”.

The Globe is reporting that next steps will be court protection from lenders, and then broken up and sold to foreign rivals.

iSteam is one of those iPhone apps that ranks in the top 10, just like iFart, iBeer and Pull my Finger. Fort the 22-year old creators of iSteam they are loving the million or so people that have downloaded the $0.99 app as it has generated revenues of over $100,000 in the past month!

BeamReader has left beta and is now available – BeamReader has the ability to view your PDF’s straight from your BlackBerry without connecting to your server or a network connection. And most important it views your PDF e-mail attachments/documents that are stored on your memory card that same quality as they would appear on your PC.

Evgeny Lebanidze, President and CEO of SLG Mobile said “We are delighted to introduce BeamReader to the BlackBerry market and firmly believe that a native full fidelity PDF reader makes the BlackBerry platform more complete for business users and more competitive with other platforms,”

Gameloft has secured a licensing agreement with Fox Mobile Entertainment to bring “Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian” to your mobile phone. This will be available in time to launch with the official release of the film on May 22, 2009

Wowzers – shares of Nortel Networks fell almost 25% on Tuesday… that cannot be good for business.  The shares closed at $0.38 and RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Sue has warned that bankruptcy is a “distinct possibility”. Just 9 years ago shares were on top of the world valued at $1,100 each.

In a recent report, research firm Generator Research is predicting Apple will own 40% of the global smartphone market and surpass Nokia by 2013 as the largest. The report said Apple has “the resources, competencies and motivation to invest in the mobile sector just at the time when the economic climate is forcing many established players in the mobile industry to cut back on product development.”

Generator also predicts 77 million iPhone will be sold in in 2013 and the App store will be “developed to the point where third party developers have access to network assets that will allow them to write programs that can send messages and establish voice calls between different iPhones.”

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Rumours are flying around that Koodo Mobile is going to launch the Samsung Slyde M540 in February. Nothing is confirmed yet.

Currently Koodo has the LG KEYBO, LG Shine,MotoKrzr K1m, Moto 385 and the Samsung U410. Before we get into the Samsung Slyde, we have also been tipped that Koodo might pick up the BlackBerry Pearl 8130 to match Virgin and Solo.

The Samsung Slyde M540 would actually make a great deal of sense for Koodo – it’s a texting dream and the price points are right up their alley. When TELUS exclusively launched this back in November they put it right on sale for $0.00 – this would be perfect for the Koodo Tab. Current TELUS rate plans are: 3-year: $29.99; 2-year: $79.99; 1-year: $179.99 and No Contract: $229.99.

The Slyde is a slider with a full QWERTY keyboard, 2 megapixel camera , GPS, 2.1″ screen, weighs in at 130 grams – comes in Black and Pink.

More info on this soon.

(thanks live_strong!)