AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile USA have amassed an army of former senior government antitrust officials to try to save their US$39 billion deal to combine wireless businesses.

Several of the lawyers who make up the legal dream team for the wireless companies previously worked in top roles at either the US Justice Department’s antitrust division or the Federal Trade Commission’s competition bureau.

Last month the Justice Department sued to block the acquisition of Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile USA unit, the number four US wireless carrier, by AT&T, which ranks second in the market. The companies hope to settle so the deal can close.

Sprint Nextel, which has filed a separate lawsuit against the deal, hired its own star lawyer – Greg Craig, former White House counsel.

Nokia’s chief technology officer, Richard Green – who has been on indefinite leave from the company since June – is leaving the company with immediate effect.

Although Nokia said his absence was for personal reasons, there were strong hints that he was dissatisfied with the company’s switch from Symbian to Microsoft for its smartphone OS.

Nokia announced today that Henry Tirri, currently head of Nokia Research Centre (NRC) will replace him and has been appointed executive vice president, CTO and a member of the Nokia Leadership Team. He reports directly to president and CEO Stephen Elop.

Tirri joined Nokia in 2004 as a research fellow before leading NRC Systems Research laboratory in 2007. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki, Finland. Tirri will be based in Sunnyvale, California.

Although mobile phone shipments in India in the quarter witnessed a growth of six per cent year-on-year, this reflected a slight decline of three per cent quarter-on-quarter. According to IDC calculations, in absolute terms, the market shipped 42.8 million units in Q211.

“The smartphone segment showed an impressive growth of 68 per cent year-on-year and a marginal growth of 0.4 per cent over the Jan-March 2011 quarter, to garner a share of 5.6 per cent of the overall mobile phone market,” commented Deepak Kumar, research director at IDC, India. In Q210, the share of smartphones was 3.6 per cent of the overall mobile phone market, in unit terms.”

Nokia continued to lead the mobile phone market and the smartphone segment in Q211, with 25 per cent and 45.8 per cent shares, respectively. Nokia has focused on introducing and promoting dual-SIM handsets to a significant extent, among other measures. Samsung, second to Nokia with shares of 15 per cent and 21 per cent in the mobile phone market and the smartphone segment, respectively, also clocked the strongest smartphone shipment growth during the quarter, fuelled by its Galaxy series of handsets. In the smartphone segment, RIM occupied the third place with a share of 15 per cent.

IDC expects 2011 to close with mobile phone shipments in India of around 187 million units. IDC also forecasts the market to clock 328 million by 2015, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.5 per cent during the period of 2010-2015. The smartphone segment is forecast to see a much higher CAGR of 68.4 per cent during the same period and to achieve a shipment of 81.5 million by 2015.

The CEO of Egyptian cellco Mobinil, Hassan Kabbani has decided not to seek a renewal of his mandate and will be replaced by Yves Gauthier in the middle of November.

Gauthier has spent much of his career within the France Telecom Orange Group, where he has held positions as CEO or COO of various group subsidiaries in different countries. France Telecom Orange and Orascom Telecom are the major shareholders in Mobinil.

Hewlett-Packard’s (HP) board today ousted CEO Leo Apotheker after just 11 months on the job, replacing him with Meg Whitman.

HP’s board said the company needed a change at the top. The company cut its financial outlook three times in Apotheker’s tenure, and on September 22, HP said it was not confident it would be able to meet its sales targets for the current quarter.

HP’s stock price has slipped by more than 40 per cent this year alone.

Whitman, who is also an HP board member, was formerly the CEO of eBay

“We are at a critical moment and we need renewed leadership to successfully implement our strategy and take advantage of the market opportunities ahead,” said Ray Lane, who on was named executive chairman of HP’s board.

Lane was formerly an independent, non-executive chair. The company said it will look for someone to fill that independent role on its board.

The chairman said on a conference call that the board considered many candidates and decided together that Whitman was the right fit.

Whitman, who is also an HP board member, was formerly the CEO of eBay. She headed the online auction site for 10 years, taking over the company in 1998 when it was in its infancy. By the time she left in 2008, the company had grown to a US$8.5 billion e-commerce behemoth.

The ousting of HP’s third CEO marks yet another dramatic crisis in a decade of turmoil for one of Silicon Valley’s original pioneers. A year earlier, Mark Hurd was fired as HP’s CEO after submitting false expense reports in what appeared to be an effort to conceal a relationship with a former employee.

In 2006, HP’s chairwoman Pattie Dunn was shown the door after it was revealed that she had spearheaded a secret probe to spy on fellow board members and journalists, in an attempt to find the source of board-level media leaks.

A year before that, in 2005, then-CEO Carly Fiorina left after spearheading HP’s failed merger with Compaq. The company’s stock price was cut in half during her tenure.