The information for the North Korea map was added by people who are interested in the country under a Google development program called Map Maker, a collaborative effort that has become known as crowdsourcing.

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The deep-pocketed Korean company has used a combination of engineering prowess, manufacturing heft and marketing savvy to create smartphones that can rival the iPhone in both sales and appeal.

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With its quarterly announcement to guide investors before it reveals full results later in the month, Samsung again showed that it is not just the largest company by revenue in high technology but one of the strongest, with operating profit continuing to grow faster than sales.

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The company’s telecom unit produced an operating profit margin of 18.8 percent in the three months through September, the highest since it changed to international accounting standards two years ago. Samsung released its flagship smartphone, called Galaxy S III, in May and completed its rollout during the July-September period.

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Attorneys for the two companies made the requests in motions for final judgment that were filed late Friday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif.

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The verdict from the San Jose, Calif., federal jury came early Saturday morning South Korea time, a day after a Seoul court, ruling on the same case, came out with a judgment that gave Samsung its biggest victory since the two companies began their global legal battle 16 months ago.

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A three-judge panel in Seoul Central District Court said Apple infringed two Samsung technology patents, while Samsung violated one of Apple’s patents. The court awarded small damages to both companies and said they must halt sales of the infringing products in South Korea.

None of the banned products are the latest models of Samsung or Apple devices.

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Samsung, the world’s largest technology firm by revenue, said its net profit for the three months ended June 30 rose to a record 5.193 trillion won ($4.5 billion), up 48% from 3.506 trillion won a year earlier. In the first quarter, Samsung reported a net profit of 5.05 trillion won.

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Mr. Kwon succeeds Choi Gee-sung, who has led the world’s largest technology manufacturer as CEO since early 2009.

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LG Electronics, the world’s second-largest TV manufacturer, said Friday it will sell a 55-inch TV that is just 3/16 of an inch thick and weighs only 16.5 pounds. Crosstown rival Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest maker of TVs, is expected to unveil a similarly sized TV at the industry’s big trade fair, called the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas in early January.

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Samsung in the July-to-September period surpassed Apple Inc. as the leading seller of smartphones by shipping around 28 million, about four times the number it achieved a year earlier, in a rapid transformation of its biggest business by sales. Apple said earlier this month it shipped around 17 million smartphones in the same period.

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U.S. companies such as Apple Inc., Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Facebook Inc. are driving the tectonic change from personal computers to mobile ones, chiefly in the shape of smartphones and tablets. But Asian companies are in the forefront of innovation, designing and building the devices and many of their key components, from chips to screens.

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Whether or not Apple’s iPhone 4S will really make a big difference for the Korean companies — Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Co. — in the global smartphone race remains to be seen.

But it is sure to change the perceptions of that race among South Koreans and the portrayal of it in the domestic media.

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Samsung, which is embroiled in a neck-and-neck race with Apple to become the world’s largest seller of smartphones, is trying to gain an upper hand in a legal battle that started in April when Apple accused it of copying key design elements in smartphones and tablets.

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At the heart of the issue are so-called standard patents, which companies contribute to international bodies and make available to other companies, generally for minimal, though reliable, royalties to make gadgets compatible with each other.

Apple is involved in several high-profile patent battles over the rapidly growing market in mobile computing products like smartphones and tablets. But its dispute with Samsung is particularly heated because the Korean electronics company is the biggest seller of smartphones using Google Inc.’s Android software and is about to surpass Apple in overall smartphone sales.

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The company’s chip-manufacturing business remained its biggest contributor to profit, though its earnings were well below the near-record level of a year ago. Its flat-panel business lost money for a second consecutive quarter.

Samsung’s cellphone earnings were lifted by higher sales of smartphones. But for the first time since it started reporting quarterly performance a decade ago, Samsung declined to say how many cellphones it shipped. Strategy Analytics, a Boston-based market research firm, later estimated Samsung shipped 74 million units, up 16 percent from a year ago.

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The two operations last year accounted for 44 percent of Samsung’s revenue and 70 percent of its operating profits. But the display component business has been in a cyclical downturn and lost money in the first quarter and likely the second. The immediate effect of the combination will be to hide the display unit’s difficulties in the more strongly performing chip operation.

But the move also positions Samsung, the world’s largest technology manufacturer by revenue, to address a larger structural issue that executives rarely discuss: that the customers of its component businesses compete with the other divisions of Samsung, which make cellphones, TVs, computers and other consumer electronics gadgets. The strain of that issue recently became visible in relations with the biggest customer of its component divisions, Apple Inc., which in April sued Samsung alleging that its cellphone operation copied designs of Apple’s products.

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Mr. Ro does contract research for South Korea’s two big electronics makers, Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Co., on a difficult problem: How to build OLED screens big enough for large televisions.

It’s one of the hot topics among display researchers and manufacturers who are meeting in Los Angeles for the annual conference of the Society for Information Display, or SID. More academic gabfest than trade show, engineers will trot out their latest ideas for displays as small as sheet-like films that roll up in a pen to as large as roadside billboards.

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For more than a decade, consumer-electronics manufacturers have been trying to marry the Internet and TV. In recent years, they’ve added connectors that let TV sets hook up to the Internet and, in some cases, added software that provides shortcuts to Web-based services from companies like movie-rental service Netflix Inc.

But this year, starting with product announcements at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, manufacturers are making a full-on push with “smart TVs”— models that have built-in computer-style processors and operating software so the sets can be modified with applications just as computers and smartphones are.

The idea is to make it easy to shop, surf the Web, check the weather and traffic and set up customized news pages. Consumers also would have available a variety of other apps for, say, social networking or sharing photos and videos.

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The company, LG CNS Co., has been experimenting with a version of Twitter—the short-burst messaging service used on computers and cellphones—that it created for the internal use of its 7,000 employees.

Called BizTweet, the system at LG CNS is an example of a less-heralded offshoot of the Twitter phenomenon: Companies are using it for internal communication and other purposes beyond the external marketing for which it has become well known.

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The company, which is expected this year to become the world’s largest technology manufacturer by sales, experienced big jumps in profits in its two component business–memory chips and liquid crystal display screens.

Its consumer product divisions, mainly cellphones and TVs, saw profit margins shrink due largely to price competition and increased marketing expenses.

Samsung executives said they expected the third and fourth quarters to be more of the same, though the profit squeeze in end products will likely be greater than the improvements in components.

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The South Korean rules had long stood in contrast to efforts by other governments around the world that have tried to break Microsoft’s grip on the Internet browser market. For South Koreans, they made Internet transactions a nuisance by requiring that users download plug-in programs, sometimes a dozen or so, for each website with which they did business.

Microsoft’s competitors, Internet security experts, website developers and advocates of open-source software and networks have long pushed for an end to South Korea’s rules.

The government finally took action when regulators realized the rules were preventing businesses from offering services to smartphones. As well, government antitrust officials say they want to flex their muscles over Microsoft’s dominance in Internet browsers in the same way they’ve seen their counterparts do in the U.S. and European Union.

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But so is the corporate whistleblower whose accusations led to Mr. Lee’s resignation and tax fraud conviction in 2008.

Kim Yong-cheol, a former attorney in the Samsung conglomerate, has a best-selling book about his life, work at Samsung and his thoughts about Mr. Lee’s control of the 64-company empire.

But Mr. Kim has gotten virtually no media attention for the book in South Korea. Newspapers and magazines have turned down advertising for the book and none have printed reviews of it, all in apparent fear of upsetting Samsung, which is the biggest advertiser in the country.

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The country’s communications regulator on Tuesday said it wouldn’t stop people from importing Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iPad for personal use, ending a ban that early adopters in this tech-savvy country dubbed unfair. Some Korean tech Web sites had even started to publicly expose famous Koreans who had the gadget in apparent violation of the ban.

The issue climaxed Monday when the minister of culture, tourism and sports, apparently unaware of the rules laid down by the Korea Communications Commission earlier this month, used an iPad as a prop at a news conference to announce a $50 million fund to support electronic-book publishing.

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But trouble came when Mr. Yu pulled out an Apple iPad, held it up and remarked about how nicely it displays electronic books. The problem is, South Korea’s communications regulators haven’t approved the device for wireless networking in the country.

Tech-industry bloggers pounced on Mr. Yu, criticizing him for using a device that isn’t even available in South Korea yet.

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