The HTC First smartphone, which is embedded with the Facebook Home application, looks unlikely to be seen in the UK.

There are also reports that sales of the device in the USA are being discontinued by the AT&T network.

Anton Faulconbridge of RantMedia writes:

2013 promises to be an exciting year for the app industry. With the number of smartphone users almost on par with laptop, desktop and tablet users, this is a crucial time for app developers to bring fresh and innovative material to the table.

Whilst many industries are drying out, the smartphone technology sector continues to flourish and a wave of app developers who sit up and take notice of new trends are likely to do well compared with slapdash competitors. Let’s take a look at some savvy tips and tricks to stay ahead of the game in 2013.

Visa Europe says the adoption of NFC contactless payments has reached a ‘critical point’ across Europe.

More than 19 million transactions took place in March 2013, driving the total spend on contactless cards and smartphones equipped with a Visa payWave app to over €1 billion (£856 million).

We start this week's podcast by talking about Yahoo and Tumblr before moving on to discuss Google's recent developer conference.

There are product announcements from BlackBerry, HP and the former MeeGo developers at Jolla... and there's some interesting mobile app news as well.

Yahoo! has agreed a deal to acquire blogging and media sharing platform Tumblr for approximately $1.1 billion (£724 million).

Tumblr will continue to operate as a separate business with David Karp as CEO.