Best Buy Europe, the joint venture responsible for The Carphone Warehouse brand, plans to close its eleven so-called ‘Big Box’ Best Buy stores in the UK within the next two months.

In addition, the Carphone Warehouse Group is planning to end its American profit-sharing agreement by selling its interest in Best Buy Mobile US and Canada back to Best Buy.

Figures in the latest IBM Coremetrics Benchmark suggest that record numbers of US consumers will shift their online Christmas shopping from PCs to mobile devices.

Last October, 4.2% of people used a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site - but that figure had more than doubled to almost 11% this year. Similarly, mobile sales reached 9.6% in October 2011, up from 3.4% in October 2010.

Cloud desktop specialist Cortado has announced an HTML5 version of its Cortado Corporate Server product line, offering even more availability for its services.

Cortado Corporate Server already provides desktop-type functionality on Apple, Android and BlackBerry devices, enabling users to remotely access documents for editing, sharing, emailing and printing. The new HTML5 client now makes the service available to PCs, Macs and other web-enabled devices as well.

As Cortado reveals a new HTML5 client for accessing cloud-based files, Mark Bridge talks to Cortado CEO Carsten Mickeleit about wireless printing and accessing the 'cloud desktop' on mobile devices.

Mark Bridge writes:

I’m reminded of a sketch from BBC TV’s ‘The Young Ones’ in 1982. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are waiting around.

“What’s new?”, asks Pestilence. “Microchip technology”, replies one of the others. “That’s quite a new thing, isn’t it?”

Quite new. It’s probably the best description for much of last week’s mobile industry news.