The mobile virtual network operator will be an important factor in the growth of 4G connections, according to ABI Research.

It's predicted there'll be 103 million 4G subscribers connected via MVNOs by 2016, up from just 3.8 million worldwide last year. Around a third of these 103 million subscribers will be from China and Japan.

Although there have been a number of 'Facebook phones' launched in the last couple of years, the description of Vodafone's latest offering stands out from the crowd.

The company describes the Vodafone 555 Blue as "the world’s first designated prepay phone specifically designed to put the Facebook experience into the heart of the handset". It's been developed in collaboration with Facebook and has been produced exclusively for Vodafone by TCL.

Everything Everywhere has published its second quarter and first-half results for 2011.

The one-year-old company, which is responsible for Orange and T-Mobile in the UK, has seen turnover and mobile service revenue both drop slightly year-on-year, although mobile service revenue was up when the effects of regulation were excluded.

LG Electronics has published its quarterly results for the three-month period ending 30th June 2011.

After two consecutive quarters of losses, LG made a net profit of 108 billion Korean Won and an operating profit of KRW 158 billion (£91 million). Revenue for Q2 2011 was up 9.3% from the previous quarter to KRW 14.4 trillion.

In this week's podcast we’re talking about smartphone sales from Nokia and Apple, redundancies at RIM, the closure of Google Labs, gesture recognition technology, customer service research and the growth (or not) of mobile payments.

You can download the show from iTunes or listen to the podcast by using the audio player on our website. There's an RSS feed for the MP3 version of the podcast as well.