Last month Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said that software support for Symbian phones would continue until 2016 at the earliest. It's now become clear why he was able to give that date with such confidence.

Nokia and Accenture have published details of their agreement for the outsourcing of Symbian software development and support activities, which was first announced at the end of April.

In The Fonecast this week we talk about mobile payment plans from the 'big three' network operators, a new bill-paying app from Pizza Express, spectrum trading, Nokia's new MeeGo smartphone, RIM's problems and a lot more.

Download this week's show from iTunes - or listen to the podcast by using the audio player on our website.

Mark Bridge writes:

There's more to NFC than mobile payments... and there's more to mobile payments than NFC.

The latest audio accessories from Nokia use 'contactless' NFC technology to speed up Bluetooth connections. Simply touch a compatible Nokia phone against the Play 360° loudspeaker and your music will play through the speaker. There's no need to bother with conventional Bluetooth pairing.

This week's podcast looks at a new mobile payment partnership, the possibility of spectrum sharing, m-commerce at Pizza Express, Nokia's MeeGo device, RIM's problems and the rest of the industry's big news stories.

People are spending more time using mobile apps than they are on the 'real' web, according to a recent analysis from Flurry. It's calculated that US consumers spend an average 81 minutes per day using mobile applications, compared with 74 minutes on desktop or mobile internet browsers.

That's a dramatic change from 12 months ago, when the average user spent 43 minutes a day using mobile applications and 64 minutes using the web.