Mark Bridge writes:

We’ve had a few sets of quarterly results in the past week. Let me summarise as best I can.

Qualcomm: doing very well, thank you.
Microsoft: pretty decent, although no-one’s talking much about phones.
Intel: not as good as before, although better than expected.
Nokia: sorry, we’ve lost a billion Euro. Well, we did warn you...

Now to the rest of the news, where there was more than a little déjà vu.

A new ad-funded virtual mobile network launched in the UK. Three years after Blyk moved away from running its UK MVNO, Ovivo Mobile has opened for pre-registrations. Good luck to CEO Dariush Zand and the rest of the company.

Meanwhile Barclaycard announced a stick-on NFC credit card for ‘mobile’ payments. It’ll turn any phone into a mobile wallet – which sounds a bit like the BOKU service we reported in February – but, unlike BOKU, there’s no software involved so it’ll turn pretty much anything into a mobile wallet. Cue much hilarity in the tech community.

In other instances of history repeating itself, Everything Everywhere announced plans to combine some of its Orange and T-Mobile shops into ‘Everything Everywhere’ stores while Motorola followed in the footsteps of HTC by preparing to close its cloud-based file storage.

Growth was reported in mobile advertising (hooray!) and mobile malware infections (boo!), with research also anticipating a dramatic increase in 4G mobile device shipments and mobile payment adoption.

In fact, it’s research I’ll end with. A study published by Everything Everywhere showed that 74% of British adults wanted to bring 4G technology to the country as soon as possible. However, it wasn’t faster mobile phone connections that most respondents looked forward to. It was the UK catching up with other countries and staying competitive.

Based on this, you could almost argue the UK government should subsidise the forthcoming UK 4G spectrum auction in order to help the economy. Perhaps someone at one of the networks would like to suggest that?