O2 says its UK network carried over 440 million SMS text messages on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, which was a 10% increase on last year’s figures.

In addition, over 200 million calls were made via O2 UK during the 48-hour period.

Joe DeCapua of voanews.com writes:

This week (3rd-5th December), over 4,000 people from 50 countries have gathered near Washington, D.C. to discuss how mobile technology is affecting healthcare. Organizers of the mHealth Summit say some of the biggest advances and initiatives are taking place in low and middle income countries.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Short Message Service used for sending 160-character messages via mobile phone networks. The first official SMS message was sent on this day in 1992, when an Sema Group engineer named Neil Papworth sent a text message from a computer to the Orbitel 901 mobile phone being used by Richard Jarvis of Vodafone UK. The message simply said ‘Merry Christmas’.

SMS had been devised some years earlier; Finnish engineer Matti Makkonen is credited with creating the initial concept in 1984.

Orange Vallée, the part of France Telecom-Orange responsible for innovation and development, has released a free cross-network mobile app that enables users to make free voice calls, send messages and receive voicemail messages.

It’s called Libon and is available as an iOS app in 90 countries including the UK; an Android version is planned for early next year.

Figures from mobile security company AdaptiveMobile suggest that 148.43 million spam texts are received by British consumers every month, with 14.2 million people being bothered by SMS spam at least once a week.

The study, which was carried out last month by YouGov, found that consumers rated unwanted text messages as the most annoying form of spam (41%) ahead of email (36%) and direct mail through the letterbox (17%).

Mark Windle, head of marketing at OpenCloud, predicts that this year’s reduction in the number of traditional telecoms operators in some countries will provide an opportunity for other operators to innovate and capture market share in 2016.

He says next year will be a year of rapid change for telecoms… whether it’s MVNO disruption, competitive tariff pricing or simply defence from the ‘dark art’ of hacking.

Mark Bridge writes:

The most memorable moments in life often go unrecorded. You don't have your camera in your hands. Your finger is still hovering over the 'pause' button on your audio recorder. Or you were simply too busy experiencing whatever was happening. It's all about the one that got away.

That's where Kapture can help.

Mark Bridge writes:

James Rosewell shows me a colourful roll of paper that's the width of an iPhone but well over three metres long. When I look closer, I can see it's a printed copy of the Wall Street Journal's mobile website. That's a lot of scrolling to do... and a pretty unfriendly user experience for anyone reading the news online. Why does it work so badly?

Iain Graham, James Rosewell and Mark Bridge return to review their mobile industry predictions from last year. Which mergers, partnerships and developments did they forecast correctly... and which didn’t work out as planned?

Later in the programme, the team anticipates some of the topics that will be hitting the headlines during 2016.

Mark Bridge learns about the mobile technology trends at Mobile World Congress 2015 by chatting to James Rosewell of 51Degrees, Dr Kevin Curran from the IEEE and Chris Millington of Doro.

They talk about wearable devices, wireless charging, mobile operating systems and much more... including some of their favourite products from the exhibition.

We're taking a look back at the biggest mobile industry news stories from February 2015, including allegations that the UK's security service tried to breach SIM card security by hacking into one of the world's biggest SIM producers.

We also talk about the planned BT and EE merger, the creation of two new UK virtual networks, some acquisitions in the mobile payment arena and a new Ubuntu smartphone.

In today's programme Mark Bridge talks to Chris Millington, who's Managing Director for Doro UK and Ireland.

They discuss the state of mobile retailing in the UK, the future of wearable devices and - as you might expect - smartphones for seniors.

We're back with a month of mobile industry news, including takeover talks and takeover rumours. O2 and Three are said to be discussing a merger... but is there any truth in the suggestions that BlackBerry could be up for grabs?

We also discuss Apple's record-breaking quarterly figures, the highlights of CES and the launch of Microsoft Windows 10, as well as saying farewell to the current version of Google Glass.