A new study says South Africans and Kenyans are Africa’s most active Twitter users and that the social networking site is rapidly becoming a key information tool across the continent.

Researchers analyzed more than 11.5 million tweets from specific locations in Africa during the last three months of 2011.

A new report from ABI Research says the trend towards ‘freemium’ pricing on mobile apps will continue next year. The term refers to a product that’s offered free with a chargeable option for customers who want additional features or enhanced functionality.

Apple enabled in-app purchasing for free apps just over two years ago.

Not content with its efforts to put television on mobile phones, Vodafone has now launched a plug-in keyboard that turns your TV into a mobile phone.

The ‘Webbox’ is aimed at emerging markets rather than the UK, with Vodacom in South Africa preparing to start selling the Webbox next week.

A new report from Pyramid Research says more than 200 million mHealth applications are in use today, with the number expected to increase threefold by 2012.

Browser company Opera has taken a look at ‘gender equality on the mobile web’ in its latest State of the Mobile Web report. It notes that the percentage of women on the mobile web has risen 575% in the last two years. South Africa currently has the world’s highest proportion of mobile internet users – 43.5% - followed by the USA with 35.6%, Russia at 32.4% and the United Kingdom with 31.5%. At the other end of the scale, India has the fewest female users (4.0%), followed by Nigeria (5.4%), China (11.6%) and Vietnam (17.9%).

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?

Product news in today's podcast includes Samsung's curved-screen smartphone, an HTC phablet and an update for Windows Phone 8.

We're also talking about malware, roaming charges, Ofcom's licence fees, a drop in mobile revenue, BT's MVNO and a project that sounds... well... silly.

In today's podcast: Samsung's profit, UK mobile ad spending and Vertu's smartphone range are all increasing.

Meanwhile HTC's profit and the proportion of children with mobile phones are both going down. Discover the background to these news stories - and plenty more - in our regular weekly broadcast.

Today's podcast starts with a gentle warning to app developers from the Office of Fair Trading.

We then move on to Amazon's new tablets, HTC's sale of its Beats Electronics stake, Twitter's emergency alerts, UK government plans to improve mobile broadband on trains, customer complaints and the growth in adult content for mobile devices.

Ring-back tones offers consumers yet another way to customise their mobile phone service. Yet despite this - and the revenue opportunities that can be generated - many network operators don't provide ring-back tones.

In today's special feature we talk to Florent Stroppa of OnMobile to discover why the UK doesn't really seem to be bothered about ring-back tones... and whether the next-generation of interactive ring-back services could change this.

There are big changes on the horizon at BlackBerry. We talk about the company's potential future and also look at the recent tablet announcements from Microsoft and Tesco... plus the rest of the week's mobile news.

There's also a special report from IAB2013 about the sometimes awkward relationship between mobile devices and the television industry.