UK telecoms regulator Ofcom wants to ban inflation-related rises in phone and broadband contracts. Instead, it says any potential mid-contract price rises should be set out in pounds and pence.

A new forecast from research specialists Canalys shows the smartphone market is set to recover next year. Worldwide shipments declined by 12% last year but that decline is expected to slow to 5% this year.

Vodafone Group plc and CK Hutchison Group Telecom Holdings Limited have agreed to combine their UK telecommunication businesses, respectively Vodafone UK and Three UK. The merger will create a large new network operator to compete with Virgin Media O2 and EE.

UK mobile payment service Paym will close on 7th March 2023. The service, which allowed users to make and receive payments using their mobile phone numbers, was launched in 2014.

Consumer protection organisation Which? has been given permission by the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal to represent Apple and Samsung smartphone buyers in a legal case against chip manufacturer Qualcomm.

Mark Bridge writes:

New Apple products! New Android smart watches!

You’d be forgiven for not having noticed either of those news stories last week. Apple did indeed announce a new iPhone – but it was simply a new iPhone 5c with just 8MB of memory.

Joe DeCapua of voanews.com writes:

Mobile phone use in Africa has spread far, wide and fast. By the end of last year, it was estimated that 70 percent of the population would have a mobile phone. Now, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies says it’s using the technology to save lives.

Mark Bridge writes:

Happy New Year!  It’s been three weeks since our last newsletter and a fortnight since our podcast of mobile predictions for 2013, so there’s plenty to catch up with.

Mark Bridge writes:

Predicting the future is easy. Making accurate predictions is more of a challenge. In our final podcast of 2012 we've provided a forecast for the mobile telecoms industry in 2013 - and we've also looked back at last year's expectations.

So... what do the three of us at TheFonecast.com expect from mobile phones and wireless technology next year?

Mark Bridge writes:

We started last week with a 20th birthday party for the SMS text message, which was first used as an alternative Christmas card by Neil Papworth in 1992. Since then, mobile data has been transformed from the familiar dit-dit-dit dah-dah dit-dit-dit of Nokia phones to non-stop internet connectivity on smart devices.

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.