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:

It's been a headline-grabbing couple of weeks for micro-blogging site Twitter. First it picks up London-based TweetDeck for what was probably around $40 million - and then it's built into the next version of Apple's iPhone and iPad operating system. From this autumn you'll be able to tweet from within the camera app, the web browser, the contact application and even YouTube on your iOS5 device.

Ralph Jennings of voanews.com writes:

Taiwan's massive high-tech industry has long been synonymous with building gadgets cheaply for foreign companies. But at the country's annual technology convention, locally designed tablet computers are hoping to change that image by challenging Apple's wildly popular iPad.

After decades of making PCs at a discount for more well-known foreign companies, Taiwan firms are using their manufacturing experience to design their own machines.

Mark Bridge writes:

I'll start with a personal comment. One of my friends has described my music taste as eclectic - and he didn't mean that in a good way. It probably explains why I've been sitting at my desk singing "melty head" to the tune of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face".

Mark Bridge writes:

On Tuesday this week the International Agency for Research on Cancer - part of the World Health Organisation - classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans.

Mark Bridge writes:

This month's Carnival of the Mobilists is now online. It collects the best mobile blogging for the previous month and is hosted on a different mobile-related site every month.

We start this week's podcast with news that thousands of Microsoft's ex-Nokia employees are losing their jobs.

Other topics for discussion include the new Apple and IBM partnership, Yahoo's acquisition of Flurry, regulating mobile games, improving rural mobile coverage, BT's new phone service and some management movements.

We start this week's podcast by talking about Yahoo and Tumblr before moving on to discuss Google's recent developer conference.

There are product announcements from BlackBerry, HP and the former MeeGo developers at Jolla... and there's some interesting mobile app news as well.

Today's edition of The Fonecast takes a look at the top mobile-related news stories from the past week, including the new Google Keep app, Apple's mapping acquisition and Facebook's VoIP service.

We also cover the BlackBerry World application store, a new UK 4G survey from eBay, in-car connectivity and the recent Yahoo! purchase of Summly.

It's a good week for Yahoo! as it appoints Marissa Mayer - previously Google employee number 20 - to the role of CEO. However, things aren't as cheery at Research In Motion, which has been ordered to pay over $147 million in a patent case.

Meanwhile O2 UK is recovering from a network problem that left around a third of its customers disconnected for almost a day.

This week's mobile industry news podcast from The Fonecast takes a gloomy look at HP's job losses, the end of the Cisco Cius tablet and the growth in Android malware - before cheering up with encouraging news from Orange, Yahoo! and Sidecar.

You can listen to the programme on our website audio player, via iTunes, by using our RSS feed or by downloading the MP3.