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:

Last week Nokia announced a new typeface called Nokia Pure.

The new branding will soon start appearing in Nokia's advertising and on Nokia devices as well.

Mark Bridge writes:

There was big news from the United States this week as Deutsche Telekom decided to sell T-Mobile USA to AT&T. Was it a shotgun wedding or is this a carefully calculated deal designed to benefit consumers?  Time will tell – assuming, of course, the merger gets approved by the US regulator.

Mark Bridge writes:

The Terminate The Rate campaign has pretty much run its course. Its aim was to get Mobile Termination Rates reduced. These are the wholesale charges paid when a mobile or fixed-line network connects a call from one of its customers to a rival. Lower MTRs would mean better deals on call charges, the campaign argued.

Mark Bridge writes:

"It's political correctness gone mad, innit?"  The terms and conditions for booking tickets to the London 2012 Olympic Games include a warning that certain items are banned. Food, flasks of drink, umbrellas, musical instruments and mobile phones are all on the prohibited list.

Mark Bridge writes:

The last seven days have seen the UK mobile industry coming to terms with Ofcom's plans to cut mobile termination rates from next month. Some think the reductions should have been larger and faster-acting, others say they'll mean higher call charges for prepay customers. The reality will become more obvious from 1st April.

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.