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.

Bluestreak Technology, a Canadian company that provides technology for delivering multimedia to various consumer devices, has listed the top 5 most important technology trends it expects to hear about at Mobile World Congress 2011.

2010 was a year of tremendous change in the technology industry...

Mobile phone recycling has become increasingly mainstream, with many millions of people in the UK handing in their old mobile phones and electrical gadgets for cash. It's a growth industry that's seen more and more companies and websites offering cash bonuses to customers selling mobile phones.

Advertising feature

Adam Taylor writes:

The mobile phone industry is an attractive proposition. Over 90% of the UK population has a mobile, and the seemingly non-stop developments in mobile technology are doing a great job in satisfying the UK’s thirst for anything that provides a quicker, more efficient (or in some cases, more fun) way of doing things. With such a demand, naturally supply tends to follow.

Mark Bridge writes:

Sorry, but I find it hard to get excited by financial results. Actually that's not strictly true. I find it hard to get excited by financial results that aren't unexpected.

Mark Bridge writes:

I just wanted to have a few words about the Sony PlayStation Phone. I know I’ve been wrong about things in the past – and I have little doubt I’ll be wrong again – but I’d like to suggest a lot of people have been looking in the wrong place.

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.