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.

Simone Orendain of voanews.com writes:

A new program offers rice farmers in the Philippines advice on fertilizer use via their cell phones.

International Rice Research Institute scientists have spent 18 years refining a computerized system to give farmers advice on just how much fertilizer to use...

Mark Bridge writes:

This week’s big news isn’t entirely mobile-related – but it is entirely worth mentioning. First we had Amazon snapping up the part of LOVEFiLM they didn’t already own. (Allow me to start the speculation about a video-streaming Kindle). And then Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he was leaving.

Mark Bridge writes:

If you’ve read any of the tech press today you’ll have seen that Amazon.com is buying LOVEFiLM. Yes, that really is how the company writes its name. Amazon already had quite a collection of LOVEFiLM shares, so it’s really just buying the remainder.

Mark Bridge writes:

It's been a funny old week. With the International CES behind us and Mobile World Congress less than a month away, you’d be forgiven for thinking there wouldn’t be much big news until the world’s mobile mavens start arriving in Barcelona.

Mark Bridge writes:

The RIM BlackBerry PlayBook. Embarrassment-in-waiting or soon-to-be-success in the increasingly crowded tablet market?

Just before Christmas I stuck my neck out and predicted the latter. But that’s not a position I’ve always held.

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.