Mark Bridge writes:

It’s always a relief when April Fool’s Day doesn’t fall on a work day, isn’t it?  Still, that didn’t stop the jokes. Even though the mobile industry traditionally tends to head to the pub for a roast dinner and a pint on Sunday, there was many a prank in the morning of April 1st.

Our friends at 51Degrees.mobi revealed left-handed device detection, Google prepared to run mobile ads on phones with dials, Phones 4U introduced Gnomes 4U femtocells, Nokia made a Windows Phone device out of ice… and so on.

Mark Bridge writes:

There are times I feel like turning my back on the mobile phone industry and joining a monastery. That’s probably not going to happen, given the monks’ tradition of not admitting wives. But yesterday was another of those frustrating occasions. Let me tell you why.

Orange UK has announced the launch of Secure Mobility from Orange, an end-to-end security solution that lets businesses manage company data on tablets and smartphones.

The service, which can be used on company phones and on employees’ own handsets, combines Orange’s Mobile Device Management and its Data VPN.

Figures from ABI Research predict that worldwide smartphone sales will overtake sales of all other ‘non-smart’ mobile phones by 2016.

It also expects the total number of handset shipments to increase by 29% in the next four years, from 1.7 billion in 2012 to 2.2 billion in 2016.

O2 UK has announced a new tariff called On & On.

Prices start from £26 a month for unlimited calls to mobiles and landlines in the UK plus unlimited text messages to UK-based numbers. The deal also includes 1GB of data that can be used in any way, including tethering and streaming.