The National Audit Office, which publishes reports about UK public spending on behalf of Parliament, says a scheme to equip frontline police officers with mobile devices has not achieved value for money.

Around £80 million has been spent on smartphones and PDAs, with current calculations suggesting they’ve helped officers spend an average 18 minutes more ‘on the beat’ per shift.

Samsung Electronics has announced its full year and fourth quarter financial results for 2011.

Revenue for the year reached an all-time high of 165 trillion won (around £94 billion), up 7% from 2010, although net income was down 15% to 13.73 trillion won and operating profit was down 6% to 16.25 trillion won.

Samsung has just had its second patent claim dismissed in two weeks.

Both were in Germany and claimed that Apple was infringing Samsung’s telecoms patents.

A new study says South Africans and Kenyans are Africa’s most active Twitter users and that the social networking site is rapidly becoming a key information tool across the continent.

Researchers analyzed more than 11.5 million tweets from specific locations in Africa during the last three months of 2011.

Device detection and web optimisation business 51Degrees.mobi has published an analysis of the mobile devices its online partners detected browsing the internet last year. It’s called the 51Degrees.mobi Mobile Web Trends 2011 white paper and shows that the proportion of mobile web visitors in the USA with Android devices overtook Apple users by the end of December 2011.

Apple remained ahead in Europe with 42.6% of mobile web visits, although Android usage increased to 25.5% by the end of 2011.