Nokia World - the company’s biggest public-facing event, which takes place in London today and tomorrow - has been opened this morning by CEO and president Stephen Elop.

Products revealed at the event include the ‘Asha’ range of devices, which combine smartphone-like design with Nokia’s S40 feature phone platform. But the biggest and most-expected news was the appearance of the first Windows Phone-based Nokia smartphones.

This week’s podcast from The Fonecast contains news of two new mobile platforms: Google’s exotically-named Ice Cream Sandwich and the rather more prosaic BlackBerry BBX. We also talk about the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the new Motorola RAZR and an Android-powered cash register from Casio.

As well as all this there’s a discussion about mobile payments, mobile patents, a new mobile-focussed health study and a new way of saying ‘beta’.

Much of this week's mobile industry news is about new smartphones and new operating systems - but we still find time to talk about patents, payments and plenty more.

The USB ‘dongle’ is still the most popular form factor for mobile broadband modems, according to a new report from ABI Research.

It estimates that 110 million USB units will ship worldwide this year, contributing to a total of 150 million mobile broadband modems that are expected to be shipped worldwide in 2011. That’s 46% growth year-on-year.

A couple of weeks after RIM was rumoured to be buying Dublin-based mobile tech company NewBay for around $100 million, the acquisition has been officially confirmed.

NewBay Software was founded in 2002 and provides ‘white label’ cloud-based content services to manufacturers and network operators.