Unified communications service provider Outsourcery has sold its Vodafone mobile voice and data business to Daisy Group plc.

Daisy Group paid around £12 million for Hamsard 3155 Limited, the holding company of Outsourcery. Outsourcery's cloud-based services and connections via the O2 network will continue to be available through a new company called Outsourcery Hosting Limited.

MobiWire has launched its new user interface for Android smartphones. The news follows the company's transformation in February, when it changed its name from Sagem and first revealed its user interface plans.

Surface UX enhances the standard Android user interface. It claims to simplify and improve usability - and also introduces 'Surface Apps' that appear as branded on-screen widgets.

New figures from GfK Retail and Technology UK show that the Android operating system is becoming increasingly popular.

Smartphones accounted for almost half of all mobile phone sales in February 2011 (48.7%). When it came to 'pay monthly' contracts, 83.1% were smartphones... which means only a sixth of all contract phones sold were non-smart.

The UK mobile industry is losing up to £140 million a year on premium rate fraud, according to BillingScore.

It says network operators take around 30% from billing charges to cover fraud and bad debt, which means the cost of fraud affects all the players in the mobile industry, including SMS wholesalers, aggregators, content providers, retailers and consumers.

In this week's edition of The Fonecast we catch up with Bob Sweetlove of HSC. He tells us the secret of winning a Mobile News Award - HSC picked up the 'best airtime distributor' prize earlier this month - and discusses some of the current trends in distribution.

Plus, as usual, we take a look at all the big news stories that affect the UK mobile industry… from developments with the BlackBerry PlayBook to a brand new mobile payment service.