Market research company iSuppli says 79.9% of mobile phones shipped in the last quarter of 2011 – 318.3 million devices – will include GPS functionality. That's up from 56.1% in the first quarter of 2009.

The company says smartphones are taking over from dedicated sat-nav devices as the major platform for navigation. By 2014, usage of navigation-equipped smartphones is expected to exceed that of personal navigation devices.

Mark Bridge writes:

Mention 'anonymity' to anyone these days and it's pretty likely they'll start talking about Facebook. Maybe Google Street View, maybe RF chips in passports... but probably Facebook.

This 'over sharing' of personal information is a far cry from the situation a few years ago. Once, no-one on the internet really admitted who they were. That New Yorker cartoon - "Nobody knows you're a dog" - wasn't far off the truth. You couldn't tell a dungeonmaster from a librarian when they were online.

Earlier this month ABI Research predicted there'd be 5 billion mobile phones worldwide by the end of the year… yet a few days later Ericsson estimated there were already 5 million mobiles.

Now the GSMA – one of the mobile industry's global trade associations – has confirmed the 5 billion figure, putting its weight behind recent figures from Wireless Intelligence.

Apple held a press conference yesterday evening in an attempt to draw a line under recent 'antennagate' complaints. The new iPhone 4 has been criticised for a dramatic drop in signal strength when it's held in a certain way; a problem the company says is a combination of software fault – signal strength wasn't being displayed accurately – and a hardware design issue that affects all mobile phones.

Mobile video services – including video telephony, video messaging, video sharing, video-on-demand and VoD downloads – will only generate around $121 million this year... but the market will be worth $2 billion worldwide in 2013, according to the latest report from ABI Research.