Nokia has just reported its first quarter financial results. Sales and profits were both up year-on-year, with net sales reaching 9.5 billion Euro. Device shipments were up 16% year-on-year to 107.8 million units, with sales of 'converged' devices – smartphones and mobile-enabled computers – up 57%. In addition, 10 million Nokia smartphone users have downloaded the company's free sat-nav service since January.

However, CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo warned that the company continues to face tough competition at the high end of its mobile device portfolio and challenging market conditions on the infrastructure side.

Virgin Media, which offers a 'quad-play' combination of broadband, TV, fixed-line phone and mobile services in the UK, has completed a three-year refinancing programme. It says this has fundamentally changed the capital structure of its business, providing greater flexibility and scope for the use of any surplus future cash flow.

Mark Bridge writes:

Being an optimistic cynic isn’t easy. But, hey, I do my best.

Which is why I smiled benignly when I heard this week that WiFi provider The Cloud was offering a free app to O2 iPhone users. It's a simple tool called FastConnect and it'll make it easy for those O2 customers to find free WiFi access via hotspots powered by (you guessed it!) The Cloud.

The first-ever Orange Business Index, which looks at the previous year's trends in business mobile communications, shows that average data use across all Orange UK business customers increased by over 150% during 2009. The highest increase was among small business, which saw a 290% increase in data consumption to a monthly average of 16.3MB per user. Medium-sized businesses experienced a 226% increase; a monthly average of 10.9MB per user. Much of this increase in mobile data usage has been driven by the rise in popularity of mobile email and web browsing.