Basingstoke-based mobile ticketing specialist Trinity Mobile has seen its highest-ever year-on-year growth for the delivery of mobile boarding passes to airline passengers. In 2009 it recorded over 600,000 mobile boarding passes being sent to passengers via mobile text messages, up from just 50,000 in 2008. Trinity Mobile says the 1200% year-on-year increase was driven almost entirely by customer choice, with passengers simply choosing to receive a bar-coded mobile boarding pass instead of printing details at home.

There’s a European flavour to this week’s podcast, with the team talking about the EC’s approval of the Orange/T-Mobile merger and new EU protection against unexpectedly high ‘roaming’ data charges.

Iain, James and Mark also discuss all the other top mobile industry stories from the last seven days, covering everything from O2’s annual results to comedy controlled by SMS.

Mark Bridge writes:

It’s not just me, is it?  The mobile industry really has gone a bit litigation crazy.

The Fonecast takes an in-depth look at the week's headlines. T-Mobile and Orange are given the go-ahead to merge their UK businesses, consumers get more protection when using mobile data in Europe, O2 announces its UK results and Skype drops support for Windows Mobile phones.

Apple has filed a lawsuit against HTC, claiming that HTC has infringed a number of Apple patents related to the iPhone's user interface, underlying architecture and hardware.

The lawsuit has been filed with the US District Court in Delaware and also with the US International Trade Commission, which has the power to block imports of HTC devices if it rules in Apple's favour.