Mark Bridge writes:

What a week it was for mobile manufacturers. RIM revealed the BlackBerry 10 platform to its developers, while Samsung announced a new flagship Android phone. Both offer a number of distinctive features, with fans commending them and critics suggesting they didn’t go far enough.

Mark Bridge writes:

This story starts with Mercury One2One and Orange. They were acquired by Deutsche Telekom (which changed One2One’s name to T-Mobile) and France Telecom. Next, Everything Everywhere was created to run the T-Mobile and Orange brands in the UK.

Everything Everywhere has launched the UK’s first live 4G mobile broadband trial in the north of England.

It’s centred on the village of Threlkeld in Cumbria and will involve up to 50 local residents.

The latest quarterly financial results from Everything Everywhere reveal that 71% of ‘pay monthly’ customers now have smartphones; an increase of 14 percentage points from the Q1 2011 figure of 57%.

An increase of 151,000 post-pay customers since the previous quarter, along with a drop of 494,000 prepay users, means that 49% of customers on Orange and T-Mobile UK networks currently have a post-pay contract.

Research carried out by Capital Economics and commissioned by Everything Everywhere shows that the faster download speeds delivered by 4G LTE mobile broadband could add 0.5% to the UK’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the end of the decade - the equivalent of £75 billion.

In addition, 4G in the UK could also create or safeguard 125,000 UK jobs and is expected to drive £5.5 billion of private investment into the UK economy by 2015.