O2 UK has created a new international roaming deal for customers with a ‘pay monthly’ contract. O2 Travel will launch in July 2012, providing customers with fixed charges when they travel in Europe.

Voice calls will use minutes from the customer’s standard tariff allowance with a one-off 50p charge per call. Data usage will be charged at 25MB per day for £1.99.

The European Union’s new charges for mobile ‘roaming’ when abroad have been agreed by the European parliament and will become law from 1st July 2012. Overall, consumers are expected to save 75% across roaming calls, text messages and data compared with 2007 prices.

As well as reduced costs for voice calls and SMS messages, new price caps for mobile data will be introduced.

This week’s podcast from The Fonecast covers all the top stories from the past seven days. We’re talking about RIM’s plans for its BlackBerry business, the EC’s plans for ‘roaming’ tariffs, T-Mobile’s price-rise plans and much more.

You can listen to the programme on our website audio player, via iTunes, by using our RSS feed or by downloading the MP3.

Iain Graham and James Rosewell look back at the top mobile industry stories from the past seven days - including RIM's BlackBerry plans and the EC's new roaming regulations.

Mark Bridge writes:

It’s always a relief when April Fool’s Day doesn’t fall on a work day, isn’t it?  Still, that didn’t stop the jokes. Even though the mobile industry traditionally tends to head to the pub for a roast dinner and a pint on Sunday, there was many a prank in the morning of April 1st.

Our friends at 51Degrees.mobi revealed left-handed device detection, Google prepared to run mobile ads on phones with dials, Phones 4U introduced Gnomes 4U femtocells, Nokia made a Windows Phone device out of ice… and so on.