Mark Bridge writes:

With just three working days for many people in the UK last week, you’d be forgiven for thinking nothing much would happen. However, you’d be wrong.

Telefónica UK and Vodafone UK announced plans to pool the basic parts of their network infrastructure in an expansion of their existing ‘Cornerstone’ partnership. It means that Vodafone and O2 will be using the same base stations for 2G, 3G and 4G service across the country. Responsibility is being split down the middle; Telefónica UK will take care of the east, while Vodafone UK will have the west. I imagine the dividing line running conveniently between the headquarters buildings in Slough and Newbury respectively.

Business-to-business mobile phone dealer A1 Comms, which also runs online retailers BuyMobilePhones.net and Mobileshop.com, is reported to have acquired the Go Mobile franchise business from Shebang Technologies. The franchise operation was set up last year and branded as the Purple Partnership.

A1 Comms, which was founded in 1997 and is based in Derbyshire, currently employs 75 people. The company had previous run a number of high-street shops before focussing on its B2B and online businesses.

Ericsson has published a new Traffic and Market Report that predicts 85% of the world’s population will have 3G coverage by 2017. In addition, 50% of the world’s population will be covered by 4G LTE networks.

Smartphone ownership will have reached around three billion in 2017, compared to 700 million in 2011, and there’ll be approaching nine billion mobile subscriptions worldwide. Ericsson has calculated there are currently 6.2 billion mobile phones worldwide.

Android will remain the most-shipped smartphone operating system for the next five years according to the International Data Corporation, although Android’s market share will start to decline after 2012. Smartphone shipments are forecast to grow 38.8% year-on-year to 686 million units in 2012.

IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker predicts a total of almost 1.8 billion mobile phones being shipped this year, a 4% increase from 2011’s total. This overall slow growth is mainly due to a decline in feature phone shipments. However, feature phones are still expected to comprise 61.6% of the total mobile phone market this year.

Google has acquired Quickoffice, which produces mobile office productivity applications for Android, Apple iOS and Symbian handsets.

Quickoffice enables users to access Microsoft Office documents and update them from a mobile device.