HTC America, the US-based part of HTC’s business, has launched a new service called HTC Advantage for new customers.

Anyone buying an HTC One, HTC One mini or HTC One max will now be offered a free one-off cracked screen replacement if it’s needed within the first six months of ownership.

We start this week's report with two new smartphones: a flagship Android device from LG and a dual-boot handset from Geeksphone.

We also talk about the health effects of mobile phones, a new mobile loyalty app, wireless charging, machine-to-machine connections, the purchase of Viber and a recent acquisition by Google.

Vodafone UK says it now has 500,000 customers on its ‘Red 4G’ plans, just six months after launching its 4G mobile phone service.

It’s currently providing 4G service to 36% of the UK population.

The Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme (MTHR), which ran in the UK for 11 years until 2012, has published a final summary of its research projects.

The programme was set up in 2001 following what became known as the ‘Stewart Report’ from the Independent Expert Group on Mobile Phones.

A total of 31 research projects have now been completed as part of the MTHR Programme. They’ve been published in peer-reviewed journals and are also on the MTHR web site.

Research from the GSMA forecasts that the number of machine-to-machine (M2M) connections around the world will reach a quarter of a billion this year.

The figure only refers to SIM-enabled connections that enable mobile data transmission between machines, which excludes smartphones, tablets, eBook readers, dongles, routers and hotspots.