Google is selling its Motorola Mobility mobile phone business to Lenovo for $2.91 billion (£1.76bn). Lenovo, which already produces Android smartphones, will maintain Motorola as a separate brand.

Google will keep most of the Motorola Mobility patent portfolio, although it will license these to Lenovo.

Samsung Electronics says it’s signed a ‘preferred partner’ agreement that’ll see Carphone Warehouse operating over 60 Samsung stand-alone stores across Europe.

It follows the opening of three Carphone Warehouse-run Samsung stores in Spain last year.

We start this week's podcast by looking at the new Ofcom rules that should end unexpected mid-contract price rises for UK mobile phone customers.

There's also talk about misleading mobile network advertising, patent agreements, takeover bids, satellite broadband and 4G data usage... plus a curious patent application from Google.

Apple has announced financial results for the first quarter of its 2014 financial year; the three-month period that ended on 28th December 2013.

Quarterly revenue reached a record $57.6 billion (£34.7 billion) with quarterly net profit of $13.1 billion (£7.9 billion). That’s a 5.7% year-on-year increase in revenue, with profit largely unchanged from the same quarter a year ago.

Figures from the International Data Corporation (IDC) show annual smartphone shipments passing the milestone of one billion units in 2013. A new report from the market intelligence company shows worldwide smartphone shipments reaching 1,004.2 million smartphones in 2013, up 38.4% from the 2012 total of 725.3 million units.

Smartphone shipments in 2011 were 494.4 million units, which means these shipments have doubled in the past two years.