Sony Ericsson is showing visitors to this year’s CES trade show what a Sony smartphone is expected to look like. Assuming, of course, all goes to plan with Sony’s plans to buy Ericsson out of the joint venture.

The Sony Xperia S is the first smartphone from the ‘next generation’ Xperia NXT series and is expected to go on sale worldwide in the next month or two.

The CES consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas opens to the public today following a media-only day yesterday.

Although next month’s Mobile World Congress takes away some of the focus on mobile devices, there’s still a lot of attention paid to handset announcements.

Total royalty payments for GSM, WCDMA and LTE technology on mobile phones are approaching $20 billion per year, according to a new report from ABI Research.

It says the amount paid in licensing fees by manufacturers will continue to grow for the next few years but is starting to flatten out.

Mark Bridge writes:

Having read some of last week’s headlines, you might think the UK’s Communication Ombudsman has told mobile phone networks not to describe their data tariffs as ‘unlimited’ unless they really are. However, what’s actually happened is that one of the UK’s communication ombudsmen (ombudspeople?) has asked mobile operators to be clear about any limits, to stop unexpectedly high bills from building up and to tell customers before they exceed any limit. Better than nothing but hardly earth-shattering.

This week we're covering a wide range of news stories, from Adobe's mobile Flash plans to the iZettle payment app. We discuss eBay's plea to the UK government, a new UK 4G trial, a potential new threat to iPhones... and much more.