Market research company iSuppli says 79.9% of mobile phones shipped in the last quarter of 2011 – 318.3 million devices – will include GPS functionality. That's up from 56.1% in the first quarter of 2009.

The company says smartphones are taking over from dedicated sat-nav devices as the major platform for navigation. By 2014, usage of navigation-equipped smartphones is expected to exceed that of personal navigation devices.

Earlier this month ABI Research predicted there'd be 5 billion mobile phones worldwide by the end of the year… yet a few days later Ericsson estimated there were already 5 million mobiles.

Now the GSMA – one of the mobile industry's global trade associations – has confirmed the 5 billion figure, putting its weight behind recent figures from Wireless Intelligence.

Mobile video services – including video telephony, video messaging, video sharing, video-on-demand and VoD downloads – will only generate around $121 million this year... but the market will be worth $2 billion worldwide in 2013, according to the latest report from ABI Research.

Earlier this year, figures from RAJAR Ltd (Radio Joint Audience Research) showed that 13% of UK adults had listened to the radio via mobile phone. 54% of these selected the station using an FM preset, while 14% ran an app for a specific radio station.

Now, new research has revealed that 20% of smartphone owners - 1.4 million people – have downloaded a radio app, with over half of them (53%) using the application at least once a week. These figures are part of RAJAR's latest MIDAS (Measurement of Internet Delivered Audio Services) survey.

Mobile telecom author and commentator Tomi Ahonen has published a lengthy blog post covering smartphone segmentation: which people use smartphones - and why they use them.

In it, he anticipates around 35% growth in smartphone shipments this year (excluding Japan), with most growth coming from lower-priced handsets. Headline figures include...