Clothing and homewear retailer Next has started selling its own-brand tablet device. The Next 10-inch Tablet runs the Android operating system with an ARM11 processor, has 2GB of expandable memory and offers WiFi (but not mobile) connectivity. Pricing is £180.00 plus delivery.

Andy Lees, senior vice president of Microsoft's Mobile Communications business, has been promoted to president by company CEO Steve Ballmer. He'd been running the department since earlier this year after Robbie Bach, president of the Entertainment and Devices Division, announced his retirement plans.

Yesterday Microsoft filed a patent infringement action against Motorola that relates to Android-based devices, with the Motorola Droid 2 named as an example in most of the nine claims.

Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Microsoft's Intellectual Property and Licensing team, said "The patents at issue relate to a range of functionality embodied in Motorola’s Android smartphone devices that are essential to the smartphone user experience, including synchronizing email, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power".

The Samsung Mobile Innovator developer forum is discontinuing its Symbian support service from 31st December 2010. The manufacturer remains a member of the Symbian Foundation; last November it said it was committed to a 'multi-OS' strategy after suggestions it was moving away from producing Symbian devices.

A group of researchers from Pennsylvania State University, Duke University and Intel Labs have investigated the behaviour of smartphone applications. After looking at 30 popular Android apps they found that two-thirds of the applications displayed 'suspicious handling' of sensitive data, with half the apps reporting users' locations to advertising servers. In addition, seven applications transmitted the IMEI (serial number) of the phone without any clear consent.