Mark Bridge writes:

It’s a smartphone autumn, as prophesied a few weeks ago by the Carphone Warehouse and many others. The frenzy of big-name announcements led by Samsung at Berlin’s IFA has given way to stand-alone media presentations from Nokia, Motorola and Amazon.

Vodafone UK has launched a new set of ‘pay monthly’ tariffs called Vodafone Red, which offer unlimited voice calls and unlimited text messaging. There are also larger mobile data allowances than previous tariffs.

Customers can benefit from unlimited UK calls and texts plus 1GB of internet usage from £29 per month with the standard Red tariff. Alternatively, Red Data from £34 per month includes 2GB of data with unlimited calls and SMS text messaging.

We start this week's edition of The Fonecast with confirmation that 4G coverage will be launched in the UK this year, thanks to Everything Everywhere.

However, all's not well in the world of mobile retail - as mystery shopping by a consumer organisation reports widespread misinformation from sales staff.

UK telephone and broadband company TalkTalk has launched a new mobile phone service for its customers. These offers, which build on the company’s existing virtual network agreement with Vodafone UK, are only open to consumers who’ve chosen one of the company’s fixed-line services.

TalkTalk Mobile promises handsets that are completely free and tariffs that start from £5 a month.

Three UK is relaunching its SIM-only tariffs, describing the new deals as ‘built for the internet’.

Pricing starts from £6.90 per month for a 12-month minimum term contract that includes 200 minutes of calls, 5000 text messages and 500MB of data. The deal offers a guarantee of no surprise UK ‘out of bundle’ data charges when the allowance is used.