ABI Research has been busy number-crunching figures from 2012. Hot on the heels of its cameraphone calculations comes a new report looking at 4G devices.

It reckons 103 million 4G LTE mobile devices were shipped in 2012.

The UK leads the world when it comes to mobile data, internet shopping and catch-up TV. That’s the conclusion of Ofcom’s seventh International Communications Market Report, which looked at the availability, adoption, price and use of broadband, fixed-line telephone, mobile, TV, radio and postal services in 16 major countries.

58% of UK adults had a smartphone - one of the highest penetration figures worldwide - while 19% had a tablet device.

EE has confirmed details of the 17 UK towns and cities that are next on its list for 4G mobile phone service.

It says 4G will be launched in Bradford, Chelmsford, Coventry, Doncaster, Dudley, Leicester, Luton, Newport, Reading, Rotherham, St Albans, Sunderland, Sutton Coldfield, Walsall, Watford, West Bromwich and Wolverhampton during the first three months of 2013.

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is offering mobile networks an unrivalled opportunity to dramatically increase their connection figures. At the moment, over 100 million M2M-enabled devices - from vending machines to smoke alarms - are providing information automatically, with mobile networks carrying the majority of this traffic

Jürgen Hase, Vice President of the M2M Competence Center at Deutsche Telekom and Chairman of the M2M Alliance, offers his M2M predictions for 2013.

Mark Bridge writes:

We started last week with a 20th birthday party for the SMS text message, which was first used as an alternative Christmas card by Neil Papworth in 1992. Since then, mobile data has been transformed from the familiar dit-dit-dit dah-dah dit-dit-dit of Nokia phones to non-stop internet connectivity on smart devices.