It’s been rumoured for a few weeks... but Porsche Design and Research In Motion have now confirmed they’ll be producing a new luxury mobile phone.

The new device is officially called the Porsche Design P’9981 smartphone from BlackBerry - and will feature a stainless steel frame, leather back cover and distinctive sculpted QWERTY keyboard.

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 and BlackBerry Curve 9360 smartphones have been announced as the first SIM-based NFC smartphones to be certified by MasterCard Worldwide as PayPass-approved devices.

It means that any bank issuing MasterCard PayPass credit or debit cards will be able to deploy MasterCard PayPass-enabled accounts to the SIM card of these smartphones.

Research In Motion has delayed the release of the next version of its BlackBerry PlayBook operating system until next year.

It also says its BlackBerry Messenger app won’t appear in that release, although the ‘BlackBerry Bridge’ smartphone-to-tablet service will continue to offer BBM access.

comScore has published research from France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom that shows smartphones, tablets and other non-computer web-enabled devices drove 4.6% of total digital traffic in August.

91.4 million people across the five EU countries said they were using smartphones, up 46% from 2010.

This week’s podcast from The Fonecast contains news of two new mobile platforms: Google’s exotically-named Ice Cream Sandwich and the rather more prosaic BlackBerry BBX. We also talk about the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the new Motorola RAZR and an Android-powered cash register from Casio.

As well as all this there’s a discussion about mobile payments, mobile patents, a new mobile-focussed health study and a new way of saying ‘beta’.