A new report from Alcatel-Lucent suggests that more than 11.6 million mobile devices are infected with malware. It’s based on figures from Alcatel-Lucent’s Kindsight subsidiary, which is able to measure the impact of network traffic.

Mobile malware infections were said to be up by 20% in 2013, with 4G LTE devices the most likely to be infected.

Mark Bridge writes:

Recent figures released by ABI Research have prompted the market intelligence company to ask whether Google is losing control of the Android ecosystem.

At first glance, Android dominated smartphone shipments for the final quarter of 2013. ABI Research says 77% of the 287 million smartphones shipped in Q4 2013 were running Android.

We start this week's podcast by looking at the new Ofcom rules that should end unexpected mid-contract price rises for UK mobile phone customers.

There's also talk about misleading mobile network advertising, patent agreements, takeover bids, satellite broadband and 4G data usage... plus a curious patent application from Google.

Figures from the International Data Corporation (IDC) show annual smartphone shipments passing the milestone of one billion units in 2013. A new report from the market intelligence company shows worldwide smartphone shipments reaching 1,004.2 million smartphones in 2013, up 38.4% from the 2012 total of 725.3 million units.

Smartphone shipments in 2011 were 494.4 million units, which means these shipments have doubled in the past two years.

Robin Kent writes:

After initially suffering from slow pick up by consumers, 4G has begun to accelerate, and is now well on the way to the forecasted one billion subscribers by 2017. In fact EE, owner of T-Mobile and Orange, recently announced the addition of 493,000 new 4G customers to its existing base of 1.2 million.