Mark Bridge writes:

We’re starting the week with breaking (but not entirely unexpected) news that RIM has a new CEO. Just one, not two. We’ll be talking much more about him in Wednesday’s podcast. In fact, RIM’s announcement concludes a week that’s been packed with big names - and big money as well.

Sony Ericsson has published its annual results for 2011, along with separate figures for the final quarter of the financial year.

It’s likely to be the last quarterly report from the joint venture, which is expected to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony within the next few weeks.

Mark Bridge writes:

So that’s CES week over. This year’s show seemed particularly US-centric, given the amount of 4G LTE mobile technology kicking about. Not that the UK isn’t making its own 4G plans; far from it. But let’s start at the beginning...

Sony Ericsson is showing visitors to this year’s CES trade show what a Sony smartphone is expected to look like. Assuming, of course, all goes to plan with Sony’s plans to buy Ericsson out of the joint venture.

The Sony Xperia S is the first smartphone from the ‘next generation’ Xperia NXT series and is expected to go on sale worldwide in the next month or two.

This week sees Iain taking a rare break from The Fonecast, so it’s up to Mark and James to hold the fort. They start with Nokia’s Windows Phone announcement before moving on to Visa Europe’s big investment in mobile payments, Sony’s split with Ericsson, Samsung’s smartphone success, a new design-led BlackBerry and some wide-ranging patent news from Apple.

Listen to the programme on our website audio player, via iTunes, by subscribing to our RSS feed or by downloading the MP3.