Ofcom has announced the companies that have applied to bid in the UK’s 4G mobile spectrum auction, which will start in January next year.

There are seven companies bidding to operate 4G mobile services in the UK.

Photography pioneer Eastman Kodak Company has arranged a deal that’ll see a consortium of companies paying around $525 million to buy and license over a thousand of its patents, including its digital imaging patent portfolio.

The consortium, which has been organised by Intellectual Ventures and RPX Corporation, is believed to contain Adobe Systems, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Fujifilm, Google, HTC, Huawei, Microsoft, Research in Motion, Samsung and Shutterfly.

It’s reported that Samsung is no longer seeking a ban on the sale of Apple products in the UK and a number of other countries across Europe.

Samsung was claiming that Apple had used a number of its ‘standard essential’ wireless technology patents without permission, while Apple said Samsung hadn’t offered to license the patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

​Smartphones are still eating into the market share of portable consumer electronics devices, according to a new report from ABI Research.

Annual shipments of digital cameras are expected to fall by over 11% worldwide compared with last year - and by almost 20% in North America. Meanwhile, shipments of handheld game players are expected to drop by 4% worldwide year-on-year and by nearly 13% in the North American market.

It's the last podcast of 2012, so we're making some predictions about the mobile industry in 2013... and looking back to the forecasts we made twelve months ago..

Should we expect a renaissance at BlackBerry?  Is it the beginning of the end for SMS?  Will smartphones keep getting bigger?  Will the number of UK networks get smaller?