Finnish company Jolla, which launched in July with plans to release a smartphone with a user interface based on the MeeGo platform, has demonstrated its user interface and the ‘Sailfish’ OS at the Slush start-up conference in Helsinki.

In addition it’s announced a forthcoming software development kit for Sailfish.

Orange Vallée, the part of France Telecom-Orange responsible for innovation and development, has released a free cross-network mobile app that enables users to make free voice calls, send messages and receive voicemail messages.

It’s called Libon and is available as an iOS app in 90 countries including the UK; an Android version is planned for early next year.

Kevin Deal, Vice President of Aerospace & Defence at IFS North America, writes:

It is difficult to believe that the idea of a hand-held mobile phone was an alien concept only a few short decades ago. From brick-sized analogue devices to wafer thin smartphones with processing capabilities comparable to those of laptops, new technology is constantly pushing the boundaries of what we can expect from our phones. And, in a reverse of the normal pattern of technology innovation, a development driven by consumers is set to have an important impact on aerospace and defence (A&D).

Figures from mobile security company AdaptiveMobile suggest that 148.43 million spam texts are received by British consumers every month, with 14.2 million people being bothered by SMS spam at least once a week.

The study, which was carried out last month by YouGov, found that consumers rated unwanted text messages as the most annoying form of spam (41%) ahead of email (36%) and direct mail through the letterbox (17%).

ABI Research says 2013 will see NFC leaving its ‘trial phase’, with 285 million NFC-enabled devices expected to be shipped worldwide.

That figure will have increased almost seven-fold by 2017, when a total of 1.95 billion NFC devices are forecast to be shipped.