Mark Bridge writes:

I’m not the first person to point out that mobile phone patent battles are raging all around us. They’ve been going on for years.

However, the topic of FRAND patents - those designated as ‘industry standards’ and therefore required to be licensed on Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory terms - has become an increasingly newsworthy topic.

In the last couple of weeks we’ve reported on an EC investigation into Samsung’s licensing of mobile patents and a Motorola/Apple legal battle that involves FRAND licensing.

Two flaws in the Google Wallet payment service have recently been revealed.

The Zvelo security blog discovered that a ‘rooted’ Google Nexus S could have the encrypted PIN code broken if the phone was stolen, while The Smartphone Champ found that Google Wallet would retain payment card details if the app was reset.

In this week’s podcast from The Fonecast we’re talking about Facebook’s stock market plans, Motorola’s legal battle with Apple, a handful of quarterly results and Google’s new app watchdog.

As usual, you can listen to the programme on our website audio player, via iTunes, by using our RSS feed or by downloading the MP3.

Three and a half years ago, Google launched its Chrome web browser for desktop and laptop computers.

It’s now introduced a beta version of Chrome for Android-powered mobile devices, although it’ll only run on phones or tablets that use Android ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ version 4.0.

Google has revealed details of a behind-the-scenes security service called ‘Bouncer’.

It automatically scans applications in the Android Market to identify whether they are likely to behave maliciously when installed on a user’s smartphone.