A new study suggests that online impulse purchases in the UK may have increased by £1.1 billion a year as a result of the shopping convenience offered by smartphones and tablet computers.

The figures from Rackspace Hosting indicate that 48% of UK adults who use smartphones or tablets for online shopping admit they’re buying things on impulse more frequently by using their handheld devices, resulting in an average £329 extra spent per person per year.

Mark Bridge writes:

If you want to understand mobile gaming, from the commercial side of game development to the current trends in game design, Sandy Duncan is a great person to talk to.

He spent over 16 years at Microsoft, initially working with PC manufacturers and latterly setting up the company’s Xbox game console business in Europe. He’s an enthusiastic gamer. And, for the last six years, he’s been CEO of YoYo Games.

I started my conversation with Sandy by asking him why there was so much interest in mobile gaming when PCs and dedicated consoles were always going to be more powerful than smartphones.

Mark Bridge writes:

Oooh, a new phone. It’s running a powerful new processor, it has a large edge-to-edge toughened glass display and its model name bears the familiar ‘i’ suffix. Hang on a moment. Suffix?  Yes, suffix. This isn’t a new Apple device but Motorola Mobility’s first Intel-powered Android smartphone, the RAZR i.

A new report from Informa Telecoms & Media says M2M growth is lagging behind industry expectations, with 132 million mobile connections in June and $5.68 billion (£3.5 billion) revenue generated in the previous 12 months.

That’s the equivalent of one M2M connection for every 50 ‘human’ connections and $1 of M2M revenue for every $200 of service revenue.

A new report from Pyramid Research expects worldwide 4G LTE handset sales to reach 490.5 million in 2017, which is a compound annual growth rate of 73% over this year’s predicted figures.

It means LTE handsets will account for 20.7% of all handset sales in five years’ time.