Acer says the first two smartphones of its 2013 line-up will be showcased at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The Acer Liquid E1, which first appeared last month, will be on display alongside the Liquid Z2.

Although last week's Apple iPhone 5 announcement dominated the headlines, there's still plenty more to talk about.

We have a prediction about the billionth Android handset, we look at Acer's cancelled smartphone launch and we discuss the growth of mobile messaging.

It’s reported that Acer has cancelled the launch of a new smartphone in China running the Aliyun cloud-based mobile operating system. Aliyun, which had been developed by the Alibaba Group, is already available on a number of devices from other manufacturers.

Alibaba is quoted as saying Google had told Acer it would terminate its Android-based cooperation and technology licensing if the launch went ahead.

Preliminary figures from the International Data Corporation estimate that worldwide tablet shipments for the second quarter of 2012 reached 25 million units, up 33.6% from the first quarter of 2012 and up 66.2% year-on-year.

Once again, Apple was the largest tablet producer, shipping 17 million iPad devices during the quarter. In fact, all the top four tablet vendors saw year-on-year growth.

PC and mobile manufacturer Acer has announced plans to launch AcerCloud, a secure online service that’ll let users share multimedia and data files between PC and smartphones - even when the main PC is in standby or hibernation mode.

Acer’s ‘Always Connect’ technology will wake a hibernating PC through WiFi, enabling media to be retrieved via a mobile device.