Mark Bridge writes:

“He knows if you’ve been bad or good...”

You don’t need to be Santa Claus to appreciate that RIM’s quarterly results have marked a disappointing end to a disappointing year. Yes, the company’s sold millions of BlackBerry phones - but PlayBook sales haven’t been good, its new OS is delayed and its market share appears to be falling. You could argue that 2012 is a make-or-break year for Research In Motion... or at least for its current management.

Mobile music discovers service Shazam has been taking a look back at 2011 and predicting the music artists to watch in 2012.

The service, which enables consumers to identify tunes using their mobile phones, has analysed customer data to create a list of the music acts it thinks are most likely to succeed next year.

We're squeezing plenty of news into this week's podcast, starting with a warning about so-called 'unlimited' data tariffs and ending with a new online gallery that hopes to put art into smartphones.

Mark Bridge writes:

Having read some of last week’s headlines, you might think the UK’s Communication Ombudsman has told mobile phone networks not to describe their data tariffs as ‘unlimited’ unless they really are. However, what’s actually happened is that one of the UK’s communication ombudsmen (ombudspeople?) has asked mobile operators to be clear about any limits, to stop unexpectedly high bills from building up and to tell customers before they exceed any limit. Better than nothing but hardly earth-shattering.

Music discovery service Shazam is rolling out its LyricPlay feature across all its free and paid apps for iOS and Android devices.

After Shazam has identified a song that’s playing, LyricPlay displays the song’s lyrics in time with the music.