A report from Strategy Analytics shows that Qualcomm continues to lead the market for application processors used in smartphone manufacturing, although its market share has fallen. Not only did Qualcomm lead Q1 2012 in terms of unit shipments, it also took 44% of revenue share.

Overall, the global smartphone application processor market showed 55% year-on-year growth in the first quarter of 2012, reaching $2.47 billion.

Last month Research In Motion was ordered to pay $147.2 million dollars in damages for infringing a mobile device management patent held by US-based Mformation Technologies.

RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server was said to have infringed the patent, which enables companies to update devices ‘over the air’.

A new forecast from ABI Research expects almost 20% of annual smartphone shipments to include facial recognition capabilities by the end of this year.

The technology is already part of the Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean versions of Android, with Samsung’s Galaxy SIII being one of the most high-profile smartphones to feature face recognition technology at the moment.

Virtual mobile network operator giffgaff, which runs on the O2 network and is owned by Telefonica UK, has been found not to have breached the Committee of Advertising Practice’s rules on misleading advertising, substantiation, qualification and exaggeration.

The company’s unlimited mobile internet deal states “there is NO Fair use policy” but a number of customers claimed this was misleading, saying they’d been disconnected for high data usage that was said to be adversely impacting other customers.

Shazam, which was created as a UK-based music identification service using the ‘2580’ short code ten years ago, has reached a new milestone. Customers have now used the service to identify songs and to learn more about television shows and ads over five billion times.

The Shazam app is currently used ten million times a day by a fan base of 225 million people.