The latest research from the comScore MobiLens service shows that one in eight European smartphone owners has completed a retail transaction on their mobile phone.

The study, which looked at mobile commerce across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, noted that 19.5 million smartphone users across these ‘EU5’ countries had accessed retail content, with 75% of them conducting and completing a purchase. That’s over 14.5 million mobile shoppers across Europe.

Enterprise mobile security company Good Technology has published its device activation report for the second quarter of 2012. The report, which includes details of the smartphones, tablets and operating systems used by its business customers, shows that Android activations increased in Q2 2012 while iOS activations fell.

Android activations increased to 28.3% overall, while iOS activations dropped from 79.9% in the previous quarter to 70.8%.

Mobile phone coverage in the Channel Tunnel is now available for Eurostar and Le Shuttle customers travelling between France and England. Coverage in the opposite direction - from England to France - is due to be launched by UK network operators later this year.

The northbound service has been introduced by Eurotunnel and French mobile network operators Bouygues Telecom, Orange and SFR. It uses a GSM-P optical fibre system for 2G and 3G connectivity with equipment developed by Alcatel-Lucent.

A new survey released by PopCap Games, which became part of Electronic Arts (EA) in 2011, shows that half of UK and US mobile gamers also use their mobile devices as their primary game platform at home.

50% of the mobile phone and tablet gamers in the survey preferred to use their mobile devices instead of traditional consoles, computers and handheld gaming devices, with tablet-only players showing an even higher preference (57%) for their mobile device.

A new study from ABI Research says the world’s smartphone customers will download about 36 billion apps in 2012, which means the average smartphone user will download almost 37 applications this year. It’s almost 6% up on the 35 apps that an average smartphone subscriber was thought to have downloaded in 2011.

However, the long-term trend is heading in the opposite direction.