Photography pioneer Eastman Kodak Company has arranged a deal that’ll see a consortium of companies paying around $525 million to buy and license over a thousand of its patents, including its digital imaging patent portfolio.

The consortium, which has been organised by Intellectual Ventures and RPX Corporation, is believed to contain Adobe Systems, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Fujifilm, Google, HTC, Huawei, Microsoft, Research in Motion, Samsung and Shutterfly.

Smartphone penetration across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom hit 54.6% during the three-month period from August to the end of October 2012, according to the comScore MobiLens service. It found that Spain had the highest smartphone penetration in Europe (63.2% of mobile phone users) followed by the UK at 62.3%.

Spain also had the most dramatic growth, up almost 15 percentage points from last year.

In this week's podcast we find BlackBerry facing a legal battle, SMS spammers suffering a big fine and EE boosting its 4G data tariffs.

We're also talking about a new iPhone camera accessory from musician will.i.am, rich cross-network communications in Spain, free WiFi in Yorkshire and the year's most-popular mobile search terms.

Mark Bridge writes:

As the end of the year approaches, so the volume of ‘real news’ tends to reduce as it’s replaced by annual reviews and seasonal surveys. We’ll be joining in with our predictions for 2013 in a few weeks’ time... but first, here’s a look back at the biggest stories from the past seven days.

Earlier this year RIM introduced a touchscreen smartphone called the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha. It ran a modified version of the BlackBerry PlayBook OS and was designed to help developers test their BlackBerry 10 apps before the platform is launched officially in January 2013.

RIM has now added a second developer device; the BlackBerry Dev Alpha C.