A new study says South Africans and Kenyans are Africa’s most active Twitter users and that the social networking site is rapidly becoming a key information tool across the continent.

Researchers analyzed more than 11.5 million tweets from specific locations in Africa during the last three months of 2011.

Happy New Year!  We’re back with our first podcast of 2012, containing the biggest mobile industry news headlines from the past couple of weeks. That means we’re talking about everything from tweeting in court to AT&T, from BlackBerry takeovers to (yet more) patent battles.

As always, you can listen to this week’s edition of The Fonecast on our website audio player, via iTunes, by subscribing to our RSS feed or by downloading the MP3.

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.

The Lord Chief Justice of England & Wales, Lord Judge, has issued guidance about the use of live text-based communications in court.

It covers mobile email and social media, including Twitter, when sent silently from mobile phones and internet-enabled laptops.

Mobile privacy and security company Whisper Systems, which is probably best known for creating encryption applications that were used by protesters in Egypt earlier this year, has been acquired by Twitter.

Country-specific versions of the RedPhone and TextSecure apps were created in February following the original US-only release.