Dr Kevin Curran, Reader in Computer Science at the University of Ulster, joined us during Mobile World Congress to offer his well-informed opinion about trends in mobile technology.

We talked about a wide range of topics, including battery life, disposable tablets, wearables, m-health, 4G fragmentation, connected furniture, M2M security, the rise of video and the IEEE.

We start this week's report with two new smartphones: a flagship Android device from LG and a dual-boot handset from Geeksphone.

We also talk about the health effects of mobile phones, a new mobile loyalty app, wireless charging, machine-to-machine connections, the purchase of Viber and a recent acquisition by Google.

Research from the GSMA forecasts that the number of machine-to-machine (M2M) connections around the world will reach a quarter of a billion this year.

The figure only refers to SIM-enabled connections that enable mobile data transmission between machines, which excludes smartphones, tablets, eBook readers, dongles, routers and hotspots.

Cisco’s Visual Networking Index report, which forecasts mobile data traffic for the next four years, anticipates an almost 11-fold increase in global mobile data from 2013 to 2018.

A total of 190 exabytes of data (190 billion gigabytes) is expected to be consumed on mobile devices in 2018; that’s the equivalent of every person on earth streaming a YouTube video clip every day.

Berg Insight forecasts that the total number of cellular (mobile) machine-to-machine connections in the global retail industry will grow from 18.4 million last year to reach 33.3 million connections in 2018. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 12.6%.

Cellular M2M connections are used on a range of retail devices including Point-of-Sale terminals, ATMs and ticket machines, avoiding the need for a fixed-line data connection.