Nokia has appointed Michael Halbherr, who's recently been running the product unit in Nokia's Services business, to the post of executive vice president. As well as being a member of the Nokia Leadership Team he'll now lead a new Nokia Location & Commerce business.

The Location & Commerce business will create new 'social location' products and services while continuing to serve customers of Nokia's NAVTEQ subsidiary.

Last month Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said that software support for Symbian phones would continue until 2016 at the earliest. It's now become clear why he was able to give that date with such confidence.

Nokia and Accenture have published details of their agreement for the outsourcing of Symbian software development and support activities, which was first announced at the end of April.

In The Fonecast this week we talk about mobile payment plans from the 'big three' network operators, a new bill-paying app from Pizza Express, spectrum trading, Nokia's new MeeGo smartphone, RIM's problems and a lot more.

Download this week's show from iTunes - or listen to the podcast by using the audio player on our website.

Mark Bridge writes:

There's more to NFC than mobile payments... and there's more to mobile payments than NFC.

The latest audio accessories from Nokia use 'contactless' NFC technology to speed up Bluetooth connections. Simply touch a compatible Nokia phone against the Play 360° loudspeaker and your music will play through the speaker. There's no need to bother with conventional Bluetooth pairing.

This week's podcast looks at a new mobile payment partnership, the possibility of spectrum sharing, m-commerce at Pizza Express, Nokia's MeeGo device, RIM's problems and the rest of the industry's big news stories.