Orange's move into mobile contactless services has continued with the launch of the Samsung Wave 578. It's an NFC-equipped handset running Samsung’s bada 1.1 operating system.

The Samsung Wave 578 will appear first on Orange networks in Spain, Poland and France before being rolled out to other European countries. However, Orange UK won't be offering this particular device.

Digital security company Gemalto has announced a new service called Facebook for SIM. It embeds Facebook in a SIM card, enabling mobile network operators to offer the service to customers without a data connection.

Participating networks can offer the service free for a trial period before introducing a flat-rate subscription charge.

The GSMA has announced the winners of its Mobile App Challenges competitions.

The Brand App Challenge, the Band App Audition and the mWomen Base of Pyramid App Challenge were aimed at the developer community, with winners being chosen for their creativity as well as their ability to address the criteria set by the Challenge partners.

A report from Informa Telecoms & Media has revealed that deployments of femtocells have more than doubled in the past 12 months.

Most femtocells were supplied for residential use, although almost a third were in businesses - a dramatic increase from 12 months ago when the company recorded no non-residential deployments.

Earlier this week Qualcomm announced a new quad-core Snapdragon chipset for next-generation tablets and mobile computing devices. The flagship chipset - the APQ8064 based on the 'Krait' micro-architecture code - will achieve speeds of up to 2.5GHz per core.

It's expected to offer 12-times the available performance as well as 75% lower power than the first generation of Snapdragon processors.