Private communications specialist Silent Circle and open source handset producer Geeksphone have announced a joint venture to produce a security-focussed smartphone.

The new device is called Blackphone and runs a custom version of Android.

Bedfordshire Police have issued a statement warning mobile phone users that calling 999 won’t charge their mobile phones.

Operators answering emergency calls in the force control room have also received calls from people who believed that ringing 999 and then hanging up would boost their battery life. This ‘urban myth’ has been circulating for several months.

Analyst firm Ovum has published its mobile payment and mobile advertising predictions for this year.

Ovum expects continued technology and service innovation, notably around location-based applications, in the mobile payments space in 2014. However, there will be increasing complexity within the mobile payments ecosystem this year, and on-going challenges around the business model for digital wallet services.

HP has announced its first smartphone devices since discontinuing the Palm webOS range in 2011.

One has a 6-inch screen - the HP Slate6 VoiceTab - and there’s also a HP Slate7 VoiceTab with a 7-inch screen. Both run Android 4.2 on a quad-core processor, are equipped with stereo loudspeakers and have a 5 megapixel camera on the back.

New figures from ABI Research show that shipments of SIM cards fell by 193 million to 4.94 billion units in 2013, which is a year-on-year decline of 3.8%.

The main factor blamed for this drop was the mobile telecom market in Asia, where SIM card shipments fell below 2011 levels with a 10% decrease.