Recycling firms have agreed a code of practice to try to identify when stolen mobile phones are being offered for sale to them.

About 100,000 stolen handsets worth £4m are believed to be sold on each year.

As mobiles blocked from UK networks can still be used abroad, thieves sell stolen handsets to recycling firms which export many handsets.

Under the code, companies must check phones against a national database and report any stolen ones to police.

Recycling companies encourage people to send in their old, unwanted phones in exchange for money - on average about £40. The handsets are then resold elsewhere, often in developing countries.

Mobile phone operator Vodafone has launched what it says is the "lowest-cost mobile phone on Earth".

The Vodafone 150, unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, will sell for "below $15" (£10) and is aimed at the developing world.

It will initially be launched in India, Turkey and eight African countries including Lesotho, Kenya and Ghana.

The UN predicts that mobile ownership will reach 5bn in 2010, with most growth in the developing world.

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) said that demand was being driven by people using their phones to access banking and mobile health services.

"Even the simplest, low-end mobile phone can do so much to improve healthcare in the developing world," said ITU secretary general Dr Hamadoun Toure.

Three new design innovations to tackle mobile phone crime, including a device that locks a phone and alerts the owner if it is taken away from them, have been unveiled today. The prototypes were as part of the Mobile Phone Security Challenge, an initiative from the Home Office. The aim of was to make phones more secure and to prevent unauthorised use of mobiles. This could potentially become a big problem, as phones become facilitators for day-to-day electronic payments.

The UK's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has asked the European Commission (EC) for the right to review the planned merger of France Telecom's Orange UK and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile UK.

The EC has until 1 March to make a decision.

The OFT said if the request is granted, the matter will be referred to the UK Competition Commission for thorough investigation.

The joint venture threatens to affect competition in mobile telecommunications in the UK, the OFT said. The number of mobile operators in the UK would be reduced from five to four.

The merger between Orange and T-Mobile would create the UK's largest mobile operator, with around 29 million customers, or a 37% share of the market.

The gloves are off, folks. The groups supporting the Symbian operating system have obviously recognised the very real threat posed by Google's Android operating system and have decided to do something about it, by making the Symbian OS completely free and open source.

But that's not all, Symbian Foundation has declared that the Symbian OS is far more 'open' than its Android competitor which, it declares, is not as open as Google likes to make out. 'About a third of the Android code base is open and nothing more. And what is open is a collection of middleware. Everything else is closed or proprietary,' said Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation. He added: 'Anyone can influence (the Symbian) roadmap or contribute to new features.'

Gazing into the future with Gartner, what can we expect in the world of tech?

The research firm recently revealed its forecast for 2010 and beyond, envisioning a world where more of us live and breathe online and more often through our smartphones than our PCs.

Although the predictions target Gartner's corporate clients, most will certainly affect smaller businesses and consumers too.

"As organizations make plans to navigate the economic recovery and prepare for the return to growth, our predictions for 2010 focus on the impact of critical changes in the balance of control and power in IT," Brian Gammage, a Gartner vice president, said in a statement. "With greater financial and regulatory oversight for all IT investment decisions, few organizations will be unaffected."

With virtualization and cloud computing gaining more of a grip on the business world, up to 20 percent of companies will own no IT assets of their own by 2012, predicts Gartner. Also driving this future will be the trend of employees using their own personal PCs on the job. As technology ownership shifts toward third parties, Gartner expects that IT budgets will likely dwindle or be refocused onto more critical and strategic projects. Support staff may also need to be cut or retrained to focus on the new business requirements.

O2, Orange and DoCoMo are all apparently stocking up on micro SIMs suitable for Apple's iPad, though taking a sharp knife to an existing SIM is always an option.

Quite why Apple decided to use the third form factor for the iPad's 3G module isn't clear, but anyone planning to stuff an existing SIM into an iPad will need to be prepared to slice off some edges to make it fit.

The company would combine its advanced voice recognition know-how with its text translation service to create a mobile phone that acts as an instant interpreter.

Head of translation services Franz Och said: "We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time.

"Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that's what we're working on."

Mobile operator 3 is working to change people's perception of its network as 'weak', chief executive Kevin Russell has said.

Russell, speaking at a briefing on Tuesday, said people's poor experiences with early 3G handsets had combined with the recent, sudden explosion in mobile data use to create a bad impression of the operator's network. He said 3 would make "big changes" this year to address that problem.

"The number-one challenge at 3 would be the legacy perception of our network [as] weak," Russell said, adding that the perception was "probably deserved in many ways".

Russell described 3's download speeds in the first half of 2009 as "poor", adding that the company had been "absorbing the ramp-up in terms of mobile broadband". A year ago, fewer than a million of 3's customers were using the internet on their handsets — that figure is now roughly 2.2 million, he said.

Mobile Choice puts O2, Orange and Vodafone up against each other in a battle of speed, to see who has the quickest internet connection.

With Vodafone, Orange and Tesco Mobile (runs on O2's network) all joining O2 in selling the Apple iPhone 3GS, consumers are facing a dilemma of which operator to side with. We therefore decided to pit them all against each other to see which one boasted the fastest internet speeds. The conditions were all the same, a central London location with full 3G reception on each handset.

LG has reported a 32% year on year increase in handset shipments for the fourth quarter ended 30 December.

The manufacturer shipped 33.9 million handsets in the quarter, up 32% year on year and up 7% on Q3.

Annual shipments rose to 117.9 million units in 2009 from 100.7 million in 2008, as growth in North America, Europe and emerging markets offset a weaker home market in Korea.

The company’s mobile communications division posted overall sales down 7.4% from one year earlier to KRW 4.16tn. Operating profit fell to KRW 67bn from KRW 215bn one year earlier.