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.

The final weeks leading up to Christmas saw a dip in handset sales, despite some operators reporting record sales for the period, according to data from analyst firm GfK.

The figures revealed that sales had risen by 0.5% to 633,000 units by week 49 of last year compared with 2008, but they then showed a sudden dip in the last two weeks. According to one senior industry source, the slowdown reflected some operators reaching the end of their budgets.

Despite this, some retailers reported record sales for the Christmas period in 2009. Orange said it had been 'the best Christmas ever' for mobile retail. A spokeswoman added: 'While footfall was down over the period due to the snow, it did not matter as Christmas started early for us thanks to a strong device portfolio and Christmas Gift Box.'

Meanwhile, Tesco said it had been a 'great Christmas' in terms of the number of activations and iPhone sales, and also across the branded business.

The head of O2 has apologised to customers who could not make phone calls because the mobile operator’s London network was overwhelmed by bandwidth-hungry smartphones.

Ronan Dunne told the Financial Times he was disappointed with O2’s network performance in London since the summer. But the UK’s largest mobile phone operator was making good progress towards fixing the problems, he said.

O2 ran into significant network difficulties in the capital during the second half of 2009 as customers with smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone ramped up their use of applications that repeatedly pull data off the internet at short intervals.

A German computer scientist has published details of the secret code used to protect the conversations of more than 4bn mobile phone users.

Karsten Nohl, working with other experts, has spent the past five months cracking the algorithm used to encrypt calls using GSM technology.

GSM is the most popular standard for mobile networks around the world.

The work could allow anyone - including criminals - to eavesdrop on private phone conversations.

Mr Nohl told the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin that the work showed that GSM security was "inadequate".

"We are trying to inform people about this widespread vulnerability," he told BBC News.

"We hope to create some additional pressure and demand from customers for better encryption."

There has been no substantial change in the number of adult brain tumours since mobile phone usage sharply increased in the mid-1990s, Danish scientists say.

The Danish Cancer Society looked at the rates of brain tumours among 20 to 79 year olds from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.

They found that trends in cancer rates had not altered from the period before mobiles were introduced.