Between Samsung having ongoing budgetary woes from cheaper Asian competition, the rise of Xiaomi and Microsoft calling the Lumia 830 an ‘affordable flagship’, 2014 was the year that flagship phones ceased having all the limelight in the smartphone world...

For Qualcomm, the expression ‘it’s tough at the top’ has never been truer in the past few weeks for the company.

I have often expatiated at length on the difficulties that NFC stakeholders face in persuading the public to adopt NFC. They have to have handsets that can NFC payments; they have to know they have handsets that can make NFC payments; they need to know how to use those handsets for NFC payments; they need to be convinced that they should make NFC payments as an alternative to cash or card payments; and so on.

It’s not so long ago that M2M was viewed as the poor relation to standard “human” voice and data services. Now it is firmly on the radar of the operator heavyweights. According to Vodafone, a fifth of businesses globally now have an M2M deployment in place, with 98 per cent already seeing return on investment. 

As the quarterly financial results from technology companies roll in, we are presented with two similar but contrasting visions of the devices market. One is of an expanding market, of an underdog recovering its strength, while the other is of record-breaking sales and exceeded expectations in some places, while trying to ignore its decline in others.

News has emerged today that Hutchison Whampoa is in talks with Telefónica with regards to a potential acquisition of the latter’s subsidiary, UK operator O2. The deal, which is unlikely to be inked for some weeks owing to an exclusivity agreement, is reported to be worth up to $15.3 billion.

After a brief reincarnation as Softcard, it appears that the NFC provider Formerly Known As ISIS (FKAI) is on the point of being jettisoned by its carrier owners and sold to Google.

Well, not entirely but just its current generation. Instead the company will focus on next-generation Glass, with a new team working on its development at Google, under current manager Ivy Ross. However, Google announced that it remained committed to launching the consumer version of Glass. 

The wearable device proliferation of 2014 continued apace at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show, with several device manufacturers showcasing different aesthetics for their devices, and perhaps most tellingly saying ‘wait-and-see’ for releases at MWC (Mobile World Congress) and later this year.

Streaming is king – and Taylor Swift ain’t happy. Actually she is; she just went platinum: and more than half of those copies were sold as physical discs. However, that’s not the place to reach the greatest audience.