Orange is planning to launch contactless payments in the second quarter of this year. The new payment system will be installed in the UK, France, Spain and Poland and when in use, will allow NFC equipped smartphones to be used as a mobile wallet to pay for items.
The first device to be made compatible with the service will be the Samsung Wave 578 although NFC and the services wont be just restricted to this particular device. Orange will launch more devices on its network over the coming months and years. [Read more…]
Over at MWC, Google announced that the Android Market now has 150,000 apps available for download. This amount is triple what it was 9 months ago when developers had collectively submitted 50,000 apps in total.
There seems to be plenty of rumors floating around today. The next hints at the next gen MacBook Air getting 3G connectivity built in.
Although we think the Sony NGP (AKA PSP 2) is packed full of features that actually make it very “cool”, we learn now that it could have been better. Sony said in a recent interview that not everything they intended has made it to the PSP 2 so that they could keep the price down to an acceptable level. What that means is that you still will get the NGP you saw a few weeks ago, but had Sony not restricted it to a certain (unknown) price point, it would have been packed with even more features.
As expected, Apple [AAPL] has now launched subscriptions on the App Store. The new subscriptions service allows publishers of content on the app store to set up a regular automated billing cycle of weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly or yearly. The system will use the regular Apple billing system that is already used in the app store. By doing this, it makes it easy for the user to see all subscriptions on a single location and then cancel, edit billing frequency and make other changes when needed.
Filed under unlikely, we hear rumors today that Apple is looking at three prototype versions of the iPhone 5. We have already heard about two of them which include the iPhone mini that has a 2.5 inch screen. The next model I believe is the regular iPhone 5 with a 3.5 inch screen, although other rumors hint at this model having a slightly larger 4 inch screen.
Vodafone has announced that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 will be landing on its network in the UK as an exclusive.
The HTC Revolver was leaked yesterday and from what we can gather, it will be the first smartphone to run the Google Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS. Although Android 3.0 was designed for the tablet, Google has commented that it isn’t restricted to tablets only and that other form factors will also be able to use it.
We’ve already seen two smartphones announced today that are designed heavily to be used with Facebook. These phones are the 
The MORE/REAL Stylus cap has been designed to use with devices such as the iPad, iPhone and any other tablet or smartphone with a capacitive touchscreen. The Stylus Cap is a small cap that comes in three versions with one specific for a brand of pen.
As well as announcing the 
HTC has announced a new tablet device called the HTC Flyer. The Flyer has a 7 inch touchscreen that is also compatible with stylus input. It runs Android 2.4 which is an update to Gingerbread, but still called Gingerbread that brings Android 3.0 Honeycomb elements to the backend.
