Smartphone maker plans exit after ban on secure communications sees demand for ‘unfettered access’ to all customer information

Smartphone and secure communications company BlackBerry will pull out of Pakistan by the end of the year over government intrusions into user privacy.

The Pakistani government has banned the use of the company’s BlackBerry Enterprise servers, which provide encrypted data and communications services to BlackBerry mobile phones.

I couldn’t get a signal and immediately cancelled my contract … then £690 was taken from my account

Last month I started a 24-month Refresh contract with O2 to provide an iPhone 6s. It quickly became clear that I hardly had any 4G coverage at home, at work or during my commute, so I cancelled the contract during the cooling-off period. I sent back the phone and the contract was terminated.

I then went on holiday, but on my return I received a letter claiming that I owed O2 £690 for the phone. It later agreed this was a mistake and that I should ignore the letter. A few days later it simply took £690 from me by direct debit.

Smartphone technology has increased the opportunities for casual sex and led to a spike in HIV infections among teenagers in Asia, researchers find

United Nations research has found the growing use of mobile dating apps by young gay men is a major factor in a new HIV epidemic among teenagers in Asia, the Guardian can reveal.

The report uncovered a surge of HIV infections among 10-19 years olds in the Asia-Pacific region, where more than half of the world’s 1.2 billion adolescents live.

Related: Asia's Aids epidemic needs urgent action to prevent even more deaths

Related: More than 15m people on life-saving HIV drugs, report says

Related: The portraits that told the truth about Aids – in pictures

Related: World Health Organisation alters HIV treatment guidelines

Related: Nearly two thirds of mobile dating app users are men

A New York company is providing Indonesian fishermen with a cheap mobile network solution it believes could bridge the digital divide globally.

Local fishing communities in Indonesia are beset by a multitude of connected challenges, from illegal fishing to declining fish populations to their own personal safety in the country’s turbulent seas.

But a New York based telecoms company called Tone believes mobile network technology can solve these problems by getting fishermen in remote communities connected to the Internet through an initiative called mFish. Scaled up, they believe their model could address the problem of unsustainable and illegal fishing globally, as well as being applied in many other contexts.

Without ARM, the iPhone and other smartphones wouldn’t work. Hardly anyone knows it – and that’s just how Cambridge’s ‘Silicon Fen’ company likes it

In a loose collection of offices on an underwhelming business park outside of Cambridge sits Britain’s most successful technology company, ARM. You’ve probably never heard of it, but ARM’s designs are at the heart of the iPhone and nearly every other modern smartphone. It has fingers in almost every other area of technology, from fitness trackers to server farms. It records profit margins that analysts have described as “impossible” (in a good way), and goes a long way to helping justify the “Silicon Fen” label sometimes applied to Cambridge’s tech scene. So how did one company get so successful without anyone really noticing? And, more importantly, what does ARM actually do?

Here was a processor which had been designed by postgraduate students, yet was competitive with the leading offerings

What's in a phone one day ends up in a high-speed broadband router a decade later, and ARM carries on getting paid

Why speak face to face when you can put it all in a text? Oliver Burkeman on reviving the lost art of real-time communication

Young people today, along with their Snapchat and their selfies and their sexting, apparently engage in a practice known as “phubbing”. According to Sherry Turkle, the American sociologist of digital life, this involves maintaining eye contact with one person while text-messaging another. “My students tell me they do it all the time and that it’s not that hard,” she writes in her new book, Reclaiming Conversation. I nearly fell out of my wingback chair into my bowl of Werther’s Originals.

Surely kids aren’t incapable of concentrating on one other human being face to face? But I’m a hypocrite: the main reason I don’t text while looking at someone else is just that I’d be terrible at it. Instead, I am always drifting away from a live conversation to check my iPhone under the table, or in the bathroom. When I see someone typing instead of interacting with someone at the supermarket checkout, I wince at the rudeness, because I’d never do that myself, unless it were really urgent… and yet it often does feel really urgent, so I do. Turkle’s thesis, in short, rings troublingly true: we’re more connected than ever, yet we talk – really talk – less and less.

If face-to-face conversation is dying then it has something to do with our fear of feeling vulnerable

Those potentially uncomfortable conversations are what make life meaningful

Keep clear of crowded high streets by shopping from your phone, with some of the best smartphone and tablet apps

It’s not that many years since the idea of shopping on your phone – or “m-commerce” as the jargon of the time put it – was laughed at by many experts. Who would actually buy stuff from that little device in their pockets? As it turns out, lots of people.

Smartphones and tablets may never completely replace the utter hell visceral thrills of barging your way round crowded high-street stores with 17 bags in hand, but with a bit of planning, your mobile devices can spare you the hard work.

Does privacy protection have to get in the way of usability in technology? Not if the two talk to each other, writes Danny Bradbury

Angela Sasse really dislikes long passwords. The professor of human-centred technology heads up the Information Security Group at University College London and spends a lot of her time thinking about how we can make our computers and software both usable and safe. It certainly isn’t by making people remember long passwords, she said.

“In reality that means people stop using services, or work around the mechanism,” she said, blaming those who build the applications for not thinking smarter. “It’s bad design. The problem is that they don’t go back to ask what other protection goals there are – and then consider different ways of managing it.”

Related: Security v usability: cracking the workplace password problem

Credit cards are pretty good at usable security; most people just don’t worry about it.

Regime orders mobile operator to add a two to dialling code 191, to mark year of Kim Il-sung’s birth in 1912. Daily NK reports

A major phone provider in North Korea has been ordered by authorities to change its mobile numbers to something a little more nationalistic.

As part of a propaganda campaign to celebrate Kim Il-sung’s birth in 1912, mobile operator Koryolink has added an extra two to the standard inland region code 191, so that all citizens will be commemorating the countrys founding father when they make a call, according to sources in the capital..

Related: Calling comrade Kim: dos and don’ts of using a mobile phone in North Korea

New York district attorney report argues Google and Apple should give law enforcement access to user smartphone data reveals court order system

Google and Apple will unlock smartphones and tablets when ordered to do so by a court, if the devices are not encrypted, a report from the Manhattan district attorney’s office has revealed.

The report, which details methods for extracting information from smartphones and other Android or iOS devices for law enforcement purposes when the owner does not give permission, explains that Apple can reset a locked phone with physical access to the device and Google can do similar remotely.

Tablet use is also on the rise with half the country’s population expected to own one before New Year as density of mobile devices hit an all time high

By 2018 two-thirds of Britons will own a smartphone and be an avid tablet user, according to new research.

The surge in popularity of portable devices to consume TV, video and other media shows no signs of abating, according to media agency ZenithOptimedia’s New Media Forecast.

As phones grow to become an overwhelming majority of traffic, content has become increasingly aimed at playing the numbers game

The internet was meant to be an amazing engine for invention and diversification in media. With the barriers to entry toppling, anybody could become a publisher, and, thanks to the blog revolution, thousands of people did. In the mid-2000s, especially, the dream of web-based nanopublishing was alive and well: if “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” as AJ Liebling famously said, then suddenly hundreds of millions of people had a printing press at their fingertips. Arianna Huffington, and her investors, made a small fortune from aggregating what those people had to say: “self expression is the new entertainment,” she said, and she wasn’t wrong.

And then came smartphones.

Startup, in partnership with UN-Water initiative, wants to get people messaging and playing games on the loo

Mobile app Pooductive sounds like a silly gimmick: a smartphone app for messaging and playing games with strangers while sitting on the toilet.

However, the app has a more serious aim: raising awareness of the 2.4 billion people in the world who do not have access to improved sanitation and clean water.

We can watch HD films on the train and play games in VR headsets but there’s a hitch – motion sickness

When we come to define the overarching feeling of the early part of the 21st century, it may come down to one word: queasiness. Some of the most exciting advances in technology – virtual reality, wearable tech, superfast smartphones and 3D films and operating systems – may all be scuppered by a basic human weakness: motion sickness.

“If you walk into a room, you see the visual input that shows us we’re moving, and our vestibular system, the organs of balance, tell us we’re moving, [as does] the perception from your muscles and bones,” says Dr Cyriel Diels, human factors specialist at the Centre for Mobility and Transport at Coventry University. “Below deck on a ship, you are physically moving, but because you are moving with the boat, the visual field seems to be stationary. The two seem to conflict. Your body responds with motion sickness: vomiting, feeling dizzy.”

Possibly inspired by singer Adele (possibly not), Samsung is bringing a new flip-phone model to the market

We all owe Adele an apology. After the internet mercilessly took the piss out of the flip-phone she used in her video for Hello (a decision the director said was thought through – “it’s so distracting to see an iPhone in a movie”), news has emerged that Samsung is releasing a flip model.

Buy Adele An Upgrade For Her Flip Phone #RejectedKickstarterFund http://pic.twitter.com/4PkKF2sokz

Latest Taiwanese Android smartphone apes the design of Apple while failing to quite live up to the high standards set by competitors

HTC’s latest One A9 smartphone looks and feels like an iPhone and runs the latest version of Android, but is that a compelling package?

The One A9 is a new direction for HTC, sitting below its flagship One M9 but with a price, materials and design typically associated with the top end.

Pros: well made, feels great, good screen, fingerprint scanner, microSD card slot, Android 6.0 Marshmallow

Cons: processor can choke on intensive activities, camera not quite as good as competitors, looks like an iPhone

When it comes to smartphones, does size matter? As phablet screens grow ever larger, here’s our look at some of the more modest-sized devices on the market

This year has been the best yet for smartphones, with more useful features, better designs and much improved software. But it’s also been the year which has proved top experiences don’t have to cost top dollar and good smartphones don’t have to have massive screens.

Here’s a quick look five of the best smartphones available that won’t stretch your hand.

Huawei’s quick-charging lithium-ion batteries power up 10 times faster than regular batteries by using new technique

A smartphone battery that lasts longer than a day might be out of reach of most people for the moment, but a large one that charges to 48% in five minutes is on the way.

Huawei’s new fast-charging battery is capable of charging 10 times faster than that of normal lithium ion batteries and uses a new electrode design, according to the company.

Talk to trees in an augmented reality treasure hunt or help the king and queen of Scentopia defeat the evil Weedo in a hands-on digital art park in Southend. Don’t forget your smartphone

Step into NetPark, the invisible art gallery, where there is absolutely nothing to see – unless you want to. Tucked away in Southend-on-Sea, the “world’s first digital art park” is quietly opening its nonexistent doors. On hearing this claim of a global first, people may be incredulous. But the gallery’s creators are sure: this is the one and only time a Wi-Fi network has been built specifically to house a curated art collection – and further, a collection created specifically for that space.
NetPark is the latest project by arts initiative Metal, which consists of GPS-located art to experience via a free “industrial-strength” wireless signal. Signs at all the main gates of Chalkwell Park direct visitors to the website, from where they can download apps on to their smartphones or tablets. Each one reveals a different digital artwork.

This combination of public space and public digital space creates a third plane in which art can be metaphorically hung. “The intervention is invisible but all-pervasive,” says Malcolm Garrett, one of the project’s founders. “You can build up an infinite amount of layers in any place without changing it.” Which is lucky because NetPark’s owners are nothing if not ambitious. Colette Bailey, Metal’s artistic director, sees the space like any gallery: “We will commission new work, we can show temporary work, we can have event-based digital work.” And as in any other gallery, public tours are available, with tablet computers available to borrow free of charge.

Once a smartphone leader, BlackBerry’s failure to recognize the rise of mobile browsing nearly sunk the firm. Superior security, it hopes, will key its survival

The CEO of troubled smartphone maker BlackBerry has blamed the company’s declining fortunes on a failure to deal with the “speed of change” in the industry, but claimed the company had pulled itself back “from the edge of death”.

John Chen, who took over as BlackBerry CEO in November 2013, admitted that it had once seen itself at the top of the smartphone race, but now finds itself now at the bottom.

Forget about today’s market. The more important thing is what do you believe that the market beyond looks like