The Samsung Galaxy S III set pre-order records at the Carphone Warehouse, and a Sammo exec claimed the super-smartphone had racked up nine million pre-orders across the globe.

It’ll come as no surprise, then, to hear that the Samsung Galaxy S III is – according to Phones 4u – the biggest selling phone of the year.

Transport for London (TfL) has officially flicked the switch on the Virgin Media-run free Wi-Fi service which is set to offer free Wi-Fi access throughout the London 2012 Olympics over the summer.

BBC journalist Rory Clellan-Jones sent the first landmark tweet over the system, which marks the most significant step yet towards getting full mobile access up and running on the Tube.

Well that's just rude. It's been what – three days? – since we shone the spotlight on the Oppo Finder and its record-breaking 6.65mm skinniness, and here we have another anorexic smartphone kicking it right back into anonymity.

It's called the ZTE Athena, and has just been snapped in some Mr Blurrycam action over in China with a side-on profile measuring a decidedly waifish 6.2mm.

I'm sick and tired of NFC, to be honest. For all the talk, the publicity, the PR, the hype and everything else, there are too many competing systems and not enough people actually using any of them. Still.

What we need is for something like PayPal to hit the high street – you know, something most of us already know and use? Well, wouldyoubelieveit, it just has! If you do your shopping at Coast, Oasis or Warehouse, that is.

It may be slightly less glamorous, but the budget end of the smartphone market moves just as quickly as the pricey end of the scale.

Take the newly announced Vodafone Smart II. For just £70 – that's a tenner less than last year's model – you can now jump from a 2.8in screen to a 3.2-incher, plus get some Android 2.3 Gingerbread action and a jump from 600MHz to 800MHz of processing action.

A high-profile product launch wouldn’t be the same without some sort of blunder. We’ve had antennagate, roasting hot iPads with “4G”, the white iPhone 4 fiasco… waitaminute, those were all Apple.

Not to be outdone, Samsung’s Galaxy S III dropped this week, and the pebble blue edition appears to have stage fright. However, a trickle of units has popped up in – of all places – Vietnam.

In the world of tablets and smartphones, we’re very much focused on Google’s Android, but there’s also Chrome OS ticking away in web-focused fashion on desktops and laptops.

In a recent word-fest, Google suggests there will be convergence between Android and Chrome OS, however there’s no chance we’ll see a tablet based purely on the latter.

Check out this Nokia Lumia 710 deal @ Carphone Warehouse

The Nokia Lumia 710 has come down in price yet again, now going for £99.95 at the Carphone Warehouse. The offer doesn’t appear to be available online; the ad advises to call 0800 087 0870.

Minimum top up of £10 required.

“Discovered by the Germans in 1904, they named it San Diego, which of course in German means ‘a whale’s vagina’.”

We first met the Intel-fuelled Orange Santa Clara at Mobile World Congress in February, and earlier this month we were told: “the full name will be announced at launch”. Well, it’s launch time, buddy, and you’re looking at the Orange San Diego.

Rear cameras have been getting plenty of love recently, but what about the front-facing chaps? You can typically expect block/blur-o-vision during video calls at the moment, and that suits me fine; I have no desire to count your nose hairs.

However, OmniVision wants to see your face in full hideous detail, and will be able to do so soon, with the OV2722.

So, remember the Archos Child Pad tablet designed especially 4 kidz that we wrote about all of three months ago? Course you do.

You'll also no doubt know that those hordes of tab-hungry sprogs have inexplicably been kept waiting all this time thanks to Archos announcing the Child Pad, then pretty much doing nothing at all since then. Well, seems like the wait is over, and the Child Pad is ready to go! Again!

The jury's still out on the whole stylus thing, even though Samsung has followed up on the 5in Galaxy Note smartphone with a double-sized Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet.

But Apple, it seems, isn't taking any chances, and has just applied for a patent of its own that could see the iPad 4 tablet sporting a stylus of its own, called – obviously – the iPen.

The Nokia 808 Pureview was originally tipped for a May release, then April, then May again, but more recently we were told we’d have to wait till June to get our hands on the super-snapper.

Now an update on Clove’s Nokia 808 PureView page suggests it’s been delayed once again.

Get this white Samsung Galaxy S III deal @ mobiles.co.uk

Sweet deal for the just released Samsung Galaxy S III (in white) here. You can grab it for nowt up front, and £26PM on a 24-month contract comes to… *checks calculator*… £624.

The Nexus tablet rumours have been going into overdrive of late. However, specifics have been scarce, so much so that rumourmongers couldn’t agree if the Nexus honours were going to Asus or Samsung.

Well, some sexy new benchmark results appear to confirm – among other things – that Taiwanese manufacturer Asus will captain the Nexus tablet ship.

Windows Phone 7 handsets all sing from a fairly rigid hymn sheet, and as such the first wave of devices are all very much much of a muchness.

However, Finnish manufacturer Nokia, which proudly declared Windows Phone its “primary smartphone platform” back in February 2011, has released no less than four Lumia handsets since October last year. Is there really any need? That’s what I’m here to answer.

We’re (presumably) on the verge of learning more about iOS 6 at the 2012 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), and one of the features we’ve been hearing about ahead of time is the spanking new Apple Maps app.

It’s goodbye to the trusty Google back end, and hello to 3D goodness.

Martin has already written about the spanking new Xperia Go this morning, but the Sony fun doesn’t end there. There’s a second “stylish, durable and water resistant” smartphone in the form of the Sony Xperia Acro S.  Er, not to be confused with the Xperia Arc S.

While the Sony Xperia Go is a relatively modest chap, the Sony Xperia Acro S is quite possibly the highest-specced tough guy we’ve laid eyes on to date.

Sony has announced the Xperia go, its latest Android smartphone that it says has been built “to resist life's challenges”.

By that it means a broad swathe of ruggedness by way of scratch-resistant glass that can track wet fingers, and overall IP67 certification for dust and water resistance. Sadly, it also seems to have resisted the challenge to get Android 4.0 on board from launch: Gingerbread only, m'afraid.