Location based Android music, Scottish prisoners jammed and mobile phones as guns

Kia Ora!

Our Pocket Picks research pilgrims kicked off this Thanks Giving week (as our American second cousins, twice removed, like to call it) with news about the new iPhone 2.2 firmware update, which seems like as good a places as any for us to begin with our rundown. Like everything that comes from Apple, 2.2 is feature packed to the point of being bloated and useless, though it's nice to have podcasts return to iTunes, what with Apple apparently forgetting these phones were built on iPod foundations. Bug fixes and an on-off switch for auto-correction will also be welcomed by heavy users, though there's no denying the iPhone's still handcuffed to Apple's egocentric radiator.

Unless you've taken the plunge and jail broken your own property, that is. For those who've discovered the delights of an iPhone that you truly own, it's good to know that the Dev Team released a 2.2 version of QuickPwn practically within hours of Apple's official update. In case you're wondering what all this means, a 'jail broken' iPhone is one that's liberated from iTunes and allows you to run home brew applications, connect to your preferred network and customise your iPhone to suit yourself. You know – things you'd expect to be able to do with your own property when it's not been manufactured by a quite such a self-conscious company.

Like Google, for instance. Google seems to be confident enough in its Android product to not worry too much about people using it to suit their own needs. A new update to the Imeem music application on the G1, for example, now allows you to grab artist and album info on your songs, along with recommendations and even a listing of the most popular tracks in your current location. So wandering into Manchester, for instance, might bring up a list of pumping garage and indie rock tunes, while strolling the wilds of Somerset might encourage Imeem to offer you a virtual mix tape of the Wurzels and the Yetties.

To suggest that such compilations probably ought to be illegal is probably quite reasonable, and it's also a tenuous and flimsy pretext for our next Pocket Picks story about mobile phones being jammed by Scottish jails (man, I could be on Radio 2 with continuity announcements of that quality!). We've heard about the quiet carriages on trains attempting to block radio signals, and it seems Scottish prisons are aiming to stamp them out in the big house, too. Not only is it to become illegal to own, operate or supply a mobile phone to a prisoner, but contraband mobiles are to have their signals jammed to make their ownership a moot point.

Considering the bizarre handset uncovered by Italian police, that's probably no bad thing. This handset is a (reasonably) cleverly disguised .22 calibre pistol, with the aerial acting as a barrel and the trigger being camouflaged as a button. To be fair, you'd stand out in a crowd just for trying to make a call on a retro brick like this, but it's a worrying thought that mobile phones are now being weaponised. If handset manufacturers ever manage to make a battery that lasts longer than 48 hours, we could even be looking at iTazer attachments, or radioactive phones (for making 'dirty' phone calls. Tee hee!). It also brings a whole new meaning to someone putting a contract out on you, eh?

Fortunately, mobile phones are proving to be a force for good as well as evil. While the criminal underclass is distributing Pay As You Go bullets, Motorola has been inadvertently protecting its RAZR handset users from exactly this kind of cellular attack. A Louisiana man was apparently mowing his lawn recently and felt a sharp pain in his chest. No, it wasn't a heart attack brought on by too many cheeseburgers, Coca Cola and vengeful Middle Eastern conflicts – it was a .45 calibre bullet hitting his RAZR mobile phone. The handset actually stopped this random bullet, and it didn't even seem to do a great deal of damage to the phone, rather remarkably.

Assuming this lucky chap is in the market for a new handset, he might not be in much luck this week (that's two first-class tenuous links in a single article! I'm on fire!). There really aren't many new handsets for us to close up the Pocket Picks round-up. Probably the most exciting hardware news is the leaked pictures of the new and thus far elusive Nokia E75, which features a nice big slide-out QWERTY alongside it's ordinary numerical keypad. Tasty.

Also of mild intrigue is the beginnings of a new concept phone from Samsung. After you've finished reading this week's Update, go check out this video of a rather lush, folding OLED display, and let your imagination run wild about what kind of mobile phone a screen like this could conjure up…

Kia Ora!