Pocket Picks round-up: 5th March - Xoom already overclocked to 1.5GHz, Galaxy S will feast on Gingerbread, new Android virus discovered outside market, malware discovered in market

Welcome back to another edition of the Pocket Picks round-up!

This week we’ve skilfully avoided all mention of the iPad 2 and instead been looking almost exclusively at Google’s Android platform - because we’re different like that - ranging from the good side of the mobile OS to the bad.

Let’s start with the good news.

A leaked version of Android Gingerbread (2.3.2) for the Samsung Galaxy S has appeared online, leading to speculation that an upgrade to one of the best Android phones of 2010 is likely to be on the cards very soon.

The leaked version weighs in at over a gig and appears to be the fully working version of Gingerbread with all the usual Samsung gubbins on top.

Despite the apparently finished state of this version of the OS, there is a suspicion that the South Korean company may want to hold back its deployment until after its successor, the Galaxy S II (which comes pre-loaded with Gingerbread), is released, especially after the T-Mobile incident earlier in the year.

One of the best things about Android is how talented coders can take off the hood and poke around inside with relative ease when compared to the closed systems like iOS and Windows Phone 7.

So it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise to find that the creator of SetCPU, Coolbho3000, has already managed to overclock the recently released Motorola Xoom by up to 50 per cent without causing the system to either crash or overheat in the process.

While it’ll be interesting to see the impact on the battery that a 1.5Ghz dual-core CPU will have, it does mean that Xoom owners can claim the high ground over the iPad 2 when it comes to speed.

The flipside for the relative freedom of the OS is the unwelcome appearance of viruses on the platform, with two major stories breaking just in the past week.

The first shouldn’t be of too much concern to the law-abiding Android users among you, as it's (so far) not been seen in the Market.

It’s instead the dirty pirates that should be sweating, as a trojan snappily entitled Android.Pjapps by Symantec has been discovered lurking in the illegal version of Misty Windows (note: not the Android Market version).

The Trojan signs up infected handsets to premium text numbers and blocks said texts from being received so you know nothing about them until your statement drops through the letterbox.

Wipe that smug smile off your face, legal downloaders, because you’re not getting away scott-free either.

That’s because Malware has been spotted in over 50 apps published by just three dodgy-sounding developers - Myournet, Kingmall2010, and we20090202.

Google has been quick to remove the suspected apps from the Marketplace, but reports suggest that up to 50,000 users may now have the malware - which gathers data from the user’s handset - sitting on their systems.

Anti-virus companies are currently working on a removal tool.