Pocket Picks Round-up: June 25th - New Nokia phones, NFC gains more traction in UK, webOS getting cosy with Skype

In recent weeks, we’ve been mainly focusing on Android and (to a lesser extent) iPhone news here on the Pocket Picks round-up, but this week we’ve cast our net a little wider.

Two Nokia stories dominate the week - one from the ghost of Nokia’s past in the form of its first MeeGo smartphone, the N9, while the other comes from the ghost of Nokia’s future in the guise of the first official sighting of the company’s Windows Phone.

NFC appears to be gaining traction, with three of the UK’s major networks all teaming up to deliver the service in the future, while Yahoo and HP are both trying something a little different to get consumers’ attention away from better-known rivals in their respective fields.

An interesting week, then, especially if you love/hate the Finnish giants. We’ll start with them first.

It’s likely to be the first and (possibly) the last time we see the Intel-Nokia OS, MeeGo, on a smartphone, but that doesn’t mean the N9 is looking like it's dead in the water just yet.

The physical design of the phone, at least, looks great - Nokia has taken a ‘no buttons at all’ approach to the front of the handset, which is dominated by the almost end-to-end 3.9-inch screen.

A curved back and 8-megapixel camera look pretty good, and the internals consisting of a Texas Instruments OMAP 3630 1GHz CPU and Imagination Technologies SGX530 aren’t too shabby either.

First Nokia Windows Phone revealed

Despite polite calls for people to turn off their cameras at a private presentation by CEO of Nokia, Stephen Elop, it appears one site's high quality cameras were 'not spotted', giving us all a glimpse at what Nokia is pinning to its mast for the next year - its first Windows Phone handset.

The phone, code-named ‘Sea Ray’, appears to use the same form factor as the N9, with a ‘pillow-shaped’ back and gorilla glass making the screen extra hard (and shiny).

The handset isn’t expected to arrive on shelves until at least the end of the year (most likely the start of 2012 for most countries in the world), but it will ship with Mango pre-installed (the upcoming version of the OS with full multi-tasking and lots of other helpful additions).

Yup, Yahoo! is still going - maybe not as strong as it was back in the early days of the internet, when its directories were pretty much the cutting edge of information technology, but it’s still thinking up new ways of one-upping the competition.

Having been almost completely stomped over by Google’s search engine powers in the past, the company has now beaten the big ‘G’ to the punch and developed a new site capable of sifting through various app stores on Android and iPhone.

A useful function, I’m sure you’ll agree. Expect a similar feature to pop up on other search engines soon, though, as the competition catches back up.

The NFC bandwagon continues a-rolling in the UK, with the confirmation that three of the UK’s networks have agreed to team up and create one place for retailers, banks, and advertisers to go through in order to get their systems up and running.

Ironically, the group of three - Vodafone, O2, and Everything Everywhere - doesn’t include Three. I find that ironic, anyway.

NFC, for those new to this mobile tech gig, is a system used to enable phones to make transactions without needing to resort to whipping out your physical wallet.

It’s been picking up steam across the globe for the past year or so now, and will likely be one of the buzzwords you’ll hear a lot of the OS makers and phone manufacturers using for the next generation of smartphones.

We’re still waiting to see how much of a splash HP can make with its acquisition of Palm - its Touchpad and Pre 3 due to land soon in the UK - but leaked screenshots seem to suggest that the OS has an - as yet unheard of - feature up its sleeve for release.

German website webosblog.de has found images that hint at a possible Skype integration for the new OS, allowing for both internet voice and video calls from the handset/tablet running the OS.

If true, it could well annoy the phone networks, who’d rather you didn’t clog up their already congested data services and paid through your nose for voice calls instead, but it’s another feather in webOS’s bow.