Pocket Picks roundup: October 15th - BlackBerry woes, iOS 5 released, Galaxy S III rumours, and Nexus Prime launch re-scheduled

Welcome back to another Pocket Picks roundup, and - boy - wasn't this week a bad one for Research in Motion?

Having built a reputation as both the choice of enterprise and well-priced alternative for young adults, RIM almost blew all that goodwill over the course of three days thanks to a massive failure in its email and messaging systems.

It was always an risk that something like this would happen, of course. Unlike the other manufacturers, RIM routes all communications through its encryption systems before sending - great for business security, not so great for minimising the effects of a server crash/structural issue.

Other companies didn’t get off scott-free this week, either, as this handy round-up is about to reveal...

The whole BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) debacle came to a head on Thursday as RIM’s CEO and co-founder Mike Lazaridis took the unprecedented step of recording a message for the company’s customers on YouTube, apologising for the system failures.

Lazaridis described the circumstances surrounding the prolonged debacle, which is believed to have originated in Slough, and stressed that the company was working hard to restore the system to “normal service levels”.

He also apologised for the lack of communication from the company during the affair, which has seen RIM’s PR company Good Relations take a lot of flak.

While many specialist sites were quick to judge the iPhone 4S a disappointment last week, it doesn’t seem like the general public agreed.

The recently released handset managed to destroy Apple records by reaching 1 million pre-orders in just one day. To put the number into perspective, that’s almost twice as much as the iPhone 4 - a major redesign of shape and specs - managed (600,000)

Of course, since the iPhone 4 launched, millions more people have joined iOS, which may account to some degree for the increased demand for the latest iPhone. There’s also the fact that there was half a year’s extra waiting time than normal for the 4S, which would have seen more existing customers' contracts running out prior to the phone’s release.

As this article is written on the Friday, we can’t say for certain, but if the 4S launch isn’t significantly more successful than previous iPhones then we’ll eat our Galaxy S.

Apple has lifted the lid on iOS 5 this week, allowing those with third-generation phones and iPods (as well as both versions of the iPad) to get their hands on over 200 changes to the existing iOS.

It wasn’t all plain sailing, though. The servers were absolutely hammered on the first night of release (as you all should have guessed) leading to countless error messages and the occasional blanking of data from devices for early adopters.

As the time of publication these issues appear to have been resolved, so if you plug your iOS device into iTunes now you should have the new bits and bobs like Newsstand and the notification bar before you can say “I hear RIM was having a few problems this week”.

The worst kept secret in the mobile world today has now been re-scheduled for the 19th of October, if anonymous sources talking to Engadget are anything to go by.

The Nexus Prime is the second handset to come from the Google-Samsung partnership after the Nexus S, and will be the new ‘baseline’ Android phone.

Along with the rumoured 320dpi screen, the Prime is expected to be the first handset to launch with Android 4.0 (a.k.a. Ice Cream Sandwich), which should see the OS unite both phones and tablets together (as opposed to the current situation in which Honeycomb is tablet-only).

We’ll no doubt have more details on the handset in next week’s round-up.

It’s pretty obvious that there will be a new Galaxy S at some point - Samsung isn’t likely to ditch one of its best-known and best-selling high-end smartphones just because of a few (hundred) patent battles, but we’re a little doubtful about the validity of this particular rumour.

An anonymous source (him again!) has sent Phandroid a slide from an internal presentation that apparently shows the next Galaxy S sitting alongside other Samsung phones.

The specs of this fabled device are listed as being a dual-core 1.8GHz Exynos CPU with 2GB of RAM, 12MP camera, and a 4.6-inch S-AMOLED HD + display. It also runs Ice Cream Sandwich.

I suspect these specs are mostly wishful thinking, but we’ll have our ear to the ground when the phone inevitably turns up.