20-megapixel camera phones, a Nokia that can read, and iPhone becomes best selling mobile in US

Kia Ora!

My dad was in the army for a good many years, and he used to bring home these bloody awful cans of self-heating beans. There was also coffee, soup and a variety of indeterminate 'edibles' that even a hardened SAS stalwart would struggle to get past their nose. But the cans themselves were really fascinating. Nescafe tried a similar trick a while back, with self-heating cans of coffee, but they seem to have vanished again. Anyway, when I saw a story dredged up by our Pocket Picks research Marines about a smartphone that makes coffee, I was put in mind of those indigestible army beans and immediately believed the concept to be viable.

Turns out to just be an advert, but I reckon if the army was doing it in the '60s with tins of poisonous soup, surely there ought to be some kind of USB-powered contemporary alternative by now?

Especially considering announcements at a Sony Ericsson conference, where the electronics giant waxed ultra-lyrical about the imminent advancements for mobile phone technology. It was suggested at the Swedish conference that by 2012 we'll be carrying phones with 12– to 20-megapixel cameras on their backs, full HD video recording and 100+ Mbps data speeds. If it all comes true, it's a pretty good reason for us to look forward to getting a bit older.

And as extravagant as these claims sound, HTC seems to be quite in accord with Sony Ericsson's thinking. We normally like to save this week's hot handsets until the end, but the HTC MAX 4G fits in perfectly with this line of thought. Apparently this WiMAX/GSM integrated handset will be capable of surfing the internet at ultra-high speeds, and comes equipped with a 3.8-inch TFT-LCD flat touchscreen with WVGA 800x480 resolution, a 528MHz Processor, GPS, WiFi, a five-megapixel auto-focus camera, a secondary VGA camera for video calling, integrated VoIP and an accelerometer. The future is here, eh?

Continuing this theme of innovative hardware, it seems Nokia quietly introduced a superbly fascinating feature in its E71 and E66 handsets – optical character recognition using the phone's camera. A couple of PDAs tried this out a while back, for scanning business cards directly into your contacts list, and the Multiscanner package also features this incredibly useful function. It's also happy to read typed/printed pages, apparently, and convert them into text documents. For the mobile office types, a function like this could become utterly invaluable, if only to cut out the irksome task of typing people's phone numbers in manually.

Couple the Multiscanner with the real possibility of multiple operating systems on a single handset, and the PDA really has been replaced by the mobile phone. Crazy as this sounds, the fact that VMWare (which makes software to run 'virtual machines' on your PC) has just bought out Trango Virtual Processors could make this a reality. Trango is a 'mobile virtualisation specialist', and offers the possibility for adapted VMWare applications to create entirely separate profiles on a single mobile (not unlike user accounts on Windows) – which could go as far as loading different operating systems for different users. More than anything, this would prove to be an important technological feat, as much as a useful one, but it could lead on to some remarkably adaptable mobile applications.

Which brings us nicely to this week's new hardware rundown, and there's some great ones (including the HTC MAX 4G mentioned above) rearing their displays. First is a new social network-centric handset from 3, which, although it doesn't seem to be the much fabled Faceboook phone we've all been waiting for, promises to provide tight integration between the unit's contacts book and popular networking sites – like Facebook.

But if sexy looking handsets are your think, Nokia's bizarrely titled Wahoo phone should get your juices flowing. Similar in basic appearance to the Motorola V3, this super-sleek, ultra-slim folding handset also features a BlackBerry-style half QWERTY keypad along with two screens (one on the outside) and full 3G. News on this beauty is sparse at the moment, but the picture speaks at least 500 words, eh?

And as we've not spoken about the iPhone at all this week, we'll give it final mention in celebration of it becoming the most sold handset in the US – finally overtaking the afore mentioned Motorola RAZR V3. A happy Apple is always good news, what?

Kia Ora!