iPhones alternatives aplenty, Google peeps through your front room window and is that a projector in your pocket...

Kia Ora!

The theme of this week's Pocket Picks round-up is undeniably one of corporate dick measuring. Not that it's a bad thing for the end user (so to speak), as this kind of public grandstanding forces the manufacturers to offer more carrot and less stick to keep themselves in the news.

It seems you can't be considered a noteworthy mobile manufacturer at the moment unless you're offering an 'iPhone alternative'. Again, this might make for some tedious showboating from the big boys, but it'll hopefully result in some pretty exciting choices for us. First and foremost is the HTC Dream – or, moreover, the Android OS it happens to be carrying. Google, T-Mobile and HTC have been waving a big flag all week about the handset's impending unveiling next Tuesday, which is pretty exciting, even if it is becoming old news before it's even happened.

Not wanting to be left out of the rife operating system talk, Sony Ericsson felt it necessary to kick Microsoft in the shins by casually dropping into conversation that it's sexy new Xperia X1 handset (which will run on Windows Mobile) won't be "tied into any specific technical platform". Not a terrific move, insulating itself from the popular OS, especially considering the lacklustre demonstration video it released for the handset – enough to bore even the most devoted technophile and SE lover.

All this attention on the new level of smartphones was bound to rub off on one of the stalwarts of the industry, BlackBerry. Although a lot is happening on the BlackBerry front, the nearest it could drum up for hot news this week was a dedicated MySpace application that will make use of push messaging to keep you up to date on the social network front. That said, the BlackBerry has secured itself a distinct niche in the mobile business market that even the iPhone (with its gaming visage) is struggling to budge, so good luck to the fat handset brigade on that one.

And, of course, that brings us to the iPhone, which ate up user's home bandwidth with yet another firmware update this week while simultaneously reducing user options by getting a bit heavy handed with independent application developers. Almost immediately, however, the jail busters over at the Dev Team were ready to break people's iPhones and iPod touch's free with a 2.1 update to the Pwnage Tool.

As difficult as Apple might try to make it for them, the undeniably attractive device landed Steve Jobs and co the Stuff Magazine Gadget of the Year Award, seeing the public vote the iPhone 3G as this year's hottest tech; fending off the likes of the PlayStation 3 and Asus Eee PC lappy.

Although 2008 might have a line drawn under it for gadget awards, this doesn't mean there's no other exciting tech stuff on the horizon. 3M's pocket-sized projector looks incredibly delicious, though early tests suggest it's a little dim (forgivable, considering it's about the size of a fag packet), while Nokia rolls out details of its hot new internet tablet. The device, codenamed the Maemo 5, is pegged to come equipped with 3G capability – something that the current tablets in the Maemo range are notably lacking.

As exciting as the news is that the Google-developed Android OS is almost with us, the internet giant makes us wonder whether or not it's going to be listening in on our conversations – especially considering the extra effort it's been putting in on keeping tabs on our whereabouts. The new My Location app uses mobile phone transceivers to roughly triangulate your position on a non-GPS equipped phone, while the Street View addition to Google Maps gets underway to give you a street level glance of your voyeuristic web browsing.

We leave off with the exciting news that the second annual Sony Ericsson Mobile Content Awards competition is now open for submissions. The contest asks mobile developers to showcase their innovations in mobile software development and rewards them with some truly vital industry inroads and mentoring, should they make it to the final rounds. This is precisely the kind of developer encouragement that quickly filters down to benefiting the users, so good luck to everyone who's getting in on the action.

Kia Ora!