Mobile phone is 100, more 3G iPhone rumours, and why owning a handset makes you rude

Nokia, Nokia, Nokia. Not a week goes by on our sister site, Pocket Picks, without an invasion of stories relating to the Finnish giant. And the last seven-day period has been no different, of course.

Because life is short we'll ignore the little stuff and focus on the headlining news, which began with a confident Nokia declaring it was after Google's location-based mobile advertising market.

Back in our carefree youthful days of beer, beaches and blondes (not necessarily in that order) "Go big or go home" was a slogan associated with surfing. But it seems appropriate here seeing that it's clearly a philosophy Nokia subscribes to given the adversaries it chooses to go up against.

Not content with taking on Google, though, the manufacturer went on to announce the decision to include GPS in over 50 per cent of its handsets by 2012. Which could be handy when you're hunting down that last operating petrol station or the nearest water purification centre. (How quickly can the world deteriorate in four years, you ask? Just wait and see…)

Anyway, those of us with their head firmly in the sand with regards to environmental changes will no doubt welcome the thought of a touchscreen BlackBerry. Sporting only four keys, it's said to be incoming late in the summer, but according to reports is a worldwide exclusive to Verizon and Vodafone.

Speaking of Vodafone, the operator has increased its high-speed mobile broadband network in the UK to extend to Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Reading by the autumn. The six cities join London and major airports as the operator continues to roll out HSDPA across our island.

Across the Atlantic, MIT boffins have been busy coming up with Android apps. A class appropriately (if rather plainly) entitled 'Building Mobile Applications with Android' has come up with working applications for the phone before it has made it into owners' hands. So you get a mobile social network that links to your contacts and brings up their location using Google maps, you can keep track of your employees if you're a small delivery business, choose to unlock your car via Bluetooth, or opt to rely on a location-based 'to do' list. Nothing too exciting, perhaps, but remember it's MIT we're talking about.

Research breakthroughs of considerably more interest came courtesy of LG, which has developed circular LCD units (there's a reason why they've always been square or rectangular) and plans to bring them to phones. So far it's got down to as little as 1.4-inch circles so expect a few novel shapes as the shackles that have restrained handset designers for years suddenly come off. Of course, once they establish just how appropriate a rectangular display is, they might prefer to keep them on.

Certainly, one handset that seems particularly settled on its LCD shape is Samsung's new F400. The double slider is relatively well equipped, true, but the thing that caught our attention is the Bang & Olufsen audio components it promises. Whether that means it'll prove prohibitively expensive is another matter. (Though we suspect it can't cost as much as the Christian Dior, crystal-incrusted handset, which, remarkably, comes complete with remote control.

And the association with other companies doesn't end there for Samsung, with Tech firm 3M suggesting that the Korean consumer electronics powerhouse plans to be the first to include mini-projectors in its phones. We're more excited about this than we perhaps ought to be.

Particularly when you consider that 3G iPhone rumours continue on a weekly basis. When will Apple end our torment?

On which frustration we have just enough time to mention that contrary to what you may believe, the mobile phone is actually 100 years old – though we concede the definition is stretching the concept of handset.

Still, at least the revelation that SMS costs are more expensive than sending data from space shouldn't come as surprise to those on PAYG, while anyone who's been to a restaurant over the past few years will most likely agree with a survey suggesting that owning a mobile makes you a ruder individual.

And on that note, why don't you p*** off until next week, eh?