N-Gage launches as separating 3G iPhone fact from fiction becomes hard to do during April Fool's week

After a bit of an Easter lull, owing to some behind-the-scenes technical jiggerry pokery, Pocket Picks has been back on stride this week with a veritable glut of mobile news, lies, drama and shock revelations.

The week began with some 3G iPhone rumors and word on a new company that specializes in unlocking the current models along with a giant collective intake of breath in anticipation of the inevitable deluge of April Fool's japes. The deluge never really came, but we partook in our own little bit of mirthful deception with a false story about Apple planning to license the iPhone OS to third-party handset manufacturers. Well, we like to keep you on your toes.

As usual, the iPhone commanded plenty of blog space throughout the rest of the week, too, appearing in a leather jacket, usurping the laptops of more than a quarter of its users, evolving into an even more compelling platform for developers and showing off its (supposed) 3G makeover at the end of the week.

But out with the almost stiflingly thick iPhone fog of revelations, there were plenty of other newsworthy bits and pieces cropping up. In music news, Dave Stewart threw the cat among the pigeons with proposed plans to 'bomb' the current mobile music delivery paradigm, so we can all look forward to that. Elsewhere, MySpace announced its new Music Store which will go head to head with, yes you guessed it, the ever ubiquitous iTunes.

There was also news of a new Last FM application for S60 phones while Dolby signed on the dotted line to beef up the overall general audio grooviness of S60 based handsets.

Back to handsets and Palm made the news, inexplicably, due to having sold one million of the distinctly underwhelming Centro smartphone – as they so often say, there's no accounting for taste. Showing old hands how it should be done, there was also news of a couple of arrivals from new UK based smartphone company, Velocity Mobile, in the form of the feature rich 111 and the 103.

Nokia got in on the handset action as well, though not with anything we're likely to see this side of the globe. The four new handsets it announced last week were aimed at developing markets (in particular South Africa) and considering their entry price, were surprisingly well endowed in the tech department – let's hope its a trend that catches on here, too.

The really big one this week came out of the Nokia camp with the slightly unexpected and muted launch of the N-Gage service – if your weekend hasn't been spend getting to know it then consider the rest of this week well and truly spoken for.

In the applications department there were all sorts of goodies flooding the site last week. There was a pseudo GPS app for Facebook users termed FindMe, yet another mobile VoIP start-up called Octrotalk, an MP3 editing tool for S60 handsets known as MP3Cube and a reasonably useless app called MobiPad that lets S60 and UIQ mobile users control their device with a WiiMote (why?).

Lastly, the Nokia 6630 was reduced to a teeny bopping trinket by appearing as a freebie on the cover of Girl Talk and a chap from Lancashire made the news for apparently receiving text messages from his dead wife in which we heroically resisted the temptation to include the pun 'dead ringer' in the post title (but couldn't resist mentioning here).

Pocket Picks is currently on the brink of a bit of a rocket fuelled injection of new content so do keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, click 'Track It!' to be sure to catch next week's round-up.