Nokia signs some music muscle while the iPhone 8GB dies out in the UK

It was a bit of a handset heavy week on our sister site, Pocket Picks, over the last seven days.

Kicking off the coverage was Samsung's flagship handset, the Soul slider, which has now officially been penciled in for a European release. Samsung made the headlines again shortly after when a patent surfaced detailing a unique gesture based interface for mobiles – iPhone eat your heart out.

It was really Nokia, however, that dominated the first half of the week, announcing two new XpressMusic handsets and following that up with a welcome announcement that the company has signed Sony BMG for its forthcoming 'Comes With Music' range of handsets.

In spite of such high profile partnerships on the music front, Nokia is still keeping its feet firmly on the ground, telling us exclusively at its London Press Event that it has no designs on becoming a record label. If ever Nokia changes its mind however, you might be able to sniff out details in advance on its new company blog, Nokia Conversations, which also launched last week.

LG had a pretty busy week, too, announcing two new handsets, even though most followers of the company had known about them, in one form or another, for ages. The first out of the bag was the LG-KF700, containing a touchscreen, a slide-out keypad and something called a Shortcut Dial – meaning it will either be the simplest phone in existence to use or a fingers-and-thumbs nightmare. Its sibling, the LG-KF750, was announced shortly after under the new moniker, the Secret, also featuring a touchscreen and a slider keypad, but cramming all manner of other bells and whistles into its tiny shell, including a five-megapixel camera.

Last of the handset announcements was a double header from Sony Ericsson with the G502 and the Z780 which, despite their mismatched naming conventions and respective candybar and clamshell form factors, were pretty much identical feature-wise, pushing affordable HSDPA connectivity as their key feature.

By now you must be wondering why we have managed to get this far without mentioning the iPhone. The truth is, the iPhone only made the news once last week, but for a pretty big reason in that the 8GB version of the device has been discontinued in the UK (gasp!).

Apart from a Levi's phone and news that T-Mobile has an Android handset planned for before the end of the year, the only other handset related news snippet to get our attention was the predictions that Linux-based mobile OSs could claim as much as 20 per cent of the market share by 2013.

In other developments, Skype launched a native S60 app at long last but in a distinctly non-VoIP flavour, thereby souring its arrival somewhat. And for those of you who've been waiting patiently for an S60 drum sequencing program to arrive (there must be at least some of you), there was also not one, but two offerings on that front – waiting for buses and all that, eh?

Lastly, any of you looking to collaborate with a world renowned film maker might want to check out Spike Lee and Nokia's new venture.

And with that, we shall sign off for another seven days. Click 'Track It!' to be sure to catch next week's Pocket Picks round-up.