Starting the New Year in style with wishlists, Halo 3 Stats and more mobile YouTube

We aren't ashamed to say that over the past ten days, we've been carelessly gorging ourselves on all manner of festive food stuffs, putting our feet up in front of the TV and, wait for it, turning off our mobiles (gasp).

Even so, we still managed to find a few minutes here and there between mouthfuls of turkey and interludes of Only Fools and Horses to check in on the world of mobile technology, as dutifully reported on our beloved sister site Pocket Picks.

On the last day of the year - while everyone else in the country was getting comprehensively inebriated and generally indulging in merriment of all kinds - we were taking a special look at messaging and the best or most innovative services we have come across over the last year.

Waking bright and early on the 1st, our lack of indulgence the previous evening afforded us enough concentration to pull together a couple of wishlists for the remainder of the year. Google's Android, an unlocked iPhone and a brighter future for Motorola all made the cut.

The 2nd bore the fruits of Christmas future with a sighting of the new Blackberry 9000 series and news about a new mobile battery tech that could extend battery life to as much as two months on a single charge.

There was also the unsurprising news that Apple's iPhone is pretty popular here in the UK and is set (according to a buoyant O2) to have shifted 200,000 units by early January. It can only mean that ever more of you will be needing a clear voice amongst the noise to tell you where to get the best web apps from; this week it was the Halo 3 Stats web app that got a going over and we'll be covering plenty more over the next year.

But if you are sick of hearing about the iPhone, you might be glad to hear that a new version of Microsoft's office package Quickoffice has just launched in a premier flavour (Quickoffice Premier) for S60 handsets adding a whole bunch of new editing functions for Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents.

A tad late to the New Year party, a discovery on the 3rd of a new S60 and UIQ application called Anfy Call Filter might have been useful over the party season for ignoring unwanted calls. We came across another couple of interesting apps; namely Miniserver and Pointui Home. The first is a handy little app that lets your phone communicate with your PC wirelessly and the latter is a very clever program that offers a multi-touch operating system on your Windows Mobile handset.

By the end of the week though it seemed everyone was partied out and like us over the majority of the festive season, TV was on everybody's mind. There was news of Mobix moving to snare new mobile TV channels including the Nuts 'lads mag' channel. The folks at S60.com took to YouTube in order to explain to all those people who got shiny new S60 phones over the holidays how to use them.

And, for the advanced user, Nokia finally made it possible to watch YouTube videos on the Nokia N95 8GB directly from the web browser just like on a PC via the latest firmware update for the device – huzzah.

Last of all comes a great example of looking backwards to move forwards. A new mobile search engine called ChaCha has launched that allows you to text queries to human responders who search to criteria much more specific than that understood by an automated search engine.

Will 2008 be the year of common sense? Let's hope so. We'll certainly be back with a expansive take on Pocket Picks' activity in our round-up next week - click 'Track It!' to make sure you don't miss it.