The Finns are back on top as Nokia dominates a leaktastic week
It's the Pocket Picks round-up
Mobile news has been ticking over dependably over on our sister site Pocket Picks this week. Early on, there was welcome news from 3, which is stepping up to the new roaming charges early and undercutting them (unlike Orange, which seems content to leach its customers right up until the eleventh hour).
It was Nokia's turn to steal some headlines next, with some blurry spy shots of the new N81 music phone leaking onto the net. A deluge of up close and clear snaps of the device dropped the following day and very classy it is looking, too.
In other leaks, the new Palm Treo 800 also made an appearance, sporting what looks to be a knuckle wrenchingly small QWERTY keyboard and aesthetically dubious design.
Back to Nokia, though, and a pairing with Microsoft could see the Finnish mobile monolith wheel out its own iTunes-style service based on the licensing of Microsoft's PlayReady DRM system.
The love-it-or-hate-it Nokia Prism was also doing the rounds again, this time as an updated 7900 version of its former self, with full specs arriving mid week. The N95 also got an upgrade in the form of the official announcement of the widely speculated music centric hardware revision.
Speaking of the N95, the handset was also confirmed as finally coming to 3, a pairing that's been long anticipated given 3's excellent X-Series internet service.
Lastly in Nokia news, O2 confirmed that it will be carrying the Nokia 6500 slide by October, and that it will be accompanied by the Sony Ericsson K850i.
Which neatly brings us to the week's biggest leak, when some shots of an unannounced Walkman clamshell handset emerged looking all grey and retro.
In news of a less hardware focused slant, The Discovery Channel launched two made-for-mobile TV programmes and Player X flaunted its recently acquired right to supply all manner of licensed Transformers content through its own channels.
Speaking of films, it also came to light that the mobile and online video focussed 2007 Portable Film Festival got underway, 150 examples of which can be downloaded to your mobile for free.
In other culture, news also filtered through that despite their popularity, contradictorily mobile ads are most often regarded as irrelevant.
And so to software specific happenings. Nokia updated its Mac Multimedia Transfer software, Yahoo made its IM client available to all 3 customers, and hackers cracked the iPhone, managing to run a NES emulator on the device.
Wrapping up, we discovered an Islamic prayer alarm application, a Bluetooth app that transforms your phone into a wireless mic, and a giant who can't use mobile phones.
But to cap it all off, Pocket Picks was honoured to adorn the latest Carnival of the Mobilists, with three posts from last week.
Hell, it's just all in a day's work, really; click 'Track It!' to receive an alert for next week's Pocket Picks update.