The world and mobiles are getting smaller together

There's no denying that the world is getting smaller. It's a tired old cliché, but in the wake of various mobile technologies that have been cropping up on our sister site Pocket Picks of late, it is perhaps an even more pertinent sentiment today than it ever has been.

Take Google Talk's new instant messaging (IM) translation bot, for example. It's a clever little bit of software that can translate IM conversations in real-time into various languages. The fact that it can be used via Fring and hence on your mobile certainly gives new meaning to the idea of the mobile as a device for communication.

The concept may seem removed to some mobile users at the moment but a study that surfaced mid-week suggests more and more mobile users will start to use IM in favour of texting over the next five years.

But it's not only the world and text traffic that is getting smaller; as ever mobile phones are continuing to shrink as evidenced early in the week by one of Toshiba's three new handsets, the minuscule HSDPA-packing G450 handset. And although not quite as small but perhaps even more compact in terms of form is the Phillips READiUS handset, complete with folding screen.

Mind you, the trend towards ever more compact handsets can't continue forever, especially when fandangled new devices such as nuke detectors (without a word of a lie) are set to be included in their ever more diminutive shells.

The iPhone had a busy week as our crack team of writers took a look at music streaming and cinema timetable web applications for the device, both of which proved to be rather impressive. News also filtered through that the iPhone is set to get business tariffs in the US, leaving us wondering about where the UK stands on that front. Hopefully the fact that O2 has shifted 190,000 of the things will help speed up the arrival of a similar service on these shores.

Elsewhere Nokia made its usual contribution to our pages, first with a very interesting looking patent for a virtual keyboard and followed this with a barrage of additions to its Beta Labs site. Nokia's biggest splash this week, however, concerned rumblings about a team-up with Facebook. Certainly something to watch for.

In other application news, YouTube launched an official mobile client and Windows Mobile gained a couple of neat apps in the shape of the self explanatory mVisualVoiceMail and then the very clever WMWifi, an application that can turn your smartphone into a wireless router.

And lastly in culture, there was the rescued baby seal who was gifted with her very own mobile phone for tracking her progress in the wild via text, and a company called Mobile Fun that is offering people with more money than sense a burial service for their phones, which may or may not have the Zen like essence of their former users trapped inside their plastic shells. You simply couldn't make that sort of thing up.

That's it for now, click 'Track It!' to be sure to catch next week's round-up.