Underwater phone calls, Helena Christensen wants to take your picture and a phone that detects lung cancer

Kia Ora!

2009’s really shaping up to be a technophile’s wet dream. The World Mobile Congress was a sea of silicon and LEDs this year, with so much hot gadgetry much of it’s still only just being announced by the awestruck attendees - including Pocket Picks.

New hardware is still dominating the news, with some mighty impressive tech as manufacturers all attempt to offer something new in a familiar format.

At one time, all the best stuff came from Japan, just as Marty McFly pointed out to Doc Brown. Admittedly, times have changed, but when it comes to phone tech the Rising Sun still wins out.

This gorgeous touchscreen beauty from NEC really makes an effort to provide for every kind of user, as it includes not only a slide out keypad but the screen can actually twist into a landscape orientation once extended. Exactly why it does this isn’t important - we’re just mighty impressed that it can do it.

Funnily enough, though, Nokia has never been able to make much headway in Japan, despite Japanese users being seriously tech hungry. So it’s unlikely they’ll be seeing much of the hot new N86 that everyone’s talking about, and our Pocket Picks research goblins managed to get their claws on one for a good chewing. Essentially this looks like a success of minimalist design, but the goblins do warn it might be slightly too austere for some. Also, what’s with this one being labelled as an N85?

Not far behind Japan in the tasty technology competition is Korea. This camera phone from Samsung demonstrates Korea’s advancements in quality products in recent years, with a small, sleek design and a host of photography specific features.

It’s got the 8MP CCD that all top of the range camera phones now insist upon, a Xenon flash, auto focus and face detection.

To go one better, the Samsung Memoir can actually detect smiles, which will presumably be used to ensure the flash doesn’t go off until everyone’s saying cheese - including ex-supermodel Helena Christensen who’s been drafted in to help promote the device. Sweet.

But if GPS is more your thing than digital photography, it looks like Garmin is on hand with a brand new combo handset. A partnership with Asus has delivered the M20, which runs Windows Mobile 6.1, a touchscreen, accelerometer and whopping 640x480 resolution display.

But being Garmin, it’s obviously focused on navigational capabilities, which the impressive 528MHz processor helps to run quickly and smoothly. You can even log into Garmin’s social network Ciao service to check your friend’s locations. Voyeuristic, but fun.

Perhaps, though, you’re more interested in a phone that’s got some serious longevity, which isn’t generally something most of us worry about considering the constant renewal of contracts these days. But the WMC revealed an unexpected trend for waterproof handsets that - although it’s hard to fathom the circumstances that might demand hermetical reception - seem like a damn fine idea when you see one floating in a jug of water.

These three submersible handsets seemed to each offer its own styling, from rugged outdoorsman’s devices to chic clamshell offerings.

Whether or not they actually float is perhaps an entirely different questions, but a waterproof phone that sinks perhaps isn’t as useful as it might initially appear.

But last word undeniably has to go to the handset that takes us to hypochondriac’s heaven - a modified N95 that can apparently ‘smell’ disease on your breath. So you’re chatting away to your peeps, and the handset monitors your breath by quantifying the levels of nitrogen, ammonia and oxygen, and is able to determine whether or not you’re under attack from germs or viruses.

The handset uses some custom Symbian S60 software to interpolate the data, and can supposedly detect such ailments as asthma, diabetes, lung cancer and even drunkenness.

Kia Ora!