Pocket Picks round-up: April 16th - E7 in the UK, Sensation coming to the UK soon, and lots of exploits for big name Android apps revealed

New phones, new software, and new exploits are the order of the day this week, with Android and Symbian users the ones in the classroom that should be sitting up straight and paying attention.

We’ll have some iOS and WP7 news next week, don’t you worry, but for now, settle down with the two largest OSs (in terms of market share) and share in their highs and their lows in this week's Pocket Picks round-up.

The phone formally known as Pyramid - the HTC Sensation - has been scheduled for a UK release next month on Vodafone, meaning the battle between Samsung and HTC top of the range Android phones will once again begin in earnest.

Last year the Desire and Desire HD went up against the Galaxy S and Nexus S. This time it’s the turn of the 1.2GHz dual-core Sensation against the equally specced Galaxy S II. Exciting stuff.

HTC’s betting big on this one, with it both marking the first dual-core handset from the company as well as the first to sport the new version of the Sense UI. We’ll see

From a cutting-edge dual-core Android phone to a - wait, 680Mhz single-core?

Yes, Nokia has finally released the E7 QWERTY Symbian handset on its online store. If you’re not sure what the E7 consists of, imagine the N8 and stick a keyboard on it - it’s practically the same model.

Currently the phone is free on a whopping £35 per month, two-year contract, which is either brave or silly depending on your unquestioning love for Symbian. Talking of which...

It may be a dead man walking in the OS world, but the Finnish giant isn’t going to just leave the OS formerly known as Symbian^3 out to dry just yet.

This week the company revealed the first details on the next major update to the system, called ‘Anna’, which adds a bevy of new features including the long-awaited (for me, anyway) ability to use the virtual QWERTY keyboard in the portrait orientation.

There’s also been a number of improvements made to the hateful web browser (thank goodness), and ‘Fresh Tiles’ for the look of the UI.

The update is expected to arrive in a few months time.

It’s a double-header for hack watch this week, as there’s been two security exploits revealed in Android applications - albeit due to the app creators rather than anything specific to the OS.

First up is Adobe Flash, which has been found to contain a ‘critical’ vulnerability related to embedding Flash videos into Microsoft Word documents.

Before you cleanse your Android phone in sulphuric acid, it’s worth noting that this issue is present in all versions of Flash across the platforms that support it.

It’s also worth noting that, as yet, you can’t actually embed a Flash video into a Word document with any Android app, so it’s not quite as alarming as Adobe’s website makes it out to be.

Of more direct concern to Android owners is the discovery of an exploit in the Android version of the official Skype app.

The guys over at Android Police have discovered that the databases Skype uses to store contact details and IM history is unencoded and, more alarmingly, unprotected from view.

Of course, for an evil-doer to actually gain access to this info remotely you’d need to download a nasty app from the Market with some kind of special code attached. The sort of code that Android Police has publicly posted as proof of concept, maybe.

Skype has been notified about the flaw, so hopefully this will all be sorted out quickly.