Pocket Picks round-up: December 17th - LG reveals details on Prada phone, Google Wallet coming to UK in 2012, Samsung drops legal fight in Germany

With just one week (and a day) to go before Christmas, a lot of businesses will be winding down and taking a few weeks off to celebrate / for the hell of it.

Not us, though!

Instead, expect another round-up (possibly with extra festive cheer) next Saturday, as usual. Think of it as an early present or something equivalent.

Anyways, this week, we’ve got a good selection of news for all the major mobile formats, with rumours that Google Wallet will make an appearance soon in the UK, as well as news on an app that actually takes advantage of Windows Phone’s much-touted (but criminally underused) Live Tiles.

French newspaper Les Echos has reported that Google plans on launching its NFC payment service Google Wallet in the UK early next year.

Google is apparently already in talks with banks and retailers about rolling out the contactless payment service, although it would require some serious inroads to be made in both NFC handsets and payment points before the summer for this to be a smooth process.

NFC, or Near Field Communication, has been picking up steam in the west over the past year, rolling out slowly across the US. It’s available on a range of Android handsets, including the Nexus S, but is fairly rarely deployed across other formats.

Rumours were swirling prior to the iPhone 4S launch that Apple was going to include the tech in its next phone, but it seems more likely that both it and Nokia (Windows Phone already supports the system at a software level) are waiting until this year at least before jumping on board.

LG reveals details on the Prada 3.0

We already knew LG and Prada were going to be bringing out another phone, but now the South Korean firm has officially revealed what will sit inside the designer-branded handset.

Far from being the usual 'licence first, quality later' product, the LG Prada 3.0 is actually shaping up to be a fairly decent-looking phone.

The fashionista’s latest phone of choice comes with a dual-core CPU, runs Gingerbread, packs a 4.3-inch NOVA touchscreen, and - well - has ‘Prada’ stamped on the back. It’s a feature, I think.

The phone also comes with NFC, so you can pay for your boutique purchases without having to hand your platinum credit card over to the riff-raff running the shop. The LG Prada 3.0 is due to land in January.

It may have dropped support for RIM’s BlackBerry, but Google continues to support Gmail on what many would consider its more direct competitor: Apple’s iPhone.

The latest version of The Big G's email app now includes features such as ‘scribbles’, which allows for doodling and jotting down notes - not very email-like, I have to say - as well as a new notification sound for iOS 5. This'll hopefully make it easier to tell when you’re getting an email rather than a Facebook message.

There’s now also the option of setting up custom signatures and out of office messages, which may sound boring to some, but is vital for those of us that use our iPhones for business matters.

If you think this is the final update you’ll see from Google when it comes to iPhone, don’t worry. The company posted a statement on its official blog stating that it will "continue to work on highly requested features", and is hoping to integrate multiple login support and banner notifications (among others) at a later date.

We haven’t mentioned the incredibly drawn-out process of corporate law for a while on this round-up (for good reason - it’s incredibly boring), but the news that Samsung is dropping its legal action against Apple in Germany is relatively interesting.

The South Korean electronics giant has been locked in complicated legal tussles with the American firm all over the world in the past year, with Apple managing to block sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (temporarily) earlier in the year.

This current legal challenge doesn’t focus on design snatching, however, but on the 3G technology the iPhone uses, which Samsung claimed was its own.

Alas, this doesn’t appear to be the case, after all, and the efforts to have the iPhone 4S banned in the country have fallen through.

Given Christmas / holiday season is one of the most popular times to fly, and the Lumia is flying off the shelves at the moment, it might be worth checking out Skyscanner - a cheap flight finder that’s just touched down on the Windows Phone runway.

While the function of the app is all well and good, what really interests us is that it’s one of the few pieces of third-party software on the platform that takes advantage of WP’s Live Tiles feature. This allows an app to automatically feed information through to the home screen without your having to open it separately.

Despite this being one of the unique selling points of the OS, very few developers seem to have taken advantage of the function, which is a shame for all us with unlimited / fairly decent data rates, especially when it comes to travel apps.

Hopefully, the feature will become as common a sight next year as a 737’s flight path over a formerly peaceful rural area.