Pocket Picks round-up: January 8th 2011 - CES special

Hello and welcome to the first Pocket Picks round-up of 2011.

If you’ve never heard of Pocket Picks, it’s one of Pocket Gamer’s many attractive sisters, concentrating not on the gaming side of portable devices, but more on the apps, new handsets, and general mobile tech news.

This week has been dominated by mobile launches from CES 2011 in Las Vegas, with the first crop of dual-core Android handsets officially unveiled to the world, but there was also time for some rumours, strange accessories, and disappointing denials.

LG was the first company out the gates at CES, with a (very) early morning conference in order to officially announce both the the Optimus Black and the first Android dual-core phone, the Optimus 2x.

Of the two, the 2x is possibly the most significant as it, along with Motorola’s two handsets, marks the start of what is shaping up to be the year of the dual-core mobiles.

The fact that just two years ago a single-core 400Mhz handset was considered top of the range just goes to show how quickly mobile tech is moving forward, thanks in no small part to ARM’s increasingly powerful range of chip designs.

There’s not too long to wait until we can get our hands on the new device, either, as the handset is due to be rolled out in Korea in January, and other countries soon after.

It wasn’t just LG that was showing off some cutting-edge technology at the industry’s first major trade show of the year.

Motorola’s two offerings, the Droid Bionic and Atrix, represent the first dual-core 4G (in this case, LTE) handsets to be officially announced, using the same Tegra 2 CPU/GPU as the Optimus 2x, but also with the ability for data transfer over wireless networks at up to 100Mbps.

As with the Optimus 2x, the Atrix should be arriving on US shores some time in the first quarter of the year, with the Bionic following in the Spring.

"The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist", said the French poet Baudelaire. In a similar fashion, one of the greatest tricks Apple has ever pulled is convincing the world that video calling didn’t exist before poster-feature FaceTime arrived with the iPhone 4.

Nevertheless, it still requires a phone with two cameras to work properly - a feature that had died out to a certain degree (pipe down, Nokia owners) during the middle portion of the last decade.

Vainworks has a solution - a stupidly simple one that manages to fall into that sought-after category of ideas that overlap ‘Mad’ and ‘Genius’. See if you can guess it before clicking the link to the story.

We finish this week’s inaugural round-up with some depressing news that Sony Ericsson has decided to leave Xperia X10 owners out to dry when it comes to further Android updates, despite the phone being barely more than six months old.

In what’s rapidly becoming an ugly trend among the Android manufacturers, Xperia X10 owners will be forever stuck on Android 2.1, no doubt to encourage newcomers to the range to purchase the upcoming Android 2.3 replacement, the Xperia Arc, although SE itself isn’t saying that officially (as you’d expect).