Pocket Picks round-up: June 11th - Samsung giving hackers free phones, iOS 5 unveiled, HTC adds fuel to the fragmentation fire and adds juice to the ChaCha

The impact social networks have had on our lives can be easily seen in the number of phones nowadays that come with at least one of the two major sites - Twitter and Facebook - in some way integrated into the internal operations of the phone.

That could take the form of ‘Tweet this’ buttons across all apps - as with the recently announced iOS 5 from Apple - or it could be essential to the running of the phone itself, like using your Facebook friends as the basis of your contacts list as with Windows Phone.

But while integration is slowly becoming a ‘must have’ feature for phone manufacturers to include at a software level, will HTC’s new Facebook phones like the ChaCha and their physical buttons make much of a splash, considering that it’s really the only thing that differentiates them from the crowd?

My guess is no, but it does raise the question as to just how far phones are going to align themselves with social networks in the future.

This HTC phone - aimed at teenagers hopelessly addicted to Mark Zuckerberg’s social network - is out now in the UK, only it’s a little different from the model we saw demonstrated (behind glass) at the Mobile World Congress in February.

Instead of the under-powered 600Mhz processor that dwelt inside the Android 2.3 QWERTY phone, the company has secretly bumped the speed up to a more reasonable (for a mid-range phone) 800Mhz, bringing it in line with the Desire Z and a number of other last-generation handsets.

The dedicated Facebook button is still present at the bottom of the chassis, allowing for instant access to the network for those who postively have to share everything with friends of a friend of a friend.

The ChaCha is out now on Three for free on a £20, 24-month contract.

We like the web version of the Android Market here in the Pocket Picks shed, but there are still some things about it that get our goat.

Being able to see all apps available, for instance, is a great way of avoiding those moments where you search for software that’s not there because your phone can’t run it.

It would be nice, though, if it told us whether we should bother with something before we commit to hitting the buy button.

Coincidentally, that’s exactly what a new update to the Market does - displaying all your phones and whether they can run the app in question just below the Install / Buy button on the product page.

The update doesn’t appear to be out everywhere yet, but hopefully this is just a case of Google trying it out in one region to see if the feature works properly rather than a US-only function.

Well, this is a change in fortune somewhat from the early days of Android.

Following on from news that HTC won’t be locking people out of the bootloader last week, Samsung has now given away free Galaxy S 2s to the team behind CyanogenMod to encourage modifications.

Not only is this good news for the large portion of Android users that chose the system in the first place for its open nature, but it’s also turned into rather a good PR stunt by the South Korean firm, as the Cyanogen team appear to be pretty chuffed if this tweet from ‘Atin’ is anything to go by.

Expect custom firmware for the current flagship Android handset to be winging its way onto the Internet shortly, then.

Apple opened WWDC this year with the expected list of changes for the next iteration of iOS.

For all the talk about 200 changes, there were few fundamental improvements over competitors’ equivalent operating systems, with a number of features like multitasking left as they are for the time being.

Still, some of the changes and enhancements should come as a blessed relief for iPhone and iPad users, including a Notification Centre to keep all your pushed messages in one place. Deep integration with Twitter, meanwhile, should allow you to tweet almost anything directly from first-party apps like Camera.

There’s also been a change to the lock screen that should make it a whole lot more useful than it is now - by providing music access and a direct link to the camera rather than just a simple ‘swipe to unlock’.

No mention of the iPhone 5, though. I guess the rumours of an August / September release were bang on the money after all.

If you own an HTC phone, you’ll probably know about the Sense UI - the company's own frontend that comes with that familiar clock widget by default (seen on the Inspire to the right)

Now HTC is hoping to add further fuel to the Android fragmentation fire by releasing an SDK for Android developers to create their own HTC Sense UI-only apps, for some bizarre reason.

It’s likely an effort to add extra value to an HTC phone over its Android rivals - building up a library that can only function on its hardware alone - but it doesn’t bode well for those that don’t want to be locked into one handset maker.