Pocket Picks round-up: May 7th - HTC and Sony reveal new Android phones, Nokia reveals a crazy patent, Optimus Black out soon, Windows Phone 7 suffers technical problems

Hello and welcome back to the weekly Pocket Picks round-up!

This week it’s an Android and Windows Phone 7 special - a head-to-head that may become ever more common if recent predictions of a Nokia-Microsoft surge next year are to be believed.

No doubt as we approach the release of the iPhone 5 those responsible for making up Apple rumours on the Internet will appear in full force, so let’s savour this period of relative quiet on the iOS front.

Hey women! You think that Desire and Thunderbolt are for you, do you? Well, you’re wrong.

No, what you have to use (being a woman and all) is the HTC Bliss, a phone the company has designed ‘specifically’ for you. Or rather, ‘specifically around a focus group of women we got in the office one day’.

Anyway, if the idea of a mid-range Android handset with a ‘calming’ wallpaper and a special ‘charm’ that allows you to see a new message even when the phone’s hidden in your handbag’s depths sounds appealing, then you go, girl.

The Bliss is expected to launch on Verizon in the US - no word on dates, price, or European availability just yet.

Like it or not, the craze for 3D (at least in the mobile world) isn’t going to go away any time soon.

Personally, I love anything 3D ever since I found the anaglyph setting in Magic Carpet on PC, so the latest diagrams to emerge from Nokia’s R&D department concerning an tracking, 3D phone has me excited.

The Communicator 3D is just that right now though - a diagram - but the idea of a handset being able to ‘see’ where your fingers are in a 3D plane in front of the phone is rather interesting.

Whether it’ll get past the design stage, however, is another thing entirely.

World’s slimmest smartphone - LG Optimus Black - launches next week

LG’s been on a roll recently when it comes to record-breaking phones.

First it managed to persuade the Guinness Book of Records that the Optimus 2x was officially the world’s first dual-core handset (despite being announced at the same time as the Motorola Atrix), now the slimmest handset, the Optimus Black, is about to launch in the UK.

The Black doesn’t pack as much of a wallop inside as the 2x, packing just a single-core 1Ghz CPU, but the depth of the device drops down to just 6mm at its nadir - impressively thin.

It’s also the first handset from the South Korean firm to sport its new NOVA screen, which is said to consume 50 per cent less power than an equally-bright Super AMOLED display from Samsung.

Sony Ericsson is prepping another two single-core phones for release later in the year - the Xperia Mini and the QWERTY keyboard sporting Mini Pro.

Styled much like the X10 series from last year, the two Android minis are 3-inch phones with 1Ghz CPUs and are 720p recording capable. Or, to put it frankly, they have ‘mid-range’ written all over them.

They do, however, have a new and improved Facebook integration that reminds me strongly of how Windows Phone 7 currently operates, with the social network able to affect everything from calendars to picture galleries.

The two handsets are scheduled for launch in the third quarter of the year.

It’s not been a fantastic couple of days for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 services.

First Xbox Live mysteriously dropped on Friday, leaving everyone unable to do important stuff such as change their avatar’s clothes and unlock achievements (where’s my multiplayer gaming, Microsoft?), then the Marketplace ended up going down for six hours after a regular maintenance check.

These outages are hardly in the same league as a certain home console competitor’s current woes, but it’s rare for a mobile distribution and gaming network to go down for such a length of time.