Pocket Picks round-up: September 17th - HTC getting big, Qualcomm speeds getting serious, Phone Story getting banned

Hello, all, and welcome back to our weekly round-up of all the big stories from Pocket Picks.

There’s not much of a theme this week, if I’m being brutally honest, although HTC has managed to get two - yes, two - separate mentions in the news below (mainly because it almost exclusively uses Qualcomm Snapdragon processors).

There’s the first piece of bada news for months - and it’s a pretty big one for that mobile OS - while over on Android, we take a gander at the very latest product to come out of the always innovating Google Labs.

With mobile CPU makers locked in a fierce fight for custom among the leading phone manufacturers, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Qualcomm has been beating its drum this week in regards to its range of products in 2012.

What is a bit of a surprise is the sheer speed the American firm's chips are expected to reach: up to a staggering 2.5Ghz in single- to quad-core configurations. Given the fastest mobile on the market today uses a 1.2Ghz dual-core, you can see why we’re still trying to catch our breath at Pocket Picks HQ.

We’ve yet to hear the official line from Nvidia in response - although an unconfirmed roadmap of codenames did ‘leak’ just prior to Qualcomm’s announcement (very suspicious) - but we expect the firm will respond soon with targets of its own.

Phones keep getting bigger. So big, in fact, that I joked way back at the start of 2011 on Pocket Gamer that I expected to see phones the size of tablets next year at the rate manufacturers are going.

Given this week’s news that HTC will be launching a 4.7-inch phone called Rhyme (codenamed Gannymede), that prediction doesn’t actually seem too far fetched.

The Rhyme's screen size is the big draw, no doubt, but it packs enough other features to differentiate it from the Evos and Sensations. For one, it uses a new version of SenseUI, which is looking a lot smarter than the old one. For two, it sports Beats Audio tech (hence the name).

Samsung’s bada mobile OS is still going, in case you were wondering. Actually, the firm is readying the first major update to the system since it launched over two years ago: version 2.0 (no funky code names for Samsung, it seems).

The big draws are multitasking and integrated search, but there’s also now support for multiple screen resolutions (which will help if Samsung continues to expand out the Wave range of phones).

Version 2.0 of bada is expected to start rolling out in the fourth quarter of the year. If you’re wondering which Wave phones will be able to run it, the answer is: all of them. Some of the new software features won't be available on the less powerful models, though.

Google has just launched its Google Voice service in the UK, a voice-activation system that allows you to do things like ‘Call Bob’. Americans have been able to do this since 2010, so we've been waiting quite a while for it to cross over the Pond.

Incidentally, I was doing this kinda stuff on my Nokia 7110 back in 2000. No joke.

If you want to find out what it was like using the world’s first WAP phone (which had a sliding keypad cover like the one in The Matrix), then you can download Voice Search app by hitting this download link.

Apple’s often skittish censorship policy for the App Store was once again in the spotlight this week when the company banned the indie satirical app Phone Story for some of the most ironic reasons we’ve seen in a while.

Essentially, this series of mini-games sets out to demonstrate the hardships and immoral activities that go into producing your shiny Apple / Android smartphone - from child labour to worker suicides.

Naturally, it was subsequently banned by Apple because it contained “excessively objectionable or crude content” and demonstrated “violence or abuse of children”. Which is, well, exactly what it sets out to do.

There is always a silver lining when it comes to these Apple censorship stories, though - you can now buy Phone Story from the Android Market [link], with the developer promising that the revenue will be donated to charity.