Pocket Picks roundup: 19th November - Blackberry throws a new Curveball, O2 trialing LTE in London, Siri hacked for Android

According to research conducted by the CEA (the group responsible for the huge trade show CES), smartphones and tablets will be the hottest gifts this coming Christmas, despite the generally gloomy outlook on the economy.

But while the desirability of the two products may be hot enough to withstand the economic cold, the level of competition between the different formats is scorching by comparison, with Nokia launching its first Windows Phone soon and RIM looking to regain lost ground with a new BlackBerry next month.

Will either handset be enough to dislodge the almost unstoppable rise of Android and iOS phones? If this holiday season does end up being a smartphone Christmas, then we’ll have a much clearer picture of where the various companies sit come January.

With the BBM troubles firmly behind it, RIM has announced that it’ll be releasing another variation on the best-selling BlackBerry Curve handset - the 9380 - for the Christmas market.

The 9380 is the first Curve model without a physical keyboard and with a touchscreen display. It measures in with a relatively dinky 3.2-inch screen for writing work emails (or gathering your pals for a quick riot).

The BlackBerry 7 OS powers the device, while BlackBerry Music will allow for sharing phat beats between your contacts and the in-built NFC tech should prove useful for reading SmartPoster tags without having to resort to the 5MP camera.

The Curve 9380 is expected to launch its assault on the smartphone market in a few weeks' time - just ready for the Christmas rush.

Some bad news for RIM also came to light this week, with a developer survey undertaken by appcelerator revealing that interest in making BlackBerry apps had dropped lower than Microsoft’s fledgling Windows Phone OS.

Out of the 2,000 developers surveyed, just 21 per cent expressed interest in BlackBerry compared with 38 per cent for Windows Phone.

Microsoft and Nokia won’t be popping the Champagne corks just yet, though. While Windows Phone may have beaten BlackBerry, it lagged well behind HTML5, which managed to interest a surprisingly high 66 per cent of developers.

The front-runners in the survey were, naturally, iOS and Android, with the former nabbing 91 per cent and the latter taking second place with 83 per cent.

And the bad news just doesn’t stop there. Google has announced that it will be dropping future support and downloads for Gmail on BlackBerry OS - a major blow for both RIM and consumers alike.

From the 22nd of November, BB users without the app will have to access their Gmail accounts through the web browser, which is naturally both more cumbersome and less feature-rich than the dedicated app.

No explicit reason was given for why support for the app had been dropped, but it’s fair to say that the lack of a native, and official, Gmail client on BlackBerry will be a major turn-off for those moving from another, supported, mobile platform like Android.

Talking of Android, some enterprising hackers have managed to extract the brain from Siri - the iPhone 4S’s voice-activated assistant - and pop the service onto an Android phone.

Don’t start rushing to download it just yet, though. While its possible to place the files onto an Android phone, you’ll still need a genuine ‘identifier’ from an iPhone 4S to run it.

However, the developers of the hack have now released tools to the general Androidsphere, with the hope that some other enterprising soul will be able to overcome this obstacle. I expect Apple’s lawyers are looking on in dismay.

If you’re like me and get disproportionately annoyed when web pages take half a minute to load on a 3G connection, this latest piece of news should warm your cockles.

The UK network O2 has begun conducting a limited trial of the 4G LTE connection that covers 25 access points stretching from Hyde Park to Greenwich, before the eventual roll-out in 2013

1,000 volunteers have been selected to take part in the trial, which runs until next spring, so if it took you half a minute to load up this article, chances are you’re not one of the lucky few taking part.