Pocket Picks round-up: January 7th - Google tablet aiming for Fire, Silk hacked to run on other Android machines, Nokia Lumia 900 rumours continue to gain pace

Welcome back to the Pocket Picks round-up! I hope you all had a great Xmas.

We’re entering the manic season when it comes to new phones and tablets, with CES 2012 due to start next week and Mobile World Congress a month later. So, expect to see a heck of a lot of new hardware popping up from all the major manufacturers.

Then, of course, we’ll be entering the ‘iPad window’, which is usually the green light for hundreds of tiny rumours to come scuttling out from the twisted imaginations of tech blogs across the globe, right up until Apple suddenly announces it.

What I’m trying to say is: it’s going to get a bit hectic.

Enough about what’s going to happen, though - let’s start off the first round-up of 2012 with one of those delicious rumour beetles. Pass me my wine would you, Siri?

Rumours have begun to swirl surrounding an (inevitable) tablet from Google, first announced by Eric Schmidt last month.

The latest batch of tongue-wagging action concerns which tablet The Big G is actually gunning for, with DigiTimes suggesting that it’s the Amazon Fire (and not the iPad 2) Google is aiming for.

That effectively means a 7-inch Google tablet (running the latest version of Android, of course), but within the price range set down by Amazon’s prodigal son rather than a cutting-edge monster slate.

It’s all just a rumour at this point, though, so don’t be surprised if we’re talking about a Motorola-made Google tablet with 2 billion CPUs come the summer.

Keeping on the Android theme, Google has revealed that it requires manufacturers intending to use Ice Cream Sandwich on their new devices to use the default ‘holo’ family of themes. If not, the device won’t connect to the Android Market.

Manufacturers hoping to stamp their presence (and a little uniqueness) on their devices can still create custom ‘themes’ to sit on top, but the actual layout of the UI and the look has to be that of the ‘holo’ family.

The move appears to have been made in order to better unify the Android experience for both users and developers, although some might argue that while existing UIs like Sense and TouchWiz can vary in terms of resource usage, they do give each Android phone a unique feel over and above the design of the hardware.

The Amazon Fire is one such Android tablet that definitely doesn’t look like the rest of the devices out there, mainly thanks to its custom look and the preinstalled apps which differentiate it from your average Samsung / HTC slate.

One of these aforementioned apps is the Silk browser, which works by second-guessing your next move and loading sites from the Amazon cloud. This theoretically speeds up browser operations, particularly in comparison to more traditional applications such as Safari.

Naturally, an app like this would appeal to those Android users without the Kindle Fire, so it’s somewhat inevitable that the talented coders over on the XDA developers forums have managed to find a way of extracting the app and getting it to run on other Android devices.

Nokia’s forays into the world of Windows Phone don’t show any signs of slowing down, as sightings of the forthcoming Lumia 900 continue to appear in odd places around the net.

The latest is a Christmas (or ‘Holiday’) card sent out by AT&T and spotted by Pocketnow, containing an image of the less-than-mythical LTE-enabled Windows Phone.

The 900 is expected to be the big daddy of the Lumia family, packing in more specs than both the 710 and 800, yet retaining the basic visual design (that is to say: rather attractive).

We’ll no doubt see some more glimpses of the device ‘in the wild’ over the next few weeks as Mobile World Congress draws closer.

Windows Phone users stewing about the lack of a fashionably trendy voice-activated robo-servant on their phones: stew no more. For you can now download a Siri-esque app of your own in the form of Ziggy.

Ziggy doesn’t play guitar, but it is developer Shai Leib’s attempt at bringing a similar service to Siri to the Microsoft OS, allowing you to speak into the phone and look up items on the web without having to faff about with your fingers.

What’s actually going to happen, though, is that you’ll ask it a question in front of your friends, smugly bask in the air of amazement when it answers, and then use your fingers to look stuff up when alone indoors.

Still, it’s quite a nifty app to have on your phone.