// Pocket Picks //

Having stuffed yourself silly on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, what better way to pass the time until drinking yourself silly on New Year’s Eve than downloading a new application for your mobile phone? Answers on a postcard please, but in the meantime, check out our pick of five top Java apps…

1. Gmail (pictured)
Google’s mobile Gmail app truly is a thing of beauty. Well, simplicity and efficiency anyway. It provides an excellent stripped-down interface to your Gmail webmail account, with all manner of keypad shortcuts to make it quick to archive and delete messages from your phone. It also has nifty features like allowing you to search your most-used contacts first when composing emails. Read more

2. Phling
There are a million and one mobile music applications and services jockeying for position, but Phling is one of the most intriguing. It streams music stored on your PC to your mobile over a 3G connection, and has community features built in allowing you to share stuff with friends too. You’ll need an unlimited data plan to make use of it without ending up with a huge bill, but it’s well worth a look. Read more

3. amAze
The best things in life are free, so a wise man once said (well, Janet Jackson and Luther Vandross, but they are wise), and such is the case with amAze’s mobile GPS application, which being funded by advertising is free to use. It works with phones’ built-in GPS chips, or in most cases, via Bluetooth with an external antenna. Fire it up, and route-finding goodness is yours for the taking. Read more

4. Opera Mini
More and more people know they can surf the internetweb from their mobile phone every month, but for the moment, few realise they can actually download extra browsers to do it with. Opera Mini is about the best mobile browser we’ve seen, with nifty iPhone-style zooming and server-side page rendering to squeeze websites onto your phone using less data (and thus increasing the speed / decreasing the cost). Read more

5.Mobispine
RSS on mobile hasn’t really tapped into the mainstream consciousness yet, but 2008 could be its year. It’s a ‘mobile media browser’ that combines slick RSS capabilities with plug-ins for sites like Facebook and Twitter, ensuring you’re never left short of information on the go. In other words, it’ll either vastly increase or decrease your mobile productivity - which in either case is a good thing. Read more