GLOBAL – It’s that time of the week again where we turn our eyes to the rest of the Web, to bring you some news of a different kind. We’ve pulled together some news about the future of voice communications, a couple of videos of people testing the robustness of Nokia phones, how to create a keyboard on a touchscreen and more.

• Does voice have a future? For a while now, we’ve been hearing that talking on your phone is in decline compared to the use of data services. VisionMobile has an interesting post about how voice might evolve over the next few years.
• For years now, we’ve all used a certain un-named search engine for all our Internet browsing needs, as less face it, there’s not been much competition. Bing announced this week that it’s been agreed that Blackberry will use Bing as the preferred search provider and the default map application for new devices across the range, globally.
• If you’ve got a touchscreen phone, you’ve obviously not got the physical keyboard that lots of people rely on when typing out messages or dialling numbers. However, there will be an on screen keyboard that pops up when needed for such occasions. Making a great virtual keyboard is a bit of a task, but a team of people from a Microsoft Research team and the Windows Phone 7 product group is up for the challenge. Eric Badger said this: “We wanted to have the best text-input solution in the world”. See how they’re getting on.
• We noticed an update to Skype for Symbian which brings it to v2.0. For anyone who’s ever used Skype, which we’re sure is most of you, you’ll know it’s a great app for talking to people across the world, often paying very little or absolutely nothing at all. V2.0 brings a few updates such as contact sharing and contact finder. More details over at the Skype Blog.
• Last Friday, James brought us a story that showed the forever-lasting, never-dying Nokia phone that was lost in a garden for a year, and still worked. Here’s a video of a phone – an old phone, produced roughly in 2005 – that puts it through some home-made rugged testing. Thrown from a couple of windows into a rain-drenched garden from various heights and finally onto some concrete, the Nokia lives to tell the tale.
• From throwing phones into the garden to dunking them into water to see if they will still work. NoXplod33 shows that a Nokia 5800 playing some music, will still continue to work after about ten seconds of being completely submerged into a sink filled with water.

Please, do not try throw your working Nokia phone out of a window or dunk it deliberately into water, this is highly un-recommended.

Have you seen any other news this week we should’ve been reporting on? Let us know, below.