Each week MobileCrunchArcade compiles the biggest news from the world of mobile gaming.

If you don’t have the time to practice your dating skills with real people, you may want to play Fantasy Date from Sprint and MoConDi. Fantasy Date is a WAP-based interactive mobile video dating game that features role-playing options that leads players through hook-up and relationship challenges. Fantasy Date incorporates the mobile web, framing and mobile video into one experience. As a player, you are offered three different choices to make when interacting with your hook-up. Your choices will determine the outcome of the dating experience. Fantasy Date is available only on Sprint’s network for $2.99 and can be found in the “Chat & Dating” category of the Sprint homepage. If you have a significant other don’t get caught playing this game, it could make for a lonely New Year.

Digital Chocolate and Greystripe started releasing some Digital Chocolate mobile games free through an ad-supported mobile game portal GameJump.com and through the mobile web (http://gjmp.tw). Six Digital Chocolate games are now available free from Greystripe including: Café Solitaire, Johnny Crash, Mafia Wars, Night Club Empire, Rollercoaster Rush and Tower Bloxx. These games are free so don’t let a few ads get in the way of downloading them to your handset. The only thing better than free is getting paid to play games.

Tablestar Games announced it will soon be releasing Swatches for the iPhone and iPod. Swatches is a puzzle game that revolves around competing to control the largest blocks of color against five live opponents or the AI. The game has a chat function that lets players communicate with one another while competing online. There aren’t many details about game play yet, but if a virtual quilting contest is your idea of fun, Swatches may be too intense for you.

If going to the animal shelter and adopting a pet is too much of a hassle, Nokia is coming out with Creebies next year. While it may sound like a nasty disease picked up from a one-night-stand after playing Fantasy Date, Creebies is a virtual pet game for the N-Gage platform. You start the game with a trailer and some digital money and try to raise some wholesome monsters with tender loving care. If one of the little darlings gets out of hand or too cute for your tastes, you can put them up for adoption or give them to a friend. Virtual pets are nice to have around the mobile phone. They can give so much love and never smell up your pocket.

That is this week Mobile Gaming News Roundup. Remember to exercise those thumbs, recharge the battery and never take your eyes off the screen.

Security researches at Arbor Networks are predicting that the iPhone will be subject to a serious attack in 2008. The attacks will likely take the form of malware embedded in photos or video. In the past the iPhone has been vulnerable to such attacks through a bug in its handling of TIFF images. A recent update has solved the problem. Former versions of Apple’s firmware used a version of the libtiff library that was susceptible to buffer-overflow attacks.

HD Moore, a security researcher and hacker, revealed in October that the TIFF exploit would allow malicious hackers access the phone’s root level. All the iPhone’s key applications run as root processes and by exploiting the TIFF bug a hacker can take control of the phone.

Arbor Networks thinks that the challenge to be the first to hack the iPhone and take control of the phone is an enticement for hackers too big to pass up.

“2007 was the year of the browser exploit, the data breach, spyware, and the storm worm,” the Arbor report said. “We expect 2008 to be the year of the iPhone attack, the Chinese Hacker, P2P network spammers, and the hijacking of the Storm botnet.”

The prediction is hardly a risky one, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations for nCircle Security. “Predicting a higher rate of attacks on the iPhone is like saying there will be more people trying to hack Leopard in 2008,” he wrote in an e-mail.

“This is an obvious direction for the hacking community,” he added. “Those who hack for good or bad are always interested in the newest target and even better is a new target with a large install base.”

Things will change in 2008, Storms said, with Apple’s release of a software development kit for the iPhone. “Once the SDK releases, everyday users will be installing third-party applications without having to risk an iBrick,” he said, referring to the fact that uses who installed unlocking software found their phones were inoperative after an Apple firmware upgrade.

“The tools and methods which Apple integrates into the iPhone to protect users from malware developed with the SDK is what will be getting significant attention in 2008,” he said, predicting that AT&T and all Wi-Fi networks in range of the iPhone will be the next target.

“Imagine a successful mobile worm that distributes itself over both cellular and Wi-Fi,” he concluded. “That’s a day that security professionals have been worrying about for years.”

Arbor Networks

A Canadian oil-field worker was stunned to get a C$85,000 ($83,700) cell phone bill but has been able to cut the damage down to C$3,400.

News stories about Piotr Staniaszek have been traveling the globe, making the 22 year-old oil and gas well tester a figure of international media attention after his father went to the press to complain about the size of his son’s cell phone bill. Staniaszek thought his phone could be used as a modem for his computer as part of his C$10 unlimited browser plan from Bell Mobility, a division of Bell Canada.

To help fight the loneliness of the Alberta oil fields, Staniaszek downloaded movies and other files unaware of the charges they would incur.

“He’s working in the field sometimes, alone, in the shack. What to do? Drink vodka or go on the Internet?” Staniaszek’s father told Reuters on Thursday from Calgary, Alberta.

“Now it’s $85,000 and nobody told him,” he said.

Bell has agreed to reduce the bill to C$3,400 but Staniaszek says he will fight this too. Bell says the plan is not intended for downloading files to a computer, and that’s clear in the contract.

If you have ever been out and about and come up with a great thought or idea but didn’t have any way to write it down, now you can use the free service from kwiry to help you remember all those thoughts in your head. If a great idea hits you, or you see something you want to checkout later, simply text it to 59479 (k-w-i-r-y) and it’s waiting for you at kwiry.com and in your email.

The service provided by kwiry should appeal to anyone who’s comfortable with texting and doesn’t want to be bothered with carrying a pen and paper around for when something pops into the head. The site lets you bring your community to kwiry.com (with friends, photos, and comments) or lets you bring your kwirys to your community (it works with facebook, iGoogle, myYahoo and others).

It won’t hurt to try this service. The cost you have to pay is your standard text messaging rates. Why let all those great thoughts go to waste? Maybe you’ll save an idea for a great novel or come up with an idea that lands you a big promotion.

kwiry

Kwiry, an SMS reminder service is officially launching today. The team has been working on the product for the last year after taking $1 million in funding from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

The product is pretty straight forward. It lets you SMS reminders to yourself while you’re on the go. Hear about a new band, product, or restaurant, but don’t have anywhere to save it? Just message the reminder (i.e. Alicia Keyes) to K-W-I-R-Y (59479) and the service will email you a list of search results related to the message. The “Kwiry’s” are also saved to your online account, where you can organize and review your previous messages or those of your friends.

The product’s dependence on SMS is designed to make it work with the large number of “dumb” phones out there. However, my sense is that a product designed for collecting reminders on the go has a rather narrow use case. When I hear about something I’m interested in, I have several more options before SMSing a new service. I can simply remember it until I get to my computer, write it down, or search for it immediately. Google has an SMS product that works even on my “not-so-smart” Katana.

The service does make sense as an application on top of Twitter’s growing platform. In fact, Kwiry has integrated with Twitter. After registering your Twitter user name with Kwiry you can add Kwirys by Twittering direct messages to username Kwiry.

Eight consumer and public-interest groups filed a petition with the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) asking to prohibit carriers from blocking advertisements sent via text messaging. This petition comes after Verizon Wireless decided in September to block text messages on its network from abortion rights group Naral ProChoice America. The decision was reversed the same day and the ads were allowed.

“Mobile carriers currently can and do arbitrarily decide what customers to serve and which speech to allow on text messages, refusing to serve those that they find controversial or that compete with the mobile carriers’ services,” says the petition, filed Tuesday. “This type of discrimination would be unthinkable and illegal in the world of voice communications, and it should be so in the world of text messaging as well.”

Mobile carriers have also blocked VoIP (voice over the Internet Protocol) provider Rebtel from advertising its mobile voice calls on their networks. Carriers “publicly admitted that they denied Rebtel’s request because Rebtel’s services competed with their own,” the petition says. “The wireless industry should not be permitted to make these discriminatory decisions.”

Verizon Wireless spokesman Jeffrey Nelson doesn’t think carriers should have to display advertising from competitors. Nelson said Verizon’s decision not to run ads from Rebtel is similar to a newspaper not running an ad for another newspaper. “We’re not blocking anything,” he said. “We’re not allowing them to advertise.”

If the petition is granted by the FCC, spam may be coming to your mobile phone by way of text messaging. Nelson said that Verizon currently blocks between 100 million and 200 million unwanted text messages advertising pornography and other products. Nelson fears too many unsolicited text messages will cause people to stop using the service.

“I don’t think [the consumer groups] understand what would happen if they’re successful,” he said. “If the folks who filed with the FCC get their way, it’d be a free-for-all.”

In some parts of southeastern Asia, mobile phone subscribers are already getting over 20 spam text messages a day. This can be a drag on the service and make it less convenient. But consumer groups fear that carriers have too much power when it comes to censoring what messages a person can receive.

“For many people, texting has replaced calling as a way of keeping in touch,” Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, said in a statement. “We need to have the FCC set the rules for the entire industry, and for a generation of people that depends on texting. There is no place for discrimination in text messaging.”

GetMobio is a cellphone based application platform that brings a lot of advanced applications to non-smart phones. They’ve been releasing a steady stream of new applications since launching earlier this year. They have applications for movies, trivia, cheap gas, and more. Now they’re releasing a recipe app that makes it easy for those not blessed with an iPhone to find meals while on the go.

MobileCrunch has covered several other mobile content platforms such as Bluepulse, Widset, and ZenZui.

Dave Matthews Band and Van Halen have been holding out from releasing their music as ringtones. But pressure from fans and promoters has caused these high-profile acts to release ringtones available on AT&T Mobility.

AT&T Mobility has exclusive access to a handful of Dave Matthews Band’s ringtones made from live recordings. In the near future studio tracks will be made into ringtones. Van Halen is making its most popular songs available to all wireless operators but for a limited time will be released only to AT&T customers.

Industry insiders think that popular bands are following the lead of supergroups like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC by getting into the ringtone market. There appears to be less of a taboo against dissecting music into ringtones for fans.

AT&T director of music and personalization products Mark Nagel says the Dave Matthews deal was a result of simply communicating the demand.

"It was a case where he was being searched for literally thousands of times a month with no content to give," he says. "We took those figures to the label and the band's management and let them know that people are asking for this. At the end of the day, it's their decision."

In Van Halen's case, the band is on a reunion tour. Capitalizing on that is one reason behind not only making the ringtones available at long last, but for doing so in a nonexclusive fashion.

"They have all kinds of fans using all types of operators," says David Dorn, senior VP of new-media strategy for Rhino, which manages the Van Halen catalog. "We just thought it made the most sense, with the band being on the road, to work with all of our partners."

Music purists may see this development as selling out to corporations by bastardizing the music to fit a ringtone format. But many fans see their favorite artists as icons that they are proud to display, even if just for a few seconds at the supermarket.

AT&T Mobility

U.S. users of Microsoft’s MSN Mobile began to see advertisements on the service for the first time yesterday. Users in Belgium, France, Japan, Spain and the U.K. have been viewing ads for a while now. The technology for mobile advertisements comes from a recent acquisition by Microsoft of ScreenTonic. Paramount Pictures and Jaguar Cars are among the first companies to advertise on MSN Mobile in the U.S. market.

Microsoft has had a slow start when it comes to bringing PC-based online advertising to mobile users but the company has the potential to catch its competitors soon. “AOL and Yahoo have previously introduced display ads, but the mobile user base is still on the small side compared to the Net, so they’re not truly late,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst following mobile search as part of a joint venture between Sterling Market Research and Opus Research. “It’s not like there’s a huge opportunity cost here or revenue lost.” Google also supports ads for mobile users.

Sterling thinks mobile advertising is comparable to PC advertising in terms of market share from search leaders. But because the mobile market is so small right now and ripe for change, any market participant could take the lead. “It’ll continue to be fluid for the foreseeable future,” he said.

Microsoft didn’t just stick MSN Mobile users with new ads. A new feature allows you to buy movie tickets over the network through MovieTickets. There is a deal in the works with Thumbplay to offer ringtones, wallpaper, games and video clips. Mobile users can get daily horoscopes too. I portend great profits for MSN Mobile.

MSN Mobile
ScreenTonic

MobileCrunch has been following Omnifone’s MusicStation this year (See: MusicStation) and the music service is sweeping the globe with coverage. And for good reason, MusicStation subscribers can download unlimited music for a weekly fee to their mobile phones. Over 1.2 million tracks are available and in the United Kingdom the service only costs 1.99 pounds a week.

MusicStation combines the features of a MP3 player with the browse, search and celebrity play list features of a desktop on your mobile phone. MusicStation has an easy to use interface that allows the user to download and search for items while music is playing.

North America, South America and Antarctica are the only three continents where MusicStation isn’t available. If you live in any of these countries and enjoy music, checkout MusicStation:

Australia
Belgium
Czech Republic
France
Germany
Greece
Hong Kong
Hungary
India
Ireland
Italy
Netherlands
New Zealand
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Singapore
South Africa
Spain

Omnifone

When children are off on their own parents can worry about a child’s welfare. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo will launch a second parent friendly mobile phone for children. The first phone of this type was offered in 2006 and sold around 500,000 units. The new unit, F801i, will go on sale in Japan later this month.

The F801i has a 100-decibel alarm that a child can activate by pulling on a cord. When the alarm is activated the phone flashes and sends an e-mail to the child’s parents. The e-mail includes information gathered by a Global Positioning System so the location of the child can be tracked. A silent alarm can be triggered by pressing a button on the side of the cell phone.

The new model of the F801i has a remote controller that children can wear like a wristwatch. This feature allows the phone to be locked if the child is separated from the phone over a certain distance. If the child gets within 10 meters of the phone after it is locked, the device will ring, making it easier to find. The phone will also send parents an e-mail if it is separated from the controller for more than 5 minutes.

The F801i is Web friendly to children by blocking adult sites and can be programmed to block access to the Internet between 10pm and 6am. Like the earlier version of the phone, a screwdriver is required to remove the battery. This prevents children from removing the battery to prevent the phone’s tracking ability.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on what you think about tracking children this closely, the F801i is only sold in Japan and there are no thoughts of selling it in other countries.

NTT DoCoMo

Each week MobileCrunchArcade compiles the biggest news from the world of mobile gaming.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is coming to an N-Gage near you. The game casts players as Darth Vader’s “Secret Apprentice” and takes place between the largely unexplored era between Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope. You will be able to harness the Force while helping Darth Vader rid the Galaxy of Jedi. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Mobile will allow players to enter tournaments, track scores and download new content trough N-Gage Arena services. I can’t wait to beat on that green toad thing which never learned to use proper sentence structure.

We have some sage advice from Greg Ballard, Glu’s president and CEO. He is worried that too many low quality mobile games may make the handset games go the way of the old Atari. I guess an Atari was some sort of game thing from ancient times, back when cell phones were the size of your favorite basketball player’s shoe size.

“Quality is tied to quantity,” he said. “In the Atari disaster, there were too many games on the system, and the quality of those games became less and less relevant to consumers, who became so overwhelmed by choices, they eventually stopped buying. We’re getting right back to the Atari days with mobile: many different titles are seeking attention on the decks, and nothing good is going to come of that.”

I’m all for quality games but not worried about being swamped with bad games. As long as everyone who plays cell phone games reads MobileCrunch there shouldn’t be a problem, right?

Nokia is set to launch N-Gage next week. Dribs and drabs have come out about N-Gage but details are sketchy and there probably won’t be a big fanfare. It looks as though the N81 will be the first mobile phone to be fully eN-Gaged, with the N73 soon to follow.

“We’re going to have an easier roll-out with a more managed environment,” says Kaidesoja. “We are not going to do all the tricks and treats that we have said on Day One. It’s a complex service with all the billing and communities and other features, so we need
to roll it out gradually.”

Roll it anyway your want to, as long as its legal and the games are good.

Artificial Life has acquired the rights to publish a game based on Paramount Pictures’ movie, Braveheart. The game is expected to come out next year and will be an action game with real-time strategy features and enhanced 3D graphics. Wow, the game sounds better than the movie. Did you ever wonder if Mel Gibson carried such a large sword in the movie to overcompensate for certain male shortcomings?

That is this week’s MobileCrunch Arcade game roundup. Remember, exercise those thumbs, recharge the battery and never take your eyes off the screen.

The smartphone manufacturer Palm lowered its second quarter numbers and said it has higher than expected losses. The company is blaming the poor performance on the delay of a product release.

Palm had predicted sales for the quarter to be between $370 and $380 million but only posted sales around $350 million. Market analysts had expected sales to be around $376 million.

In October Palm figured it would lose 1 to 3 cents a share but losses are expected to be between 22 to 24 cents a share, now that all the numbers have been crunched. A year ago, Palm earned 12 cents a share on sales of $393 million.

A full report on Palm’s second quarter numbers will be released on December 18.

Palm

In 2005 a mobile phone film festival debuted in France. Today in Yokohama Japan a similar display of cellphone generated art is being featured at The Pocket Films Festival. Over 400 international entries have been narrowed down to 48 movies deemed worthy of showing.

One of the judges, Masaki Fujihata, a film professor, says that mobile phones are an important tool in an emerging art form.

“The cell phone is something you always carry around and so you can roll the camera on a whim,” he said. “There’s such an intimacy between the work and its creator. It’s spontaneous.”

Fujihata said he was particularly fond of the nine-minute “Walkers,” whose main character is a pair of sneakers that takes a trip on a train.

These types of films aren’t for everyone. Yukio Angawa, an employee at a telecommunications company, was baffled by “Walkers.”

“It’s not that entertaining,” said the 28-year-old fan of Hollywood movies. “It’s sure different from regular movies.”

Part of the appeal of this type of work is that it is generated by one person or a small group of people working with inexpensive equipment and editing tools. MobileCrunch reported earlier this month that in the future You Will Control 25% of Entertainment by 2012. Mobile phone entertainment generated by peer groups is predicted to become part of daily life. A film festival honoring this type of artwork is a well founded concept.

“The cell phone is an extremely personal tool. It’s almost part of your body,” said Jean-Louis Boissier, a French media artist and professor at University of Paris 8, in town for the festival.

“Half the world’s population owns a cell phone,” he said. “Art that comes from such numbers holds potential for historic change.”

Web based jailbreaker AppSnap has executed its code for iPhone liberation over 1 million times. The hack makes it possible to run unsanctioned applications on your iPhone, such as an eBook reader or Blackjack for phones of firmware 1.1.1. It doesn’t free your phone from the AT&T network, though.

The hack works by exploiting the way the iPhone’s firmware handles TIFF images, but patches that flaw after the jailbreak is completed.

iPhone Atlas is reporting that the application has recieved over 2,000 donations in exchange for their hard work.

Some people in the midwest are discovering that Amazon’s recently “>launched Kindle doesn’t work as advertised. They’ve found that Kindle’s killer feature, wireless downloads of books, doesn’t work because Kindle can’t connect to their mobile networks. It borders on a “bait and switch” tactc and was a problem conveniently left out of the press releases.

Steve Saroff of Missoula, Montana discovered the issue when he tried to connect to the mobile network it needs to download new purchases. After several calls to tech support, they finally admitted the problem. You can follow the full thread here and another here.

So much for the future of digital distribution.

An executive at Nokia predicts that in a few years mobile phones will have the ability to shoot video in HD. Cellphones with cameras are being used as camcorders but the video quality isn’t good. Nokia launched the N95 this year and the handset has the ability to shoot video with television quality. But in a few years those home movies may be shot in HD with yours mobile phone.

“It’s coming. Technically, we are a couple of years away,” Nokia’s Chief Technology Officer Tero Ojanpera told Reuters in an interview. “It’s still a few years away.”

Ben Wood, head of research at CCS Insight, said phone vendors have several technical challenges ahead of them — video weighs on the battery life of power-hungry phones and increasing video quality affects the quality of the still camera.

“Video technology is there, but it has not reached huge momentum,” said Wood.

Analyst Alan Brown of research firm Gartner said he estimated 8-10 percent of cellphones might have HD video capability by 2010 or 2011. “I can’t see it getting much bigger by then,” he said.

Orange is reporting that of the 30,000 iPhones they sold in the first five days, 20% were purchased unlocked for 749 euros. With contract the phones sell for 399 euros, meaning 6000 users opted to pay more for complete phone portability.

This makes perfect sense. First off, unlocked phones are the norm overseas and paying a premium for a good product is understood and accepted. The false subsidies offered by carriers in the U.S. clearly isn’t working — witness Verizon’s shocking announcement — and things have to change. I’m taking bets: Who thinks that iPhone 2.0 will come out unlocked in the US?

20% of iPhones in France unlocked [BBC]

In the last few weeks, Apple has been embroiled in a lawsuit brought by Vodafone against T-Mobile of Germany. In an initial ruling, a German court enforced an injunction against T-Mobile’s exclusive right to sell a locked iPhone only. To comply with the order, T-Mobile began selling an unlocked version of the handset for 999 euros, as compared to a locked version of the same device that sells for 399 euros. The Hamburg District Court ruled today that T-Mobile can sell the iPhone with a two-year service contract and doesn’t have to sell iPhones that are free from the 24 month commitment.

“We are pleased with the outcome,” T-Mobile spokesman Rene Bresken said. Shares of Deutsche Telekom gained 1.2 percent after the decision to 15.28 euros ($22.41) in Frankfurt.

Orange, the French company that won the contract to sell iPhones in France, followed the injunction ordered by the German court and sold both locked and unlocked versions of Apple’s product. The unraveling of the exclusive right to sell the iPhone with a two-year contract may have affected Apple’s dealings with other service providers around the World. Apple had been negotiating with China Mobile to sell the iPhone in China but talks have stalled recently. The iPhone is to be launched in other Asian markets in 2008. Today’s ruling gives new life to the exclusivity of the iPhone.

We’ll have to wait and see if Orange gives up on selling an unlocked version of the iPhone. I’m sure Apple is putting what pressure it can on Orange to cease selling unlocked handsets. Apple shares in the revenue generated from carriers that sell locked iPhones and opening any legitimate sales of unlocked devices puts the concept of a locked iPhone in jeopardy.

The January 2008 issue of Consumer Reports contains the publication’s annual survey of cellphone service. If you want to see how your service provider stacks up against the competition you may want to get a copy. Over 47,000 readers in 20 metropolitan areas across the country were surveyed by Consumer report’s National Research Center.

The high cost of service and mandatory contract extensions were listed as the top two complaints made by survey respondents. Over 60% of those surveyed who made changes to their service plan in the past year said they were required to extend their contract. Consumer Reports claims this may be an under estimation of contract extension problems. According to recent legal complaints by consumers, some carriers don’t make customers aware that they are extending a service contract when a plan is changed before the contract ends.

Verizon and Alltel scored the highest in this year’s survey and T-Mobile matched satisfaction rates for Verizon in most of the cities surveyed. Consumer Reports gives good marks for T-Mobile plans that generally offer more service for the money than those of Verizon or Alltel.

All the service providers rated by Consumer Reports have pledged to prorate early-termination fees after Verizon announced it was leading the industry in this. Mandatory contract extensions are also expected to become more consumer friendly after Alltel and T-Mobile said they would change how business was done in the past.

If your mobile bill is too high, Consumer Reports offers five tips for saving money when you are connected and on-the-go:

1. Look into special-caller deals. Verizon Wireless and AT&T don’t charge for calls to other customers using the same service. Alltel’s My Circle plans provide free calling to any 10 designated wireless or landline numbers with any carrier; T-Mobile’s myFaves plans do the same, for five numbers.

2. Avoid overage charges. Consumers who plan on being on the cell more than usual can temporarily increase the monthly minute allotment to avoid overage charges as high as 45 cents per minute. Consumers should also check bills to ensure they are not running significantly under or over the plan’s minutes.

3. Control your child’s phone use. If runaway costs for a child’s cellphone are a problem, consider AT&T’s Smart Limits for Wireless service. It’s a $5-a-month option that allows consumers to control, via the Web, the numbers a child can call, text, or instant message, and the timing and duration of that activity.

4. Shop around for the extras. Comparing carriers or plans only by voice minutes can be an expensive mistake for consumers who will also be heavily using the phone’s other capabilities. Text messaging, now used by more than half of the respondents in Consumer Reports Annual Survey of Cell-Phone Service, can cost as much as 15 cents per message a la carte, more for multimedia attachments such as photos. By comparison, one can pay
as little as a penny per message in a monthly bundle. Rates vary similarly for a data plan for Web access.

5. Consider a pre-paid phone. Paying for calls by the minute may save money, especially for consumers who don’t usually come close to using up the time allotted by the fewest-minutes plans, typically 300 minutes a month. And no contract is required.

This issue of Consumer Reports also rates 60 phones and Bluetooth headsets. Portions of the report can be read free online at ConsumerReports.org.