Due its success in the U.S. and Canadian markets, 7-Eleven has expanded its prepaid wireless program to more than 400 stores in Singapore. The Singapore program is called 7-Connect and uses the 3G network of local operator M1. 7-Eleven says it is the first first retailer to debut a company-owned private-brand wireless program in Asia and, that it’s the first retailer to offer a pre-paid plan with free nights and weekends.

The 7-Connect prepaid “Free Nights and Weekends” plan is available for $30 per month and features: free local voice calls on nights and weekends, $10 bonus to use for other features such as SMS, rates as low as 8 cents per minute, 5-cent local 2-way text messaging, 15-cent global 2-way text messaging and carry-forward minutes, and full-service customer assistance in both Chinese and English.

The 7-Connect program was developed by Ztar Mobile of Dallas, TX.

Mobile media company SendMe has announced a partnership with mobile content provider Moderati to provide SendMeMobile’s members access to Moderati’s indie music catalog. Members who sign up for SendMe’s mobile content offering will be able to select and download ringtones from Moderati’s vast catalog, including songs from labels such as Beggars Group, TVT Records, Silva Screen and others. As part of the deal, SendMe will also include popular music from TV shows and movies, including James Bond, Charlie’s Angels, Ghostbusters, Rocky and more.

Russell Klein, co-founder and CEO of SendMe, said in a statement: “With the addition of Moderati to our ringtone catalog, our members can access their favorite indie music, TV show themes, college fight songs and more…we’re excited to work with Moderati to let our members choose from blockbuster hits and indie favorites – whatever suits their tastes.”

Even though the C905 demo video leaked out almost a week prior to its announcement, Sony Ericsson managed to keep the demo videos for the other handsets announced in June under wraps until now.

Released this morning, the demos show off the F305’s gesture-based gaming, the S302’s photo snapping prowess, and that the K330 and J132 are.. uh.. phones that can be used while standing or sitting.

Check out the other 3 videos after the jump.

Struggling Sprint Nextel suffered another defeat, as a California court ruled it would have to pay $73 million in a case challenging the carrier’s practice of charging customers a fee who want to cancel their contracts before they are up. Called early termination fees, Verizon Wireless and AT&T face similar suits in various state courts over the practice; the charges argue that customers should not have to pay to switch service providers. The FCC has even taken up the cause in an attempt to strike a balance between carriers’ and states’ abilities to regulate the fees customers are charged.

Scott Bursor, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, reportedly said that this decision “sounds the death knell for the industry’s petition seeking a preemption ruling from the FCC—a ruling the industry has never been able to win in court.”

While carriers have announced changes to their early termination fee structures, carriers still face multiple suits over the practice.

The California case ruled that Sprint owes its former customers roughly $73 million in refunds. But the ruling isn’t final, (is it ever?) and Sprint has two weeks to respond to the court’s decision, then the California Superior Court will make a final ruling.

With the Treo 800w lacking a standard wired headset/headphone jack, users were a bit surprised (read: mad) to find that the voice commands they’d grown accustomed to on other (cheaper) Palm handsets weren’t functional over Bluetooth.

Fortunately, it seems that voice-enabled features were just a bit delayed, rather than completely omitted. From this page over at Palm.com:

“Palm® Treo 800w Voice Dialing Over Bluetooth will be available soon as a download from this web page. Please return to this page in the coming days for the download and details”

No word yet when the update should roll out – hopefully “in the coming days” actually means what it implies.

Edit: Apparently, it meant “We rolled it out yesterday, but haven’t updated this page yet.” 800w users can get the update here.

[Via SlashPhone]

Looks like we have our first clue as to what SE might be announcing in two weeks.

Some resourceful gent over at the arabic Sony Ericsson community, SE4m, has managed to get their hands all up on an unreleased Sony Ericsson slider, and was kind enough to share the experience with the world.

Not a whole lot is known about the slider, tentatively labeled the G705. It’s packing a 3.2 megapixel camera, bluetooth, M2 expansion, and an LED flash, all on top of the A200 platform.

In other words, nothing too exciting just yet; yet another mid-range slider with a standard feature set. Perhaps some killer feature is getting lost in the translation?

More pictures over at [Unofficial SE Blog]

Hot on the tail of the Walkman trio announcement last week, rumor has it that Sony Ericsson’s looking to make another announcement within the next 2 weeks or so.

Sony Ericsson has had a fairly constant flow of announcements over the past few months. Unfortunately, outside of the C905 announcement back in June, they’ve all been pretty boring. It’s tough to get pumped about Bluetooth accessories.

Hopefully this next one is something worth writing home about.

[Via MobileCowboys via Unwired View]

The World Wide Web consortium or W3C announced new standards that it hopes will make mobile Web browsing easier. Published as a W3C recommendation, the groups says it Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 “condenses the experience of many mobile Web stakeholders into practical advice on creating mobile-friendly content.”

Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, leader of the W3C Mobile Web Activity program, said in a statement: “In support of the W3C mission of building One Web, we want to support the developer community by providing tools to enable a great mobile Web user experience.”

The groups says that it hopes its recommendations will help mobile content developers deal with the challenges of designing Web content for a variety of mobile devices, not just the iPhone or Android-based handsets. Along with its recommendations, the W3C released a mobile Web code checker that allows developers to test mobile-friendly Web code.

If 100 independent games go into development , 95 of them fizzle out once the coders realize how terribly boring the first chunk of the game development cycle can be. Between physics engines, sound engines, lighting engines, and all of the other groundwork elements that have to be done before the fun stuff starts, it’s a tough hill to climb.

Fortunately, there’s a short cut: engine licensing. By paying to use someone elses engine, you get to shave off an good amount of the work that comes before the fun stuff. It’s not an overnight path to John Carmack status, but it makes things a bit less painful.

In a move that’ll push even more people on the iPhone development party bus, GarageGames’ has ported their game engine, Torque, to the iPhone platform. Long used to make games for Windows, Mac, Linux, and the Xbox 360, Torque is a powerful 2d/3d game engine with a huge perk: it’s dirt cheap. While many engine licenses can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars (before royalties), Torque licenses generally cost indie developers less than $200. (Licensing for the iPhone will be done on a per title basis, so no concrete numbers are available)

It’s not so simple that it’ll trigger a flood of crap games, but convenient enough to entice otherwise uninterested talent. Good news all around!

[Via TUAW]

This morning, Sprint pushed a new default mobile portal called Sprint Web to around 40 of their handset models, with plans to bring it to all models within the next few weeks.

Built on technology developed by ChangingWorlds, Sprint Web takes a stab at what it thinks the viewer finds most important based off of past usage patterns, and places it at the top of the page. (Anyone wanna take bets on how long it’ll be before someone screams “ZOMG PRIVACY VIOLATION!!!”?)

They also added a Google-powered search box to the top of the page, right where it should be. Does anybody really use portals for anything besides search anyways?

Sprint customers should start seeing the change today, no action required.

[Via MocoNews]

Sometimes when you’re working on cramming a bunch of new features into a handset, you just can’t make the deadlines. Between compiling, testing, bug repo.. wait, it’s pretty much the Curve painted orange?

Erm, well, whatever the cause of the delays, the Curve Sunset has been pushed back a week. Expect it to roll out in all of its orangey-redness on T-Mobile come August 4th.

[Via TmoNews]

17 days after the iPhone 3G launch, could Apple still be pulling a crowd each day? A bit doubtful, I cruised over to the local Apple spot this morning. Sure enough, the line was about wrapped around the corner, 20+ iPhone-hopefuls deep.

In what’s being declared as an effort to make getting an iPhone 3G “easier and more convenient“, Apple has decided to open the doors to their retail stores at 8 a.m (2 hours earlier than usual) indefinitely. Additionally, they’ve added staff specifically trained in iPhone sales/activation who are able to “pre-qualify” customers while they wait in line. Once qualified, customers are given an iPhone voucher which can be traded anytime before the doors close.

While the new staff and pre-qualifying process oughtta speed things up, opening early seems more like an effort to get the morning mob out of the store (and out of the way) as early as possible.

[Via iLounge]

Motorola announced plans for another reorg, this time in its home and networks mobility unit. The division is the company’s second largest business unit after its flailing mobile phone unit. It supplies carriers and cable companies with networking equipment and currently is organized into product units including cable set-top boxes, modems, cable infrastructure and networking gear.

Reports say the reorganization will divide these businesses into three units: one for cable set-top boxes and digital video equipment, Internet-based video and modems; and then the company’s networks business will be divided in two units: one for traditional wireless equipment for carriers, and another focusing on next-generation technologies including WiMax and LTE.

For the rest of the scoop, see CG.

We’ve mentioned Skyfire before – they’re the ones aiming to hop in and face-punch all the other mobile browsers by doing everything the rest can’t; Flash, AJAX – all those fancy intertubes technologies generally reserved for desktop browsers.

After a $13 million funding round and a couple of roster expansions, Skyfire is all prepped for its Symbian launch – for beta testers, that is.

Sometime yesterday, Skyfire began passing out beta tickets to those who had signed up over the past few months. We haven’t actually found anyone in the beta so far, though, so no impressions just yet. If you made it in, feel free to drop a comment and let us know what you think.

If you’re totin’ an S60 third series device and want to check out Skyfire pre-launch, head on over to the beta signup page. It may be a while before they open the floodgates again, but its first-come-first-serve, so the sooner you sign up the better.

Airvana and Alcatel-Lucent announced plans to jointly develop a CDMA/EV-DO femtocell platform that incorporates an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). The two said that: “this initiative will ensure that CDMA/EV-DO network operators are able to make use of femtocells to improve the in-building wireless experience for their subscribers, while ensuring that these new network elements work seamlessly with the broader mobile network.”

Under the agreement, Airvana will rework its femtocell platform to include interfaces with Alcatel-Lucent’s IMS core.

See full post at CG.

Verizon reported another strong quarter, with little thanks to the few remaining landline customers. Verizon Communications, the 51% parent to Verizon Wireless, says its second quarter earnings were up 12%, reaching $1.88 billion, or 66 cents per share, from $1.68 billion, or 58 cents per share a year ago, even as more landline customers disconnected service. The company reported an 11.4% percent decline in residential landline customers, up from the 10.9% slide in the first quarter.

Read the rest of the quarterly highlights at CG.

Since MobileMe’s launch, Apple’s felt the heat over each and every item on the laundry list of nasty issues. They launched a product that simply wasn’t ready, and have been e-lambasted for it. Apple’s accustomed to a bit of name calling from blogs and forums, of course – but when Walt Mossberg calls your product “far too flawed”, it’s time to come out and say something.

Sometime yesterday, a new item popped up on the MobileMe section of Apple.com: Status. Looks like rather than going silent on the issues, Apple’s going to blog – the new Status page promises “new info hot off the presses even if we have to post corrections or further updates later.”

The first post, essentially a long-winded “We know – we’re working on it.”, tries to stay on the up-and-up (limited web access for the broken accounts, yay!). It does slip in one nasty little morsel: for those affected by the mail outage, 10% of messages received between July 16th and July 18th were lost. Oops! Oddly, the issues of reliability that have people chattering the most go unmentioned.

It’s also a bit odd that, after the opening line starting with”Steve Jobs has asked me..”, this first post goes unsigned. Who are you, Mystery MobileMe Man?

Regardless of its foibles, the communication from Apple is a nice gesture. To be honest, it’s just nice to see a big ol’ company talk to their customers in a way that doesn’t involve press releases.

Yesterday, analyst firm J. Gold Associates stated that they expect the Google Android and Nokia Symbian operating systems to merge into a single platform.

“We expect that within the next three-six months, Symbian and Android will combine to provide a single open source OS,” stated the firm. “Many of the same sponsors are involved in both initiatives.”

Not so, says Nokia. During the Mobile Web Wars roundtable today, an audience member asked for opinions on the merger rumor. David Rivas, VP of Technology Management for S60 Software at Nokia, just so happened to be on the panel, and he stated (twice) that there were no plans to merge the two platforms.

We’ll update with a clip (or at least a direct quote) after the round table is over.

Free video streaming by Ustream

Here’s the live stream of our Mobile Web Wars Roundtable, which starts at 3PM PT and ends at 5 PM. The Roundtable is a freewheeling discussion about whether the mobile Web is finally here and which platform will win going forward. While the iPhone seems like a slam dunk right now, can older platforms like Nokia’s Symbian or Windows Mobile replicate its success? Does Apple have anything to fear from Google’s Android? To help answer these questions we have an amazing group of mobile startup CEOs, top iPhone app developers, and other technologists on the RoundTable.

Please add your own comment or questions inside the video player or Twitter them to MobileWars. I will try to incorporate questions from the Web audience in the discussion.

We are also streaming live via cellphone camera on our Kyte channel (after the break).

The participants on the Roundtable are:

David Rivas, Nokia, Vice President of Technology Management for S60 Software
Walt Doyle, CEO Ulocate
Tom Conrad, CTO Pandora
Greg Yardley, CEO of Pinch Media CEO
Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous
David Hornik, partner, August Capital
Jed Stremel, Director of Mobile at Facebook (replacing Joe Hewitt)
Guy Ben-Artzi, Founder of Real Dice and CEO of Mytopia
Jason Devitt, CEO of Skydeck
Gannon Hall, CMO of Kyte
Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt
Marc Davis, chief scientists of Yahoo’s mobile group
Omar Hamoui, CEO of AdMob
Richard Wong, partner at Accel
Andreas Weigend, people & data (former chief scientist, Amazon)
Tatsuki Tomita, SVP of Consumer Product, Opera
Mike Rowehl, chief architect, SkyFire
Mary Ann Cotter, CEO, Cooking Capsules
John Faith , GM and VP of Mobile for MySpace

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With the Sidekick Gekko.. Gecco.. 2008 expected to launch next week, it’s not surprising that retailers have started to receive dummy floor models. With the list of retailers including a bajillion Best Buys around the nation, it’s also not surprising that pictures of these dummy floor models have landed online.

Least surprising of all? It still looks like every other Sidekick ever made.

Along with scoring a handful of pictures, CellPhoneSignal reports that a little birdie in a blue polo is claiming a (Best Buy exclusive?) July 27th release date, 3 days earlier than the previously expected date of July 30th.

A 3-day exclusive period that begins on a Sunday seems a bit odd, so don’t start planning a Saturday night parking lot camp-out just yet, Sidekick fans.