Note the BS

The biggest issue with 4G networks is handover. When you’re speeding down the highway, your cellphone and wireless devices constantly hop from station to station, picking up connectivity as you go along. In a perfect world, this handover is seamless but, as we all know, in the real world it isn’t poifect.

Nortel just tested their LTE standard with vehicles moving between coverage sites at about 60 miles an hour, a fairly large breakthroug in the 4G LTE spae. When will you get to use your own LTE dongle? Not in a while, sadly, but keep dreaming.

Remember that Silver MOTO Q we mentioned had found its way into a few AT&T stores last week? Its made the jump to the land of the official, available immediately as an AT&T exclusive.

As mentioned before, it’s pretty much a MOTO Q9h pre-flashed with Windows Mobile 6.1 and given a flashy silver makeover. Same quad-band radio, UMTS dual-band 3G, 2.0 megapixel camera — same everything else.

If you’ve been lookin’ to grab a Q9h but just weren’t feeling the black, you can nab one today for $149.99 if you’ll promise to be AT&T’s girlfriend for 2 years.

Starting tomorrow, Radio Shack will be selling the Samsung Instinct to new Sprint customers for $99. If you’re an existing Sprint customer looking to upgrade, it’ll cost you the normal price of $129. The sale is going on through Labor Day, so if you’re going to Radio Shack anyway, why not pick up a new Instinct?

What am I saying? Nobody goes to Radio Shack. What I meant to say was if you’re looking to buy a new Instinct, why not drop into Radio Shack for the first time in ten years? Ah, that’s more like it.

The Samsung SCH-u810 and the SCH-i770, both from Samsung, should offer red hot roaming capabilities to those stuck on CDMA networks in the states. These two phones, along with a Novatel USB dongle and internal WWAN adapter for laptops, will make up Verizon’s Q3 global offerings, ensuring you won’t go phone-less when you travel. The i770 is a BlackJack-esque QWERTY with quad-band GSM, G.P.S. and Wi-Fi along with EVDO. The u810 is pretty boring.

via AOL

So we return to the Palm Treo Pro, a $549 unlocked Windows Mobile Treo aimed squarely at the business set. It’s been about a week and I’ve used this guy off and on. It kept a nice charge – two days, for the most part, without much data use – and fit nicely in the pocket. But is it the Treo of which we all incessantly dream? Is it the Treo that will bring us closer to world peace and better burritos on the East Coast? Is this the Treo for you?

Yes, it is the Treo for you if you are a business professional forced to use Windows Mobile and you travel quite a bit and hardware price is no object. This is also the Treo for you if you’re buying a few cellphones for the CEO and the CFO and you want them to be productive without having to change your Windows-based IT and communications infrastructure. If you are neither of those people, think of the Treo Pro as a vision of Palm’s future.

The Treo Pro is one of Palm’s most attractive Treos to date. Gone is the lumpen plastic of the Centro and the low-gloss ho-hummery of the 800w. Whereas the Centro and the 800w took design cues from the lower end of the market, Treo tapped HTC to design this new looker and for good reason. The RIM, in a general, sense, was eating their enterprise lunch and the Centro was doing just fine.

So we have the Treo Pro. As its name implies, this isn’t for amateurs. Because it’s unlocked and unsubsidized you’d better have a damn good reason for going Windows Mobile. This could mean IT departments buying in bulk for their executives or a mobile professional who wants a messaging phone but still likes ActiveSync. Europe loves them some Windows Mobile, so their unlocked model is a good move. The US market, sadly, looks at expensive phones and then looks elsewhere. The Blackberry Curve didn’t get where it is on its good looks.

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There are really only three things you need to know about JuiceCaster:

1. JuiceCaster is a free application which lets you upload videos, pictures, and status updates (where appropriate) to a wide variety of popular social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Photobucket, and a handful of others. It also acts as a bit of a social network of its own, with custom groups for sharing status and content updates.
2. JuiceCaster for BlackBerry is now available in an open beta. You can sign up here.
3. Regardless of its name, JuiceCaster has absolutely nothing to do with projecting liquids extracted from fruits.

I’m on the road without a BlackBerry in sight, so you’ll have to boulder on alone this time. Check it out, and let us know what you think.

[Via CrackBerry]

So, pretend you’re Motorola’s handset division for a second. You’re constantly under fire from the vast majority of the blog-bearing internet for failing to create anything vaguely interesting since 2003 1996. Your future existence relies on the success of two handsets. What do you do?

Apparently, you strive to create the ugliest handset the world has seen in a really, really long time. Target let some details slip on this monstrosity on the way for Boost Mobile (check it out yourself – just punch B001DE4BF2 into the search box), and we can only hope that the image shown is a gag placeholder. If the brown/silver/purple color scheme doesn’t have you drooling, the oh-so-chic ginormous external antenna surely will.

All we know about it so far is that it’s headed for Boost prepaid, its got GPS, and 3.5 hours of talk time. Oh, and that it’s really, really ugly.

EA Games pushes out an iPhone port Tetris, and sells it for $9.99. An independent developer goes and makes his own Tetris clone (as has been done on just about every single electronic device ever created since the dawn of man) called Tris and offers it for the world for free. This is all going to go perfectly smooth, right?

Of course not. Tris’ developer Noah Witherspoon has received word from Apple legal that owners of the Tetris trademark, The Tetris® Company, have started to throw around legal jargon. As a result, Noah has pulled Tris from the App Store while figuring out where he stands legally.

Screw it, Noah. It’s Tetris. It’s the most heavily cloned game in the history of ever, and one with a long history of legal controversy. If you’re able to make a free alternative for something which would otherwise cost a Hamilton, more power to you. Rename it as “LOL FALLING SHAPES!”, and you’re good to go.

While Windows users got a few days of exclusivity on the firmware 2.0.2 jailbreaking front with the release of QuickPwn, Mac users are now free to get in on the fun.

The iPhone Dev Team released PwnageTool 2.0.3 this morning, which should be able to crack iPhones/iPod Touches running firmware 2.0.2. It comes pre-loaded with the most recent version of the Installer beta (b6) and German language support.

While QuickPwn for Mac is still in development, they’ve released a new version of QuickPwn for Windows which includes some UI enhancements and a few bug fixes. Much love to the iPhone Dev Team.

(Oh, and it should go without mentioning: Even if it weren’t beta software, this is still hacky and relatively risky. Take precautions, follow directions, and don’t blame us if your iPhone melts.)

Qualcomm’s mobile TV arm, MediaFLO has expanded its news coverage, just in time for the U.S. presidential race. The mobile TV service will now include three new 24/7 news channels: CNBC and MSNBC from NBC Universal and FOX News.

MediaFLO said the news services were timed to launch for the political party convention season.

MediaFLO USA’s mobile TV service is available to AT&T subscribers as AT&T Mobile TV and to Verizon Wireless customers as V CAST Mobile TV.

All three channels will offer simulcast programming, airing content at the same time as it appears on cable.

What would you rather pay for 200 megabytes of data while roaming international lands: $3993 dollars (204,800 kilobytes at a rate of $0.0195 per kilobyte, AT&Ts pay-per-kb rate), or a lump sum of 200 bucks per month? (Yeah, we know the only rational answer to that is “Screw that, both prices are ridiculous.”)

AT&T today unveiled the details for two new international data packages for iPhone users: $119.99 for 100mb (1.19 per megabyte) or $199.99 for 200mb (0.99 per megabyte). The packages are available while traveling to any of the 61 countries in which AT&T already offers 20 megabyte/50 megabyte smart phone data plan packages.

Sure, it’s cheaper – but it’s still absolutely ridiculous. I will never pay this much for bandwidth, and neither should you. There simply isn’t enough overhead anywhere in the system to justify it; be it AT&T or the international carriers, someone is gouging up the price to the point that it’s absurd. Find a LAN cafe, make friends with a local family, whatever – just don’t pay a friggin’ dollar per megabyte in 2008.

In its developers’ blog, Dan Morrill, Google’s ‘Developer Advocate’ explained why the company is not including GTalkService and Bluetooth in Android 1.0 SDK. In a nutshell, Google: “plain ran out of time.”

Specifically GTalkService was postponed due to security concerns that the company felt “placed a significant burden on the application developer to avoid security flaws and perform user and relationship management.”

While the Bluetooth was far enough along to be included in beta releases of the SDK, it “needed some clean-up before we can commit to it for the SDK…Rather than ship a broken API that we knew was going to change a lot, we chose not to include it.”

Google assures us that Bluetooth headsets will still work with the first round of Android-based handsets and that the company “absolutely intends to support a Bluetooth API in a future release,” though no specifics on when that will be.

Via the Android Developers Blog

The FCC has approved the latest product of the Hitachi, Casio partnership; an Exilim-branded 8-megapixel camera phone. Unfortunately, just because the FCC approved it doesn’t guarantee the swivel screened, clamshell will actually be launched in the U.S. anytime soon, but still it gives us a reason to hope. As a follow up to the W53CA, this new phone is called the W63CA.

According to the FCC docs, the W63CA is “a cellular phone for the global roaming of the CDMA method of 3G with the Bluetooth function and the FeliCa function sold in Japan.”

We’re guessing the handset features include more than just FeliCa, japan’s contactless payment solution and Bluetooth, most likely the display will feature the same 800 x 480 resolution as its predecessor.

More reason to hope the handset might land in the U.S. is the recent news that Japan hopes to promote its high end handsets in overseas markets.

Dammit. Finally the perfect HTC phone for a guy like me and it’s only going to be available in Europe. Who knows, maybe it’ll find its way over here someday. The S740 does NOT have a touchscreen (woo hoo!), has a full, tangible, real QWERTY keyboard (woo hoo!), and a real, big boy 12-key number pad (woo hoo!).

Add to that 7.2 Mbps HSDPA data, GPS, 3.2-megapixel camera, microSD expansion (256MB onboard), 2.4-inch QVGA screen, and Windows Mobile 6.1 hidden underneath HTC’s very-pretty UI and you’ve got what’s shaping up to be a nice little phone.

A firm release date isn’t available other than “from September 2008.” That’s, like, next month, though. Full press release after the jump.

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You know things are goin’ awry when your employees interpret “Confidential and proprietary material for authorized Verizon Wireless personnel and Agents only” to mean “Send this to the Boy Genius immediately.”

The document pretty much rounds up every nit pick the blogosphere has had with the iPhone 3G since day one — faux price drops, whonky data plans, etc — and presents it in easy-to-follow form for the sake of agents trying to persuade folks to stick with the ol’ VeeZeeDub.

I’ll let you peruse it to your likings but, when it comes right down to it, Verizon’s just bummed they can’t put “MYTH: VERIZON DOESN’T SELL THE IPHONE” on there.

[Via BGR]

Nokia announced two new handsets this morning, both revamped replacements of models yore.

First up is the Nokia N79, which will be replacing the N78 that hit the shelves only months ago. You ever meet a pair of twins, but its blatantly apparent which one got the good genes? The N79 got the good genes here. It’s got the 5 megapixel camera (up from 3.2), dual LED flash, 3G, GPS, and microSDHC support. Most importantly, it doesn’t have the N78’s nasty little thumb-ruining number pad.

Also being replaced is the N81, with the launch of the N85. It’s getting the same upgrade to 5 megapixels (up from 2), GPS/Geotagging capabilities, and a shiny new 2.6″ AMOLED screen. Looks like Nokia is indeed making the move to AMOLED, as we mentioned a few weeks ago.

Expect’em in the UK sometime near October, hopefully with an official North American release not too far thereafter.

[Via Electronista]

Shot of the N85 after the jump.

SCIENCE.

When murmurs of the new iPhone’s purported subpar 3G performance made its way around to Sweden, a company called Bluetest decided to try and determine once and for all if we all just had a case of the crazies.

They stuck an iPhone 3G into a $110,000 noise-free chamber along with a simulated base station, and tested communications in both directions. Then they did the same tests with a Sony Ericsson P1 and a Nokia N73. Turns out, they all performed about the same. Great news, right?

Unfortunately, the test doesn’t really prove anything. It appears that they only tested one of each handset, which wouldn’t expose flaws between batches. More importantly, it seems they only tested it against 3G, which completely ignores the EDGE/3G hand-off that many people believe to be the problem.

Oh well. At least we know the iPhone works great in a noise-proof box.

Full test details and results here

LG’s Voyager Titanium is Verizon’s latest touch-screen handset, and pretty much the same Voyager previously available in black but with a “lustrous titanium finish” and support for V CAST Music with Rhapsody and Visual Voice Mail.

The Voyager in Titanium is available for $149.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement. The V CAST Music with Rhapsody service is available for $14.99 monthly access and Visual Voice Mail is available for $2.99 monthly access, per line, plus airtime or megabyte charges and messaging fees, depending on a customer’s plan.

“Designed for the heaviest of texters,” the Blitz comes with a slide-out Qwerty keyboard, 2.2-inch screen and dedicated My Messaging key. Other features include: MP3 player with access Verizon Wireless’ V CAST Music and Rhapsody, expandable microSD slot with support for up to 4 GB support, 1.3-megapixel camera with a dedicated camera key, mobile Web-capable and more.

The Verizon Wireless Blitz is available for $69.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate and a new two-year customer agreement.

iRecord Pro now supports high quality, full D1, H.264 video encoding, lossless audio compression, timed recording, live streaming, direct recording to Windows PC or Macintosh computer hard disks and transcoding of existing digital contents to portable media player formats.

The iRecord Pro connects via standard AV connectors to any TV, set-top-box, digital video recorder, camcorder, VCR, DVD player, cassette and LP player, users then simply press a button, and iRecord Pro records content directly onto your 3G iPhone, any iPod, Sony PSP, Walkman, Nokia N95, N78 or computer.