♪It’s close to midnight and something cheesy’s lurking in the dark
Under the moonlight, you see a phone that almost makes you barf♪

Man. Just last weekend, I was looking at my boring ol’ phone and thinking to myself: if only this were covered in faux-gold and diamonds and molded to look vaguely like Michael Jackson’s torso!

Some of the main features, according to the only available pictures, are “High-definition Camera”, “Ebook”, and “Calling leave word”. SOLD.

[Shanzhai Via Engadget Mobile]

My inbox is in pain. Almost immediately after I hit the publish button on last week’s iPhone 3GS vs Motorola Droid Smartphone Showdown, a torrential blast of comments and questions has been barraging just about every communication inlet I’ve got. Phone calls. Twitter DMs. Lots, and lots, and lots of emails. Across the board, it all seems to indicate one thing: people want more. We hear you.

There are a number of worthwhile topics I simply didn’t get a chance to touch on, and a few observations I’ve made since that are worth mentioning. For those, may we present: Round 2.

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Needless to say, AT&T’s none too happy about Verizon’s “Theres a Map for That” campaign. AT&T first complained about the ads back in October, saying they were misleading. Verizon responded by adding a few extra words and an itsy bitsy disclaimer – but that wasn’t enough for AT&T. Early this morning, AT&T filed a false advertising suit against Big Red, presumably in an effort to get the ads off the air as soon as possible.

This afternoon, AT&T sent out an internal memo regarding the lawsuit, and we’ve obtained a copy.

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Look – we’re certainly not the world’s biggest fans of Windows Mobile 6.5, but we still absolutely feel that anyone who has the opportunity to upgrade from 6.1 to 6.5 should certainly do so. If you’ve got a Samsung Jack, we’ve got good news: that “anyone” group now includes you.

Samsung just hit us up to let us know that the Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade package has gone live here. It doesn’t seem like the simplest upgrade process ever — you’ll definitely want to back up your stuff before you dive in — but in return you’ll get Internet Explorer 6, the Windows Mobile Marketplace, and all of the other goodies that Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard brings along.

So you’ve lurked the blogs, watched the unboxing, and read the coverage, and you just know: you want your Droid. You already know that most Verizon Stores are opening the doors a bit early at 7 AM to get your your fix – but what if you want it even earlier?

We just got word that a very, very limited number of Verizon stores will start peddling the Droid as soon as the clock ticks over to November 6th, from midnight to 2 a.m. The emphasis here is definitely on “limited”.

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While other carriers might finally be dipping their toes in the Android water this month, T-Mobile has been in this game for a long time. They got their first Android phone (the G1) out last October, and managed to launch two more (the myTouch and the CLIQ) within the year. It makes sense, then, that they’re the first to pipe up with some usage details.

T-Mobile today shared a few interesting Android statistics, and announced a number of ways they’d be increasing their support for the Android Market.

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Seeing as HTC’s CEO Peter Chou sorta slipped up and mentioned this back in October, it’s not exactly, you know, news news – but just in case you were a little bit shaky on the dates, HTC has gone ahead and confirmed that the 1 Ghz, WinMo 6.5-powered HTC HD2 will be coming to the United States “with a major US carrier in early 2010. ”

Note that they specifically say a US carrier – implying that it’ll be just one, at least right off the bat. The rumor mill has endlessly pinned this one as being destined for T-Mobile, so it’s at least somewhat safe to assume that’s where its heading.

Either way, we’ll be getting it a bit later than our overseas brethren; in the same press release, HTC disclosed that HD2 shipments in Europe and Taiwan are heading out right this second, and the rest of Asia should see it hit the shelves over the next few weeks.

Ack! Talk about bad timing. T-Mobile is just barely off the grill for their guilt-by-association connection with the Great Danger/Sidekick outage of 2009, and now they’re right back in the network-outage spotlight.

This time around, it appears that it’s their entire network – or at least, a big ol’ chunk of it – that has gone down. Voice and data are both coming up empty, Twitter is on fire with complaints, and T-Mobile has confirmed that they’re aware of the issues and have got engineers cracking away as we speak.

Tmo’s Statement on the matter:

All – We’re aware of the current service disruption. Our rapid response teams have been mobilized to restore service as quickly as possible. We will provide further updates as more information is available.

Rapid response team, eh? I’m imagining a band of men wearing pink berets, repelling onto cell towers out of a helicopter piloted by Catherine Zeta Jones.

When the iPhone OS 3.1 update rolled through town, it brought with it a handful of new features – but it also killed off one, not-so-official feature: unauthorized data tethering on AT&T.

Early this morning, the endlessly ingenious iPhone hacking community released Blacksn0w, a carrier unlock for the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Even if you have no need to plug in a different SIM card than what was originally intended, however, Blacksn0w still has its perks. Namely, it brings the aforementioned unauthorized data tethering right on back.

We’ve just walked through the process, and it went off without a hitch. If you’re interested in doing the same but don’t want to do it alone, we’ve thrown together a handy step-by-step guide, just for you.

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Good news, everyone! As you may have heard by now, the iPhone 3GS and 3G are now fully carrier-unlockable thanks to blacksn0w – but that’s not all!

In addition to making your iPhone carriers SIM card slot play friendly with just about any SIM you can cram in there, blacksn0w also undoes some of the locks put in place by Apple/AT&T during the upgrade to 3.1. Namely, it removes the IPCC lock which prevented tethering.

I just got my iPhone up and tethering in all of a few minutes – we’ll have a tutorial up in just a bit.

Whenever you hear about bugs and exploits being discovered in the iPhone’s browser, Safari, it’s usually the doings of some masterful meddler who devoted hours to unearthing any flaws they could find — not some user casually tapping around the application. Apple’s pretty good at keeping things locked down, and the iPhone’s got enough users that most of the nasty user-facing bugs have been flushed out. Well, except for this new one.

It’s not an incredibly common bug, and it doesn’t seem likely that it would hit most users – but for the iPhone users this newly discovered bug does affect, it could mean huge operator fees.

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Gameloft, one of the world’s largest mobile gaming development houses, has just released their numbers for the third quarter of 2009.

In the first three quarters of 2009, Gameloft has already slung $132.3 million in mobile applications. This is up roughly 18% percent from the same time period last year, during which they brought in roughly $112.2 million.

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Way back in March, Apple announced that the latest and greatest build of the iPhone OS would open up a whole new world to third parties: richly featured accessories, complete with tie-in software. No longer would accessory makers be limited to headphones, cases, and FM transmitters with hardware controls – now they could make glucose meters, guitar amp controllers, and FM transmitters with onscreen controls! The possibilities were endless.

8 months later, what is there to show for it? There’s a $120 car cradle that boosts the GPS accuracy of the iPhone, some fancy running shoes, and.. er.. well, that’s about it. Maybe we’re just expecting too much; maybe the design/review/approval process is even more of a chore for the hardware guys than it is for app store developers. At this rate, though, we’ll be seeing a fourth generation iPhone before we see any more accessories.

Partly for the sake of inspiring would be hardware-makers and partly because we just like to think about this sort of stuff, we’ve come up with a list of 5 (plus) iPhone accessories we’re not-so-patiently waiting for. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

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You know what? We’ll be honest. The fact that the T-Mobile Motorola CLIQ is now available to anyone who wants one (rather than only existing T-mo customers, as its been for a week or two now) is only a small part of the reason we wrote this post.

We primarily wrote this because we wanted to be able to use the “298 minutes away from cake” graphic one more time. It’s just too damn intriguing. Are they saying its just short of 5 hours until their birthday, or are they en route to their unfortunately named friend, Cake McCool? It truly is one of life’s great mysteries.

It’s probably a bit less apparent on this side of the fence than it is over at CrunchGear, but we loves us some Woot around these parts. Where else can you buy a “Bag of Crap” that you’d actually be excited to receive?

Thing is, it gets a bit tough to keep up with Woot when you’ve got other, less entertaining tasks to do. Gotta drop the kids off at karate? Meh. Visit Grandma? What if Woot offers up a titanium bread box? You’ve been waiting for a titanium bread box for like 3 months.

Now you can do all that boring stuff and keep an eye out for that bread box.

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We don’t get a chance to do this very often, but I wanted to start this lovely Monday morning off with something I’ve wanted to say for a while: Thanks for reading us, everyone.

MobileCrunch launched in September of 2006. Around mid-2008, we changed things up a bit – and we’ve seen monumental growth ever since. MobileCrunch has gone nowhere but up across the board. Pageviews and unique visitor counts have sky-rocketed, our dedicated readership has exploded, and we’re getting the opportunity to break more stories each and every month. October was our best month ever, on every metric we can gauge.

It’s all thanks to you, dear readers. You stop by for your daily dose of mobile news, maybe share a story or two with friends on Twitter – and MobileCrunch flourishes into a better site as a result. For that, we can’t thank you enough. We’ll keep the coverage coming, and we’ll try to squeeze in a few awesome contests this month as a thanks to you guys – but in the mean time, keep tuning in. You guys and gals are amazing.

The launch of the Palm Pixi might still be more than two weeks away, but the Blue Polo Brigade is already gettin’ prepped. One of our tipsters spotted this third-party silicone case lurkin’ around in a none-too-hidden spot, though it hadn’t made its way all the way to the shelves just yet.

If you manage to spot an actual Pixi lurkin’ around any retail spots — or better yet, if you convince them to sell you one early — be sure to give us a shout at our tips line.

(You know how you know we’re geeks? Because we get all excited about cell phone accessories being shipped to retail stores.)

As smartphones get more powerful and mobile internet connections get faster, battery life seems to be getting worse and worse. While there are a truckload of technologies in the works to make things better in the coming months and years, the only real option for mobile junkies to stay juiced up is to carry an external battery pack.

Thing is, every damn time we go to use our external battery packs, we run into one of two problems: we forgot to charge it, or we forgot the cable required to hook it up to our handset. The XP1 cable from XMultiple solves both of these problems with one absurdly obvious solution: the cable is the battery. They’ve got models for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and any phone that can be charged over Mini USB.

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If your pockets are just beggin’ to be filled with an HTC Hero, your options thus far (assuming you’re in the US) have been limited. You could get one through Sprint or wait for Verizon’s Hero-esque Droid Eris – but either of those options means you’re on a modified, round-bodied Hero rather than the angled, chin-tastic Hero that nearly 70% of our readers prefer. You could import one of the original bodied Heros from the UK – but then you wouldn’t be able to get 3G on any US Carrier.

If you wanted US 3G and an original Hero, you were out of luck – until now.

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