On Wednesday, CTIA – The Wireless Association released its Semi-Annual Wireless Industry Survey results for 2008.
According to the Survey, Americans sent over 1 Trillion text messages in 2008, almost triple the number (363 million) from 2007. That works out to roughly 3.5 billion txts per day, or almost 13 messages per wireless user (the survey reports that there are “more than 270 million wireless users” in the US) per day.
In a tucked away room in the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center, Sprint and Palm are demonstrating a number of Pre applications for the first time. Earlier this afternoon we got a bit of footage of Classic, a PalmOS emulator by MotionApps’ purposed for running any legacy applications you may have laying around. Since then, we’ve also had the opportunity to check out the Pandora, Fandango, Sprint TV, FlightView, and Nascar applications, and brought back a boatload of video for you to check out.
If you’ve got loads of 5 year old PalmOS applications laying around, fear not – they’ll run on the Pre. Well, sort of; they’ll run in MotionApps’ recently announced PalmOS emulator which, for most purposes, should be just as good. We stopped by Palm’s lounge this afternoon for a quick demo, and brought the whole thing back on video for your perusal
Don’t expect much luck with anything that requires an infrared port (HotSync, for example) – while they’ve emulated the hardware functionality up to the buttons, it’s a bit tough to fake an IR port. Throwing a new application into the emulator is a matter of plugging in the USB cable and dragging over the PRC.
Classic will not come installed on the handset out of the box, but should be available in the Palm App Catalog at launch.
Hey, look! It’s the LG GD900 from Mobile World Congress, except not behind an inch of glass!
We’re amazingly torn on this device; on one hand, it’s an exercise of vanity, with nearly every defining feature existing solely for show. I mean, come on – a clear touch keypad? Why? On the other hand, hot damn it’s pretty. It’s a fashion phone without a fashion brand attached (yet.)
The S-class interface which made its first appearance on the LG Arena has made its way onto the handset, but the port doesn’t seem quite ready for prime time. The rep couldn’t get a number of features (quick launch touchpad gestures, for example, refused to play nice – in theory, you could draw a letter with your finger down on that clear layer to skip to user selected areas of the handset). LG is promising the GD900 some time in this quarter, so hopefully they can get things brushed up quick.
Long time MobileCrunch readers may know that I have a bit of an aversion to Motorola. They’ve never done anything wrong to me, personally – it’s just that every handset they’ve released in the past 4 years is a mundane, haphazard piece of garbage. However, I’m glad (though a bit reluctant) to say that they’ve strayed from this path with the Evoke QA4; it has its flaws – but as far as phones that tiptoe the line between smartphone and featurephone go, the QA4 seems pretty nifty. Check out our impressions and the full hands-on demo video after the jump.
Original E71 on left, AT&T E71x on right
It seems a bit silly to do a full hands-on of the just announced Nokia E71x for AT&T, seeing as it’s essentially identical to the original E71 – which we’ve already given a thorough reviewing. Besides the obvious color difference (Black on black, rather than silver on white), the changes are somewhat trivial: it has Feature Pack 3 rather than Feature Pack 2 (which is just about the same thing, from the end user’s standpoint), AT&T’s standard service suite, and it lacks the FM radio of the x-less edition.
While there may not be all that much to write about it*, that doesn’t stop it from being pretty; we stopped by Nokia’s booth to give it a bit of lens time alongside the original E71 – check out the fully gallery below.
(If we did have one thing to say about it, it’d be: holy crap, fingerprints. We wiped this thing down a good 10 times during the photoshoot, but fingerprints are still visible in every shot. Maybe it’s the Vegas grime all over my hands, but I just couldn’t keep this thing clean.)
[PSGallery=1qlqq5r4vu]
By all major counts, I should hate this phone. I don’t generally like candybar QWERTY phones, and I don’t like Windows Mobile 6.1. But somehow, HTC has brought both of these things together in a way that I really like.
The hardware itself is rock solid; it’s well balanced and nicely weighted in the hand, and the 12mm profile looks deadly sharp.
Yesterday, Cricket announced their plans to carry Motorola’s just disclosed Evoke QA4. What wasn’t announced, however, was whether US Cellular would also be carrying the device, as previous rumors had indicated. If the demo phones on the floor at CTIA are any indication, it just might.
We just met with Motorola for a quick hands on demonstration of the Evoke (video of which just so happens to be uploading now). After they’d handed it over to us, we accidentally powered the device off while learning to work it. For about 3 seconds while the device was booting, the US Cellular logo was on screen, clear as day. Alas, our camera had already found its way back into our pocket, and the logo was gone by the time we whipped it back out – but it was undeniably there.
Of course, this doesn’t absolutely mean it’s destined for the US’s 6th most popular carrier. It could have been a place holder, and plans might change – but as far as we can tell, it’s likely we’ll see it hit US Cellular within the next few months. Motorola, as expected, declined to speak about unannounced carrier plans.
Contrary to what Facebook friend counts may lead you to believe, most people really don’t have hundreds upon hundreds of friends. Sure, they may know some absurd number of people – but according to a study by HTC, about 55% of people really only care about communicating with five or fewer people.
Playing around with this idea a bit, HTC has just introduced a new feature they’ve dubbed “Inner Circle”, which prioritizes messages from a select group of people, granting them special notifications and one-button access. Want to see the e-mails from your mom, your wife, and your kids – but no one else? Tap the Inner Circle button, and they’ll shoot onto the screen.
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To put it gently, the Celio REDFLY didn’t launch without criticism. Essentially a mono-purposed netbook which is fueled by and acts as an extension of a Windows Mobile smartphone, the REDFLY pulls your WinMo handset’s display onto its own, and pushes all keyboard/touchpad input back to the handset. The main issue people seemed to have is that they simply didn’t understand why it was necessary; they already carried a laptop, and they already carried a phone – why bring more hardware into the mix?
Samsung didn’t officially have the Instinct S30 available for hands-on demos after yesterday night’s announcement – but, well, you know how we roll. We spent a good chunk of time poking at the device – so what do we think?
RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis is slated to take the stage later today in Las Vegas at the CTIA show and all eyes will be focused on RIM’s answer to Apple’s App Store. While we wished that RIM had held off on the launch of BlackBerry App World until Lazaridis’ little talk, there’s nothing that could have prevented this announcement from hitting at midnight. So, ladies and germs, I present to you BlackBerry App World. Please ensure that you have a PayPal account, OS 4.2 or higher and a trackball or SurePress touch screen (aka Storm) BlackBerry before proceeding.
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Samsung just unleashed the powerhouse that is the Mondi. This massive handset comes packing with speedy WiMAX support in a big daddy slider form factor. Winmo 6.1 powers the device and it seems that Samsung has big hopes for the huge device as it’s got just about everything possible in a mobile computing platform. Check it: MS Office, WiFi, BT 2.1, GPS with preloaded maps, 4 GB of internal memory, support for push email, instant messaging support, 3.0 MP camera and camcorder, Opera 9.5 browser, HDMI out, and a huge range of supported video and audio player formats.
Sprint and Samsung have just taken the wraps off the Instinct s30 aka Mini Instinct at CTIA. It launches on Sprint April 19th in two colors – Cobalt Metal or Touch of Copper. The s30 doesn’t deviate too much from the original Instinct, but developers can now jump on the s30 with open access to core Java APIs like, Multimedia, Messaging, Bluetooth, Contacts/Calendar and File Access. The Instinct s30 will cost $130 with a two-year contract extension. You can preregister now at the Sprint Instinct s30 page.
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We’re in good ol’ Sin City, fresh out of a pre-CTIA 2009 meeting with HTC. While most of the hardware they brought to the party were things we’d seen at Mobile World Congress last month, they had one thing on the software end that was just out of the oven: the latest build of the Android “Cupcake” release.
The firmware build number we were playing with was 1.5/CRA79. We didn’t spot any major new features in this build – but we did see a good number of things we’d heard about previously get their first implementations. Oddly, we also noticed at least one thing missing since last time.
Tucked away in a Korean press release alongside the likes of the long ago announced Samsung Behold, Memoir, and Omnia HD was one little gem we’d yet to have seen in any official light: the Instinct S30. Of course, it’s not the first time we’ve ever seen it – but it’s nice to know it wasn’t some incredibly elaborate hoax put on by some crafty gent just looking to crush the spirits of Instinct fans everywhere.
Besides the press image to the right, confirmation of a 3.2″ touchscreen, and word that they’ll be showing it at CTIA 2009 this week, there’s not much to glean from the release – but if you wanna dig around it yourself, the full translated version is hiding right behind the jump.
It’s certainly not the main Novatel device we’re hoping to see announced while we’re here in Vegas, but they’ve gotten the announcement party started a bit early with this morning’s debut of the Ovation MC935D.
It’s definitely not the first time we’ve seen the Novatel MiFi, or even the second – but they can keep cranking these things out in all sorts of different flavors and we wouldn’t mind a bit. A few weeks back, we found out that Sprint would be getting a MiFi of their own sometime in the next 3 months, and this latest leak indicates that Verizon will be getting one as well. No date is mentioned – but with CTIA 09 but a night or two away, we’d wager that an announcement is looming.
