Best Buy Mobile will offer free smartphones, mostly Android, every day in December
Holiday spirit over in Best Buy land must mean "getting rid of old stock by discounting it." The Droid Incredible and Xperia X10 are among the handsets to be featured in the big retailer's December mobile sale, which will involve offering up four free phones each day (one for each carrier) at a price of $0 upfront and subject to the usual two-year agreement.
Categories: Android, htc, Mobile Phone Tags: discount, handsets, holiday, holiday sale, holiday-offer, lg optimus s, optimus t, phones, smartphones, spotlight, the-spotlight, xperiax10
iPhone locked for early 2011 on Verizon, says Fortune
Though Verizon famously turned down the original iPhone before Apple ultimately signed a deal with AT&T, the company's outspoken CEO -- Ivan Seidenberg -- has been very careful over the past couple years to note that he'd love to eventually have an iPhone in his lineup . With Verizon Wireless boss Lowell McAdam tapped to take over the top job next year, what'd be a better swan song for Seidenberg than to finally pull it off? Fortune 's new profile of the longstanding chief exec and elder statesman is talking in very matter-of-fact terms that a CDMA version of the iPhone 4 will be a reality on Verizon in "early 2011," lining up with most of the rumors the interwebs has been generating over the past few months.
Categories: Android, Mobile Phone Tags: apple, culmination, entry, iphone, ivanseidenberg, longstanding, lowell mcadam, lowellmcadam, past, rumor, spotlight, verizon, verizon-wireless
Samsung’s Epic 4G for Sprint seems to live up to its name
That rumored Galaxy S Pro is very real and very official for Sprint this evening, 'cept it's not actually called the Galaxy S Pro -- instead, it'll be known as the Epic 4G when it comes to market "in the coming months." Like the EVO 4G before it, the Epic 4G sort of blows everything out of the water on paper: 4-inch Super AMOLED display, 5 megapixel primary camera with LED flash and 720p video recording paired with a VGA front-facing cam for video calls, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, six-axis accelerometer, and a 1GHz Hummingbird core. Oh, and of course let's not forget those EV-DO Rev.
Categories: Android, htc, Mobile Phone, Other Tags: amoled, axis, epic, galaxy s, phone, result, spotlight, wimax
Google Maps for Android adds transit departure times, Latitude friend suggestions
One of Google's favorite pastimes is shoehorning bits of new functionality into Google Maps for Android, probably because... well, because it can -- updating a package on its own mobile platform is a heck of a lot easier than, say, getting Apple to add a feature to its Maps app. To that end, version 4.3 has just rolled out with three major additions: aggregated (and color-coded) business reviews broken down by topic, transit system departure times, and suggested friends for Latitude.
Categories: Android, Mobile Phone, Other Tags: additions, departure, google-maps, mobile-platform, pastimes, platform, spotlight, timely-addition
Four big carriers targeting LiMo phone releases this year
Hey, remember LiMo ? Yeah, us neither, but the stealthiest of major mobile platform coalitions is back in the spotlight today on news that four top global carriers -- France Telecom's Orange, Telefonica (presumably via O2 and Movistar), Verizon, and Korea's SKT will all be launching LiMo-based phones by year-end. As a refresher, Big Red jointed the LiMo Foundation way back in 2008 , so it's interesting to see that they're still looking to play ball; the platform has typically been billed as more of a carrier-facing initiative than a consumer-facing one, so realistically, end users are likely going to perceive nothing other than a little more dumbphone synergy across the lineup than they do now
Categories: Android, Mobile Phone, Other Tags: carriers, coalitions, france, korea, mobile, presumably-via, result, spotlight, verizon, windows
HTC EVO 4G review
As a mobile platform, the EVO 4G's Android foundation is still an infant -- well, okay, perhaps it's a tweener -- but in its two-odd years in the public spotlight, the list of truly revolutionary devices to use it has been a significant one: the G1 for being the first to market; the Nexus One for ushering in a new ( and subsequently killed ) retail model; perhaps the CLIQ for introducing Motorola to the platform or the Droid for bringing the company some desperately needed, long overdue success. For the moment, anyway, a whopping fraction of the world's most important phones are running Google's little experiment. Needless to say, Sprint, HTC, and quite frankly, many of us have come to expect the EVO 4G to join that short list for some obvious reasons.
Categories: Android, htc, Mobile Phone, nexus one, Other Tags: evo 4g, list, public, sense, spotlight, sprint, started-riffing, tweener, watering, wimax
iPhone OS 4.0 spotlight lets you directly search web, Wikipedia
Apple did quite a bit today bringing its iPhone OS up to feature parity (and sometimes beyond) when compared with other modern smartphone platforms, and here's one piece not discussed today that we've been long wanting: web and Wikipedia search directly from Spotlight. WebOS and Windows Phone 7 have had it since inception, and Android's had it since Donut , and we're pretty happy to say that our OS 4.0-equipped iPhone is now also among the ranks, just 13 months after it first got a search bar . There you have it, folks, iPhone Spotlight is now useful.
Categories: Android, Mobile Phone, Other Tags: apple, engadget, iphoneos, iphoneos4, iphonespotlight, phone, result, search, since-inception, spotlight, universal search, universalsearch, wikipedia
Verizon’s HTC Incredible stocked up and ready to roll?
So HTC's mighty Android-powered Incredible for Verizon is apparently showing up in Verizon's systems as having precisely 156,709 units "On Order," and the individual that posted the shot over in Android Forums says that "On Order" is really code for "they're in the warehouse, and you're not allowed to sell them yet." He goes on to say that they won't be shipping to stores this week, but now that they're in Verizon's hands -- not the manufacturer's -- a retail event can't be far off, we figure. With Sprint having gotten virtually all of the Android spotlight at CTIA this year on account of the EVO 4G , it's Verizon's turn, wouldn't you say?
Categories: Android, htc, Mobile Phone Tags: entry, incredible, mobile, result, retail-event, rumor, spotlight, verizon, vzw, warehouse
Symbian Foundation talks about its move to open source
As we'd figured out last night , Symbian's big reveal for today was the completion of its move to a fully open, royalty-free platform -- meaning you no longer need to be a paid-in-full member of the Foundation to see all the code -- and they're ready to talk about it and spread the word far and wide. Though Symbian's certainly not getting as much share of the mobile discussion these days as some of its smaller competitors, it's certainly important to keep in mind that these guys have software deployed on literally hundreds of millions of devices, making this perhaps the largest-scale conversion of a closed operating system to open source in history
Categories: Mobile Phone Tags: custom, device, eclipse, open-source, opensource, operating, spotlight, symbian, the-harder-core, though-symbian, Wide
HTC Legend Pictures are Out | Best Mobile Contracts
It has not been long since the HTC mobile phone line-up for 2010 got leaked and now we are seeing plenty of focus on the high-spec HTC Bravo. Just recently.
Categories: Android, BlackBerry, htc, Mobile Phone, Other Tags: accessories, htc, htc-legend, legend, mobile, Mobile Phone, motorola-phones, phone, phones, spotlight