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Not that this comes as any sort of surprise, given the age of the devices in question, but it's still interesting that Verizon is dropping several BlackBerry devices all at once.  In a leaked screenshot obtained by a tipster, it appears that Verizon is discontinuing the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230, Curve 8330, 8830 World Edition, and the Storm 9530.  Once these are off of the shelves, Verizon will be left with the Tour 9630, Curve 8530, and Storm2 9550, with the Bold 9XXX coming soon.

I was always a big fan of the concept behind the Pearl Flip 8230, but I never felt like (1) Verizon threw enough marketing support behind it, and (2) RIM made it powerful enough.  Perhaps we'll see another device with a similar form factor.  I also liked the Storm, after improvements in overall build quality and the introduction of OS 5.0.

If you're an owner of one of the aforementioned devices, how do you feel about the situation?

As it stands, the green "dots" that you see in the picture above represents Sprint's 4G footprint in the United States.  In other words, it's not that huge (27 cities, to be exact).  What's even more interesting is the rollout itself - note that there's no 4G markets in New York or California.  Though other cities have been rumored for a 2010 rollout, Sprint today announced that WiMAX would be coming to Boston, Denver, Kansas City, Houston, Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. by the end of the year. 

For those in the aforementioned areas, you'll be able to tote around an Overdrive WiMAX hotspot soon enough.  Anyone going to beat down the doors for one when 4G launches in your market?

Via MobileCrunch

Just one week after the announcement of the new Windows Phone 7 Series, which is slated to replace Windows Mobile later this year, much discussion about potential form factors has surfaced.  It seems the chatter emerged from a podcast involving two Microsoft Australia Developer Evangelists who, among other things, provided some insight into how WinPho7 phones will look in the future.

The first of the three chassis is reported to be that which you've already seen via the MWC 2010 reveal.  Chassis 1, which it is affectionately referred to, will sport a full capacitive touchscreen with a 1 GHz processor and no physical keyboard (think iPhone, HTC HD2).  Chassis 2 is said to have a full QWERTY keyboard as well as a touchscreen, and may either be a slide phone (like the Motorola Devour or Droid) or something more closely related to the Palm Treo.  Chassis 3 is described as a candy bar form factor, however, information on Chassis 3 seems to be strictly speculation at this point.

Having three specific form factors is Microsoft's way of controlling the quality of the products that bear their name.  Requiring vendors to provide specific chassis and hardware specifications, yet providing three styles to choose from enables Microsoft to provide a diverse line of handsets while retaining one intentional user experience. This could be a move in the right direction for Microsoft.

If you could decide what your WinPho7 phone would look like, what form factor would you pick?

Via Engadget, ZDNet, Gizmodo, Arstechnica

Everyone needs some mid-week laughter.  In short, Nestle announced a contest last year for people to make a “Nobody’s going to lay a finger on my Butterfinger” commercial, with the winning entry being aired on television.  What better way to take advantage of Apple's app campaign then to create an ad circulating around a "Butterfinger App?"

I don't want to spoil the fun.  Check it out below:

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Via MobileCrunch

If you're a fan of Symbian S60 5th Edition, and happen to live in New York City or Chicago, you might want to scurry down to your local Nokia flagship store, as the X6 16 GB NAM Edition is now in stock.

Features include a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen, 5.0-megapixel camera, 16 GB of internal memory, 3.5mm headphone jack, Wi-Fi, GPS, and HSPA (850/1900/2100 MHz) connectivity.  While the device is well-equipped, the price is the only issue that I have.  $455?  I know it's unlocked and all, but it seems a bit pricey, given the other phones on the market that are in the same price range.  Several reviewers have pegged it as the best S60-enabled device on the market, so it will be interesting to analyze the sales numbers.

Is the X6 really "a world of entertainment?"  If you happen to pick one up, let us know in the comments!

Via IntoMobile

Recently, roughly 5,000+ apps got yanked from the Apple App Store. The offense? "Overtly sexual content." According to SVP Phil Schiller, “It came to the point where we were getting customer complaints from women who found the content getting too degrading and objectionable, as well as parents who were upset with what their kids were able to see,” he said.

On Today’s iPhone, Assistant Editor Cam Bunton made a good point in a post titled “My view on Apple’s booby ban…”:

I’m relieved Apple has taken this step. I write quite a few reviews for apps, which often means scouring through different sections in the store to find the latest stuff. Only a couple of days back I checked out the “entertainment” section and to my great irritation was confronted with “Asian beauties 1-100million” (exaggerating somewhat there)… So the apps were getting out of control, getting everywhere, getting in the way, reducing the overall quality of apps in the store and cluttering it all. All I have to say about the ban is “Thank you Mr. Jobs.” If people want to sulk or look at bikini wearing girls from Thailand, go on to Google Images and type in “Thai girls in bikinis.” (Click the post title to read the full article.)

While I’d never come out in favor of censorship, I do see that there are some valid arguments that could be made for a little judicious pruning of the App Store entries. Logical points, sound reasoning, it all makes perfect sense. But there’s a nagging issue here for some, and it’s this: While thousands of iPhone apps were abruptly kicked out, some were allowed to remain. Sexually suggestive — even kind of explicit — apps like SI Swimsuit from Sports Illustrated, Playboy and FHM are still in the store.

And according to iPhoneSavior.com, the content in the remaining apps — which encompasses images and video — is actually saucier than the stuff in "My Boys," an app that was booted for showing muscle-bound, computer-generated mockups of men. Shake the app, and they get down to their skivvies and speedos.



Okay, hold on a second: Does the company really think that digital dudes in tight shorts are considered racier than this?

(Okay this image, while not exactly tame, isn't even the most risqué of the lot. And no, I'm not posting anymore here. C’mon — This is PhoneDog, not HornDog. Sorry, but this is as racy as you’re going to get here.)


This was Schiller’s explanation: Apple weighed various factors, including what the source was and the intention of the app. “The difference is this is a well-known company with previously published material available broadly in a well-accepted format,” he said. Schiller went on to say, “We obviously care about developers, but in the end have to put the needs of the kids and parents first.”

The debate over whether to censor or not seems almost beside the point here. This explanation seems extremely inconsistent. Leaving “well-known companies” alone, even when their apps are racier than others that have been booted, doesn’t seem to be putting “the kids and parents first.” It’s like the company is picking on the little guys, but leaving the big boys — with their potentially big future distribution deals — alone.

Some think this double standard is at least partly (or even completely) due to the iPad, which is launching in a few weeks. Apple’s publishing relationships for “the big iPod Touch” have been pretty well publicized. But does that justify this blatant show of favoritism? If you’re a numbers cruncher, it might.

Media folks are chewing over the success of the app version of Sports Illustrated’s 2010 Swimsuit issue. It’s been topping the charts in the App Store’s sports category for the last week — it even beat out the NBC app covering the Olympics, which is the biggest current sports-related news.

The free SI app has been downloaded 411,648 times since it launched, and has tempted 7.8 percent of users over to the paid $1.99 version. If you do the math, this comes to $64,000 (which doesn’t even include advertising deals). This places the paid SI Swimsuit app as the 33rd highest-grossing mobile app in the App Store right now. And the free version is the 13th most popular app in the whole store. These numbers could go up even more once the iPad debuts. The temptation of seeing all that content on a bigger screen could offer an added boost.

In the end, I never thought I’d be one to speak out in favor of skin purveyors, but this just seems like yet another example of small-time developers being given the short shrift. While I can’t say I’m sad to see tasteless content removed (though it does raise some censorship flags that I’m not 100 percent comfortable with), I do think that if Apple wants to remove overtly sexual content, it should make that consistent across the board. Or at least offer a reasonable explanation that isn’t so transparently subjective and self-serving.

What do you think? Did Apple make the right choice by pulling these apps? And do you agree with its decision to leave the large media groups alone, or do you think they should’ve been pulled too? Weigh in below.


Via: Today’s iPhone, MacRumors, min Online, iPhone Savior



UPDATE: Here’s an interesting twist: It seems Apple has now created a new “Explicit” category in the store. For more on this, click to go to the post on Today’s iPhone.

You may remember the FCC's inquiry into Verizon Wireless' $350 'advanced device' early termination fee this past December, followed by inquiries into AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Google earlier this year.  The FCC seems concerned that there is no standardized structure for ETFs in the wireless industry, except to say that everyone has them.  So, they created a questionnaire for the industry leaders to respond to with a deadline in late February.

The deadline has since arrived and the responses are in.  Thanks to long-winded lawyers, each company prepared roughly 10 pages of information discussing the reasoning behind their ETFs, with Sprint producing a whopping 60 page response thanks to an abundance of attachments.  In lieu of summarizing each company's response (follow the links at the bottom if you want the juicy details), suffice it to say that the overwhelming feeling is there's a lot of justifying going on.  Each company believes that they are the victim, not the consumer. 

What do you have to say to that?  Let Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Google know how you feel about their ETFs by posting your stories in the comments!

Via Engadget
Specific Responses: Google | Verizon | AT&T | Sprint | T-Mobile

Chinese texters welcomed the Year of the Tiger with thirteen billion text messages in just two days. This made the New Year a real pressure test for the rapidly-expanding Chinese communications services with a non-stop flow of 150,000 texts per second. Many of these messages are mass-recipient spam, or worse, well-meaning messages sent to entire address books – but whether there’s real thought or not makes no difference to the hammered networks.

Chinese mobile phone services are growing like Alice after eating the mushroom (topped with a few bodybuilders worth of steroids), providing unprecedented communication capabilities for the population – and ever-increasing censorship problems for the government. It’s almost as if technological progress not only implies but actually creates and requires an increased flow of information.

They may have cowed Google and continued all their efforts to cut off the internet, but people with personal communications devices will always be able to work around any barriers.

LG haven’t been as prolific with the launch of Google Android mobile phones as many of its competitors, with only the GW620 Etna and the unreleased GT540 Swift in its catalogue.  This is about to change in LG’s home country of Korea though, as they are readying the Android-equipped LU2300 for launch during the summer.

What makes this interesting to us, are reports that the phone will have augmented reality applications built-in.  Augmented reality, for those unfamiliar with the term, is when an app works with the camera, digital compass and GPS to display information onscreen about whatever you point the camera lens at.  For instance, cinema listings when pointing at a cinema, menus when at a restaurant, historical information at a museum and so on.

The information coming from Korea is a little unclear at this point as to whether LG have developed its own augmented reality apps, or whether Google’s own Google Goggles app will be pre-installed. We’re hoping it’s the former, as it would represent quite an investment of time and money, giving it a higher chance of being useful.

At this time the LU2300 is still unconfirmed, therefore the augmented reality apps also fall under the umbrella marked ‘rumour’. If it does turn out to be factual, we hope they follow the Korean launch with a European one.

Megan Fox had it during the Super Bowl, and now we've got the Motorola Devour, too. I met with Moto and Verizon PR Monday in San Francisco and walked away with the latest MotoBlur device in his hands. Like an Aluminum Sidekick that runs Android, Devour is all about Social Networks and messaging with, oh yeah, a full-on smartphone lurking under the skin. It hits Best Buy Mobile February 25 and Verizon retail in mid-March.

A few first impressions after 24 hours of Devour. And please, lend me some credit for avoiding terrible puns on the word "devour." I'll need that credit when you get to the end of this post and watch the ridiculous video I made with the phone. In the bathtub. Pretending I know Ms. Fox. Man, I hope my parents aren't watching this. So embarrassing! (Nah ... Actually it's fun)

- Devour is big. It's really a big device. Big and angular and also big.

- Performance has been good so far. Granted, I've only gotten around to very limited testing of the device. But everything's been snappy.

- The keyboard is pretty decent. I much prefer it to Droid's QWERTY board because the keys are: 1) NOT flush mounted, and 2) Separated from one another. I do wish Moto had ditched the dedicated numerical keys row in favor of dedicated punctuation mark keys, however.

- I still get confused as to when I'm triggering "Happenings" or "Social Status" from Motoblur, as opposed to just checking my Twitter app. 

- Devour looks and feels really nice. The aluminum construction is solid, the slider is a million times more satisfying to open and close than Droid's slider, and the rubber edges of the phone are easy to grip. Also, the brushed silver finish looks cool like Tron.

- Somehow, the phone doesn't feel quite as heavy as it actually is. Devour's heavy, don't get me wrong. It tips the scales at 180 grams. But when I picked it up for the first time I thought, "Oh, it's lighter than I thought it'd be. Well, no .. Yeah, it is. It's big and bulky and heavy, but somehow not as heavy as I feared."

- By way of comparison, that's almost 50% more than Verizon's Droid Eris - a thin, touchscreen only Android device - which weighs 126 g. 

- The phone's battery slot and microUSB and microSD slots are all concealed behind the same rubber panel. It's a very laptop-style concept and I really like it. Unibody construction will be the in thing in 2010.

- Motorola built Devour with a touchscreen and an optical D-Pad. The touchscreen is great. No multitouch/pinch-and-zoom support, but otherwise very responsive and easy on the eyes. The D-Pad is a little bit of an odd duck - mainly it seems that the Blur UI was in no way meant to be navigated via optical pad. So I've had better D-Pad results in apps like Browser and Mail than within Blur.

- Motoblur is Motoblur is Motoblur ... Devour ships with the latest version, but it's the same as what you can get by updating another Motoblur device to the latest install.

- Devour ships with Android 1.6.  Boo. But you can install Google Maps with Navigation Beta for free, and that prompts a free install of voice recognition software ... which all adds up to the same voice activated turn-by-turn GPS nav system that Android 2.x devices get. Yay!

More with Devour in the coming days. The phone hits Best Buy Mobile as an exclusive starting Feb 25th for $99 after rebate with a two-year contract. Rumor is BBYM will also be cutting the prices of the Moto Droid and HTC Droid Eris at the same time. If Droid and Devour wind up both priced at $99 - which is what I'm hearing - that'd make for a tough call. Droid is clearly the better-spec'd device, but Devour has better bulid quality and a better QWERTY board. But Droid's display is so much larger and higher-res, it'd be tough to actually choose Devour instead at the same price.

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