phone

Motorola announced today that its second-generation Razr phone will be arriving at most major U.S. carriers by the end of the summer. The GSM Razr2 V9 will come to AT&T while the CDMA Razr2 V9m will come to Alltel, Sprint, and Verizon Wireless. T-Mobile is out of the game at the moment, mostly due to the carrier's lack of a 3G network. That said, it theoretically could adopt the GSM Razr2 V8, which tops out at 2.5G EDGE speeds, but that's just speculation for now.

Announced in May, the Razr2 line adopts the now … Read more

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." --Albert Einstein

Oh goody, you can watch YouTube on your iPhone, but what if you just want a phone? I tried to buy a phone that's just a phone, and wound up with a Samsung SCH-u540. Is it just me or do you think it's odd that a phone comes with a 151 page User Manual?

Manufacturers load on features to sell product--whatever it is--phones, coffee makers, micro-wave ovens, or A/V receivers. Here's the deep, dark ugly truth: the features don'… Read more

Like the Harper's Index, here are some numbers I've observed over the past 40 days... (well, 42 days actually).

Number of days in my possession: 42

Number of iPhones I purchased: 2

Number of which I kept: 1

Percent, to the nearest whole integer, of commission I took for getting a certain someone their iPhone: 0

Approximate number of hours waited in line: 10

Approximate number of days after I waited in line until the iPhone was sold out: 1

Number of people who cut in front of me in the line: 40

Number of people I allowed … Read more

It seems that a few iPhone users are encountering problems with the iPhone's touch screen, prompting Apple to replace some units.

Posters on Apple's support discussion boards and forums belonging to both AppleInsider and MacRumors have complained of dead spots on their iPhone's touch screen, almost like the old floor at the old Boston Garden. On a phone based almost entirely around touch-screen input, this would obviously be a serious problem.

It's not at all clear how widespread a problem this is. There were several active discussions about the problem on Apple's own support forums, … Read more

It's been a while since we've seen a new, exciting cell phone for T-Mobile, so when Samsung announced its SGH-T729, we took notice. Also called the Blast (yet another crazy Samsung nickname), the SGH-T729 offers a thin slider design, Bluetooth, a megapixel camera, and a QWERTY keyboard modeled on the SureType technology found on some BlackBerry smart phones. On the whole, the Blast is a solid effort for a messaging phone. We liked the design and the simple interface, but T-Mobile's lack of a 3G network is beginning to put it behind its rival carriers. The Blast … Read more

SpiralFrog is a proposed online service that would let users download songs for free in exchange for viewing some sort of advertising. It got some press coverage last August when it announced an agreement to license the music catalog of Universal Music Group, the largest of the four major labels. Over the next few months, however, a missed launch date and executive shake-up led many to write it off as dead.

But the company survived, and now its founder, Joe Mohen, is heralding the beginning of a closed beta test in the United States, with wide release expected by the … Read more

In the pantheon of phone straps and trinkets, this one stands above the rest on so many levels. This "DS Cell Phone Charm" is a miniature replica of Nintendo's DS Lite, complete with functional clamshell lid and navigation buttons, but it opens up to reveal a geek's version of an old-fashioned compact mirror. In place of the real thing's double LCD screens is a "Double Mirror" that will come in handy, as GeekSugar says, so "you can check and make sure your lip gloss is popping before making a call." Or, … Read more

InfoWorld's Tom Yager tries his prima ballerina slippers on:

Apart from habitually being at odds with conventional wisdom, I share one other trait with Jobs: Far more often than not, when everybody else writes me off as an idiot, I turn out to be right. It's just a matter of patience.

Hubris, thy name is Yager.

Despite its successful initial launch, Yager apparently thinks the iPhone will fail if you just give it long enough. Well, good luck with that one, Tom. Although, the horned one should point out that only one of you and Jobs is going … Read more

I usually get up in the mornings and go to my office and turn on my desktop CPU to check the day's news, my email, etc. But before I even turn on my desktop on a given morning, the iPhone, which sits atop my office desk, will now tell me if I have new email that has come in overnight. (Note: I have to leave my iPhone outside of my room because the GSM signal interferes with my iPod/JBL music dock's speakers, making that noise--you know that noise). Being aware that I got email overnight is nice, … Read more