ie8 fix

phones

Texting your way to $25,000

After crowning the West Coast champ last month, the winner of LG's National Texting Championship will be determined tomorrow night in New York, with $25,000 at stake.

The East Coast "texthletes" will use their enV or V handsets to compete in single-elimination brackets to determine the East Coast champ. That person wins $10,000, and later that day they will take on Eli Tirosh (who won the West Coast crown) for an extra $15,000.

Registration is still open as of press time, and it seems like it could be worth your time even if you … Read more

Mowser mobilizes any Web page

If your phone has a rotten Web browser, bookmark Mowser, and use it as the front-end to the Web on your mobile. Mowser transcodes any page into a Web-friendly format, stripping out large graphics and splitting a Web page into smaller pages that a phone can handle. It's also RSS-aware: If there's an RSS feed on a page you visit, it will provide a link for it, and transcode the feed into a format your phone can easily display.

The service has built-in bookmarks for major sites that are already mobile friendly (which it does not transcode) and … Read more

T-Mobile wins again

T-Mobile has done it again: J.D. Power and Associates recently ranked the carrier as No. 1, for the fifth time in a row, for providing the highest level of overall customer satisfaction. J.D. Power's 2007 Wireless Regional Customer Satisfaction Index found that T-Mobile ranks ahead of Cingular/AT&T, Alltel, U.S. Cellular, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel in three of six regions surveyed: the Northeast, the West and the Southwest. In the Mid-Atlantic area, T-Mobile tied with Verizon, and in the Southeast, the carrier tied with Alltel. There was a four-way tie in the North … Read more

Cell phones on planes: Part three

Fasten your seat belts and put in those earplugs as cell phones may be coming to airplanes sooner than you think. Air France will join Qantas in implementing a trial program that will allow passengers to use their mobiles while in the air. Like Qantas Air France will run the trial on just one aircraft (in this case an Airbus A318) but the French program will for six months, which is twice as long as the Qantas study. For the first half of the trial passengers will be allowed only to send text messages and e-mail but for the last … Read more

AT&T: iPhone still on track, tests 'good'

No, we still don't have a specific launch date for the iPhone. But we do know, at least according to a senior AT&T exective, that it won't be delayed beyond the originally promised month of June.

"Our expectations are good. Our testing has been good," AT&T Chief Operating Officer Randall Stephenson told Reuters. "The iPhone is on target to launch in June."

Apple has said it's cleared the decks to focus on the already-storied phone, putting aside other high-profile projects including the release of its next Mac operating system. … Read more

'Zune phone' patent application surfaces in series of tubes

There have been plenty of Zune 2.0 rumors recently--flash memory, a "watermelon" version this summer, and what-have-you. Now here's another one to add to the pile; Engadget recently pointed us to a "Zune phone" interface patent application unearthed by Mad4MobilePhones. It appears to be a sort of "tiled" setup for for "improved user interface for mobile devices such as smartphones" and "personal digital assistants." Looks like a fancy Bingo card to me.

Engadget pointed out that some of the icons appear to point to weather, music, and the … Read more

T-Mobile gets all colorful

T-Mobile is never one to shy away from new colors for its cell phones. Already it has introduced Moto's Razr in a variety of colors and designs, including magenta and dragon tattoo. But now the carrier turns its attention to one of its most recent offerings, the Motorola Rizr Z3. In addition to its existing blue model, T-Mobile soon will offer the Rizr Rose. To the rest of you, that means red, but we admit that "rose" is a little catchier.

The feature set on the new Rizr is unchanged, and though we couldn't get pricing … Read more

Google phone by end of 2007?

It seems that the Google phone rumors just will not die. This time, a Taiwanese publication has reported that HTC (well-known for its Windows Mobile devices like the T-Mobile Dash and the Cingular 3125) is building the phone and may have it ready by the end of the year. Reported features include EDGE and integration with GMail and Google Maps, but no GPS strangely enough. Of course, this is all vaporware and we don't know any solid details yet, but it's interesting enough that we'll keep an eye out for more news on the subject.

Razr V3xx goes platinum

Brace yourself, dear Crave readers, as Motorola has given us a Razr in yet another hue.

This time, however, we're paying a bit more attention because the phone in question is the Motorola Razr V3xx from Cingular/ATST. Already available in charcoal and gold, the V3xx now comes in a platinum color as well. Features are the same; you still get such offerings as HSDPA support, Bluetooth, a music player, and the disappointing 1.3-megapixel camera. With a service contract, you can get it for an affordable $99.

Sling, Apple: Streaming music to iPhone?

Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian says he has spoken to Apple about his company's ambition to stream iTunes music and video to the upcoming iPhone. It's unclear, however, what Apple thinks of the plan.

Krikorian made the comments after participating in a panel discussion at the National Association of Broadcasters conference yesterday but declined to offer details about the talks or say whether Apple welcomed such a plan. He did say Sling Media "would love to support" the iPhone.

"I think the question for them is going to be how are they going to phase … Read more