ctia

For the past few years at the CTIA show, CNET has chosen our favorite products, and here in Orlando, Florida, we're glad to do it again. Products are selected on a variety of factors including design, features, and innovation in three main categories: best cell phone, best smart phone, and best cell phone accessory.

Sometimes our picks become big winners when they're introduced, and sometimes they don't live up to our full expectations, but our 2006 picks fared pretty well over the last year. And without further ado, we present CNET's Cream of the Crop for … Read more

Compared with the star-studded CES show, CTIA tends to be a little slim on celebrity sightings. But the show does manage to catch a fair share of somebodys. The presidential tag team of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton gave a keynote address this morning and then cruised the show floor with a stop at the Sony Ericsson booth. The Foo Fighters performed at an LG party, Hootie and the Blowfish jammed at the Alcatel bash, while Bonnie Cha and I caught Ludacris at a Sprint soiree. Yet the strangest performance came from self-proclaimed "comedy legend" Gallagher. … Read more

Though the announcement didn't officially happen at CTIA, today Nokia unveiled an update to one of my favorite phones, the Nokia 5300 Xpress Music. Like its predecessor, the Nokia 5700 Xpress Music boasts a strong music-like portfolio but adds a twisting base straight from the Nokia 3250. The camera is also upped to 2 megapixels.

The microSD card slot can accommodate 2GB cards (that's about 1,500 tracks), and you can listen to your tunes via stereo Blueooth or connect your own wired headphones to the included 3.5mm adapter plug. Or for less private affairs, you can … Read more

Speech recognition technologies had a moderate presence at CTIA, and CallWave had one of the biggest announcements with its new Vtxt service. Designed for busy, on-the-go types, Vtxt eliminates the need to scan through long, dull voice mails by sending them to your cell phone. After someone leaves you a voice mail, you'll receive a text message containing the person's name and phone number as well as a summary of the voice mail. The summary is composed using a CallWave-developed algorithm that scans for what it deems as important words, while leaving out any pauses or words like &… Read more

Beyond showing its slick new cell phones at CTIA, Kyocera also demonstrated its new Bluetooth Music Gateway. This nifty device receives music from any stereo Bluetooth phone or device and then transfers the tunes to your home stereo via a standard RCA cable. You can see it here with the Kyocera E5000 music phone. Though not the first such device on the market, it still caught our eye due to its compact design and simple, easy-to-use functionality. It's also reasonably priced at $79.99. Look for a full review from CNET in the next couple weeks.

The company also … Read more

We had a chance to sit down with the Windows Live for Mobile team this morning, and chat about life, love, and the pursuit of all things mobile. As you may remember, one of the new features of Windows Mobile 6 was the Windows Live integration, bringing with it improvements to contact synchronization, search, and instant messaging. And we should expect to see more integration of core applications in the near future, according to Matt Champagne, director of mobile product management for Microsoft. Already the team has released a local search client for the U.S. and U.K. markets … Read more

At CTIA we caught a few other phones at the Sony Ericsson booth that aren't in our Sony Ericsson line show. The Sony Ericsson Z550 is a flip phone with a vertically oriented external display (quite the trend right now). It sports a flip phone design, a form factor the company is becoming more comfortable with, and is available in sterling black or pearl copper. Features are mostly midrange and include a 1.3-megapixel camera, a memory card slot, a music player, a speakerphone, and an FM radio. As an tri-band (GSM 850/1800/1900), the Z550 is available … Read more

Aside from the LG VX8700, Verizon has also announced the availability of the Motorola Razr Maxx Ve today. Quite possibly the most appealing Razr on the CDMA front, the Razr Maxx Ve is built of metal and glass and is only 0.59-inch thick. Its features are dazzling as well, and they include a 2.0-megapixel camera, a music player with access to V Cast Music, stereo Bluetooth, V Cast Video support, 60MB of internal memory plus a microSD card slot, text and multimedia messaging, GPS capabilities with access to VZ Navigator, and of course EV-DO support for all that … Read more

We were pretty stoked when Samsung told us they had a Samsung Ultra Smart F700 that we could actually touch and drool over, but the excitement was short-lived when we found out it wasn't a working model. Bummer. Still, we got some hands-on time with F700 and came away with a couple of thoughts. First, the VibeTonz technology is a little startling. This feature causes the phone to slightly vibrate when you slide up the cover or use the keyboard. Personally, I think this would get old after a while, but hopefully there's an option to turn it … Read more