Phones

Advertisements are part of the landscape here in New York City (hello, Times Square) and us locals generally like to ignore them. Which is why plenty of companies are willing to bend over backwards to get New Yorkers to stop walking really fast while blasting music into their iPod headphones and, well, notice some advertisements. Virgin Mobile's one of the recent ones, having introduced a "You Rule" campaign that addresses specific groups of New Yorkers. It's been placing them in specific neighborhoods, too, in an attempt to gain buzz by delivering personalized shout-outs.

Kind of a … Read more

Not much else to say here, other than that Apple has made it official that the iPhone will be released on June 29. That's a Friday. This means, depending on your affiliations, that you can either breathe a sigh of relief that after the 29th you'll optimally stop hearing annoying iPhone rumors, or you can stop speculating and focus on raising that $600 to feed your addiction. Now go!

(Via Engadget)

We haven't heard from Disney Mobile since the MVNO put out its first two cell phones a year ago with the Pantech DM-P100 and the LG DM-L200. So now at long last, we got our hands on a new handset, the Pantech DM-P205. Sporting a thin but relatively bland design, the DM-P205 offers a VGA camera, Bluetooth, a speakerphone, and voice dialing. See it from all angles in our slide show.

AT&T/Cingular has been a bit quiet lately, but that all changed this week when the carrier announced three new cell phones. Tuesday it was the RIM BlackBerry Curve, and today it's the Samsung SGH-A717 and SGH-A727. Though the handsets aren't brand new (we saw the former at CTIA and the latter at CES), this is the first time they've landed at a U.S. carrier. And it's interesting to note that these are two of the first handsets to show the new AT&T branding. Both offer multimedia features, and this being … Read more

Verizon Wireless has just announced that it will be the exclusive provider of the Casio G'zOne Type-S rugged cell phone, starting tomorrow. A successor to the Type-V handset it debuted a year ago, the Type-S is much smaller and has a more streamlined designed, but it was still made with the same military-grade specifications. According to Verizon and Casio, it is able to withstand extreme humidity, three feet of water for up to 30 minutes, and drops from about five feet; it can also resist dust as fine as silica flour. It certainly looks rugged, too, with its sturdy … Read more

Around this time each year, J.D. Power and Associates releases its study of customer satisfaction for cell phones. Last month the company named T-Mobile as the favorite carrier among consumers, but this week it turns its attention to handsets. Both Motorola and Sanyo emerged as winners, with each manufacturer spinning the results to their ends. And incidentally, companies both issued press releases that landed in my in-box.

Out of the eight manufacturers surveyed, Motorola and Sanyo tied to receive an overall satisfaction score of 726. Of the five key factors surveyed, Sanyo scored big in operation and battery functionality. … Read more

Nokia today announced the Nokia 8600 Luna, a new luxury slider handset that combines a soft-touch stainless steel body with a layer of smoked glass. When closed, you can see the illuminated keypad glow and pulsate underneath the glass. Named after the goddess of moonlight, the Luna's features aren't too shabby either--quad-band GSM support, a 2-megapixel camera, a music player, Bluetooth, and a stunning display.

Nokia expects the Luna to be available during the second quarter of the year (which should be pretty soon), and estimated retail price is 700 euros. No U.S. carrier has been announced … Read more

Speaking of convergence, the last place we thought we'd see a combo trend is the mouse and phone. That hardware mashup had initially been confined to some smaller brands like Taiwan-based Genius, whose mad scientists have produced such unholy marriages as combo camera-speakers.

But now Sony has come up with its own mouse phone (phone mouse?) for the Japanese market, an optical rodent that can be opened up for use as a Skype handset or propped up to become a VoIP speakerphone, according to Technabob. The Genius model still has one more function--it triples as an instant-message device--but Sony … Read more

During the interview with Walt Mossberg at D5, Steve Jobs apparently let slip (according to the transcript from Gizmodo and Engadget), that even though the Apple iPhone won't start out of the gate with support for third-party applications, Apple is open to it and is working on making that possible later this year. Both transcripts imply that Jobs was concerned about security issues, which is what presumably was holding up the process. The lack of third-party support was one of the biggest complaints about the iPhone when it was first announced earlier this year, so if Apple actually makes … Read more