Phones

Each week, we track the hottest ringtones.

In this week's roundup of Billboard's top ringtones, a new artist has cracked the top 10. His name is T-Pain and his song "Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin')" has nabbed the 10th spot this week. After its debut at number 16 last week, the catchy R&B tune seems to be gathering momentum.

Originally from Tallahassee, Florida, T-Pain seems to have no problem singing about the digital age; two of his previous hits are titled "Send Me an E-Mail," and "What's Yo Myspace.&… Read more

The Nokia N95 is a convergence fanboy's dream--there's a built-in sat-nav, a 5-megapixel camera, a media player, a PDA and of course, a mobile phone. But is it better than the standalone competition or is it a jack of all trades and master of none?

We've pitted the N95's component parts against five standalone devices to see if you're better off taping together all your favorite gadgets or going down the shops and picking up Nokia's flagship handset.

MusicFirst up, it's the Nokia N95 versus the iPod Nano--both play music but which … Read more

The vast choice of mobile phone accessories gives Crave a pounding headache. We rarely find something genuinely worth spending our hard-earned cash on. "Yet again, mobile phone companies are trying to sell us stuff we don't need," we think to our amalgamated Borg-self. But Sony Ericsson's MBR-100 might just change our mind(s).

This little electro-lozenge enables you to wirelessly blast tunes stored on your mobile phone through your hi-fi system or PC. A refreshing change from music screeching out of annoyingly crap 0.01W mobile phone loudspeakers, perhaps?

The MBR-100 is simple to connect. After … Read more

Everyone seems to have an awesome story or two about cell phones getting destroyed at parties. I've heard tales about them getting thrown into pools, flushed down toilets, dropped into cakes, and pretty much everything else. They make great "embarrassing tales of the digital age" stories. And it's even better when they happened to your friends, not you. Like this one, about my friend Cliff and his dear departed Razr.

It was my roommate's birthday this weekend, and our former college buddy Cliff (think Bluto Blutarsky, except 6 feet 7 inches tall) had driven up … Read more

Morgan Pozgar, a 13-year-old, won LG's National Texting Championship yesterday. Her fast fingers netted her $25,000.

Pozgar bested her East Coast competitors and won $10,000 along with the title of East Coast champ.

With little time to ice her thumbs, the 13-year-old successfully texted "Supercalifragilisticexpialidoucious! Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious. If you say it loud enough you'll always sound precocious," to beat Eli Tirosh (who won the West Coast crown).

So the next time you get on your teen's case for texting, just remember that they're in … Read more

Earlier this week, Microsoft filed what appeared to be a patent application for a smart phone interface, causing many a blog to begin speculating that maybe it was for a "Zune phone" (for better or for worse)--something that's been talked about for some time now. The images in the application, showing a tiled graphical interface, definitely look somewhat iPhone-ish, and plenty of buzz arose that perhaps Microsoft was trying to develop an "iPhone killer."

But a few sharp eyes (namely, those of our Microsoft guru Ina Fried) noticed that the interface also bore a … Read more

If phones have become a staple of fashion accessories, then it stands to reason that they should have proper representation--as in a modeling agency.

Elite Model Look has taken care of that, signing French phone designer ModeLabs to create its "Elite EML 1" handset. Pricing and availability for non-models remain a mystery for now, but the marketing literature is classic: "It's glamorous, naturally into multimedia, and wears the trendiest colours. It gets with the rhythm of the music and grabs every moment in photo or video. My new Elite EML2--it's a whole 'Attitude'!"

As … Read more

I'd initially been skeptical about BuyYourFriendADrink.com (BYFAD), the Web site that just opened today (see previous coverage) in which you can remotely order drinks for your friends that they can redeem at participating bars by showing the bartender a code in a text message. It's available at about 40 bars in New York City and the surrounding area, and the company plans to gradually expand to other urban areas over the course of the year.

I'd been pretty confident that the site itself would work, but I hadn't been entirely positive that the bars involved … Read more

Research in Motion finally has offered with an explanation for the outage earlier this week that left "Crackberry" users across North America without access to their e-mail. Though at first the company was slow to explain the outage, which lasted from Tuesday evening through Wednesday morning, RIM yesterday blamed the problem on a minor software upgrade and ruled out any issues with capacity or security.

Though it had been tested several times, the introduction of a "new, noncritical system routine" designed to "provide better optimization of the system's cache" caused a series of … Read more