Archive for November, 2006
Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
 Not unlike Apple and Dell, Virgin Mobile USA is getting into the recycling business — sort of. Their new program, announced yesterday, provides buyers of Virgin’s prepaid phones with a prepaid envelope inside the box to return an old phone in. As part of its new partnership with ReCellular, your unwanted handsets, like the vintage Kyocera K9 or classic Motorola StarTAC, will be refurbished and then sold or donated. And so you won’t feel so bad at the thought of someone else using last year’s model, all the sale proceeds will go to helping homeless youth, which we’re hoping will restore your faith a bit in phone donation programs. It should be noted though, Virgin isn’t the only carrier being a good samaritan with what might be otherwise discarded devices — Verizon and T-Mobile have also been spotted distributing mailers with new purchases.
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Friday, November 24th, 2006
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   There’s still no sign of when exactly we might be able to get our grubby American paws on a Verizon-branded MAXX, but Australia’s Telstra Mobile is gearing up to deliver the Christmas goodies a little early this year. As a refresher, the V6 MAXX takes the reigns as king of the RAZR hill, rocking some mighty speedy HSDPA, a 2 megapixel external and VGA internal cam, 50MB of user memory, QVGA main display and touch-sensitive external controls. The launch of the MAXX down under dovetails nicely with Telstra’s recent launch of their nationwide “Next G” HSDPA network; best of all, it sounds like you should be able to march into your local shop before too long and pick ‘er up. We’re beet red with jealousy, but if anyone has the chance to check it out, drop us a line in comments and let us know the verdict!
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Sunday, November 19th, 2006
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   Nokia’s BH-800 not high class enough for your expensive tastes? Bang & Olufsen might just have your number with their Earset 2, the wireless followup to their (aptly named) Earset 1. The aluminum-clad headset, Bang & Olufsen’s first to use Bluetooth, apparently features two microphones and some newfangled gadgetry to optimize the transmitted sound quality (think bone conduction, but with less bone conduction and more microphones). Look for the Earset 2 to drop early next year for somewhere north of $200.
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Saturday, November 18th, 2006
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    It’s not like we haven’t been teased here at Engadget Mobile with all the spy pics taken of the LG VX9900 lately. And with release dates coming and going, it’s begun to wear a bit on our patience. Well, it turns out that a Howard Forums user who shall go unnamed managed to sneak a copy of the spec sheet. A 2.0 megapixel camera, wireless sync for you email junkies, VZNavigator when us men don’t want to ask for directions, and Bluetooth 1.2 round out the feature set on this one. Still, when, and for how much?
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Friday, November 17th, 2006
When a single manufacturer accounts for an overwhelming majority of your license revenue, it stands to reason that said manufacturer might save a little dough in the long haul by acquiring you outright. And so it goes for the long, passionate relationship between UIQ and licensee Sony Ericsson; of the 13 handsets running the Symbian-based platform, nearly half — six in all — have been designed and produced by Sony Ericsson, with the remainder split between Motorola and Arima units that haven’t seen been met with nearly as much publicity. The Swedish company, currently owned by Symbian itself, will be transferred to Sony Ericsson (pending clearance of the typical bureaucratic stuff, of course) for an undisclosed sum but will continue to operate as an independent entity with the current management team in place. Though UIQ promises that its platform will continue to be available “on equal terms to all its licensees,†the move makes official what’s been known for years: that UIQ is to Sony Ericsson what S60 is to Nokia, an interpretation of the Symbian smartphone operating system to call its own. Will UIQ ever match S60’s popularity, particularly in the Symbian-friendly European market? Probably not, but with a committed partner now laying out the requisite cash, it does seem more likely than ever that UIQ’s here to stay — and as always, we’re all about choice.
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