phone

How do you listen to the sound of silence? It sounds like some kind of corny philosophical question, but conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has decided to address the quandary through an unusual medium: a cell phone ringtone. Download it to your phone (it's free), and then your handset will ring with four minutes and thirty-three seconds of pure silence instead of that irritating Kelly Clarkson ringtone that you've been using for the past two years.

Keats named the ringtone "My Cage (Silence for Cellphone)" after the artist John Cage, who once similarly composed four minutes and … Read more

In addition to the I-mate Jaq3 announcement today, I-mate also introduced the I-mate PDAL. Sans QWERTY keyboard and sporting a trimmer package (4.4x2.2x0.6 inches; 4.1 ounces) than the Jaq3, it's a quad-band smart phone running Windows Mobile 5, and it doesn't include anything revolutionary, but it has all the necessities for a mobile professional. It features a 2.4-inch, 65,000-color touch screen; integrated Wi-Fi (802.11b/g); Bluetooth; and a 2-megapixel camera. Like the Jaq3, it'll be available unlocked at the end of January, but no pricing information has been set.

At the Silicon Valley New Tech Meetup tonight I got a demo of Pinger, a cool little voice messaging service that works on your cell phone. You dial the Pinger number, speak your message to the service, say the name of person you want to get it, and it sends an SMS to your recipient. The recipient gets a text message with a phone number attached to it. The recipient selects and dials that number to hear the message immediately and can respond immediately by voice, too.

It sounds an awful lot like voice mail, doesn't it? It is, … Read more

At CES Samsung showed off a quirky cell phone that takes "thin" to a whole level. It's not thin from the side like the Motorola Razr, but rather it's exceptionally slim when measured across its front face. The GSM Samsung SGH-X830 measures about an inch wide and sports a swivel form factor in a gallery of colors, including black, green, red and blue. Features are impressive for such a small phone. Inside is a 2-megapixel camera, a digital music player, multiformat video support, 1GB of flash memory, stereo Bluetooth, a 65,536-color display and USB 2.… Read more

Continuing the tragic saga of cool smart phones that we can't get here in the United States, we have the Nokia N95. As you may or may not recall, the N95 is the flagship model of the company's N series of multimedia computers. It has a 5-megapixel camera, integrated GPS, Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), HSPDA, 150MB of internal memory, and a Micro SD slot. The design allows you to switch between different modes; you can slide the dial pad down to make calls or slide the dedicated media keys out in the opposite direction, automatically converting the 2.… Read more

Despite the CES brouhaha happening simultaneously in Las Vegas, Steve Jobs appeared onstage at his Macworld 2007 keynote in San Francisco to introduce one of the most anticipated gadgets in years. The final unveiling of the iPhone puts to rest the plethora of speculation, gossip, and rumors that have littered the Web for the last year. Read on for our first thoughts of the ballyhooed new phone for Cingular.

At CES, Samsung is showing an updated model to its earlier SGH-T319 models. The new Samsung SGH-T329 offers much of the same feature set including a VGA camera, a 65,000-color display, a speakerphone, USB cable support and Bluetooth, but fortunately it improves on its predecessor's dull design. The flip phone sports soothing, rounded edges, a gray and silver color scheme, and a vertically oriented external display. The carrier is T-Mobile, but we've no word on pricing or availability yet.

HTC makes some great smart phones, such as the T-Mobile Dash (a.k.a. HTC Excalibur) and the Cingular 8525, but one smart phone we've anxiously been awaiting is the HTC Artemis. Why? Well, it has this really cool navigation wheel, which they call RollR, that combines a trackwheel and a trackball (á la T-Mobile Sidekick 3) and makes navigating the device so easy. It almost mimics the experience of a mouse, as it it brings up a cursor on the screen, and you simply have to press the trackball to click an app or menu. In addition, the … Read more

Back in October, we reviewed the rather horrible I-mate Jaq, which was plagued by a bulky design and poor call quality. Needless to say, we were not impressed. However, the company is giving it another go with the I-mate Jaq3, a revamped version of the Jaq that features a slightly trimmed down design and integrated Wi-Fi. Despite a fresh coat of paint in a slimming black, the numbers don't lie and the Jaq3 is still a pocketful at 4.8x2.7x0.8 inches and 5.4 ounces. The Wi-Fi integration (802.11b/g) is a nice addition, but it'… Read more