ces - Cell phones and smartphones

Sure, it's not quite the one that Dick Tracy had, but LG showed off a prototype model of a watch phone here at CES. It sat behind a display case the whole time, but we did snag a few details about it: it will have Bluetooth, as well as text messaging. When asked how you would text message with it, the LG rep said that there's a scroll wheel at the bottom of the watch's face that'll let you scroll through letters and numbers. This sounds horrendously tedious, but at least making calls promises to be … Read more

This article has been updated to include new information.

Does the new Yahoo Go 3.0 beta herald Yahoo's new mobile strategy? That's what Yahoo would like you to think.

At first glance, the new Yahoo Go, a portal on the mobile phone to Yahoo's proprietary services--e-mail, Flickr, messaging, maps and directions, weather, and categorized news--looks strikingly similar to the old Yahoo Go. Sure, it's more celestial-looking with a burnished blue sky, pillowy clouds, and rays of emanating light that replace the bubbly signature yellow of its predecessor. But the carousel layout and offerings are essentially the same.

Here's what's not. The carousel is unfixed, which means users can delete Yahoo's default widgets and add their own for a much more tailored experience. The new Yahoo Go also makes use of keypad shortcuts. Pressing '#' gets you back to the carousel and '0' (zero) launches oneSearch. Reminders are tucked into most context menus.

The start screen is another brushup, helpfully summarizing your Yahoo inbox, and letting you add customized "snippets" of information, like a stock price, Web link, or RSS feed. Quick links are also shown on this page--users can select from various Yahoo services or include links to favorite Web sites. I liked both ideas, but questioned the implementation of a long, scrolling page layout that puts my quick links far below the snippet section, defeating the purpose of immediate access.… Read more

The eagle eyed folks over at Engadget Mobile spotted this blue LG Rumor over at the LG booth and discovered that it is indeed the Alltel version of the LG Rumor, rebranded as the LG Scoop. We also went down to check the LG Scoop out, and it is indeed almost exactly the same as the Sprint version, complete with the hidden slide-out QWERTY keyboard and the 1.3-megapixel camera. No pricing and availability as yet, but it looks like the Scoop will come in both blue and orange.

We spotted these new LG phones at the LG booth at CES, and so did the folks over at PhoneScoop. The LG AX565 clearly had Alltel branding and looks like a reworking of the LG Muziq but with the touch-sensitive music controls in an inset square instead. It has a 1.3-megapixel camera, an FM transmitter, stereo Bluetooth, and a microSD card slot.

Next, there's the LG Vu, which looks a whole lot like the Prada. We couldn't even get close enough to take a picture of it. It looks to be a GSM phone, so we're … Read more

Though it was announced earlier this year, the Samsung SGH-G600 made a guest appearance at CES. Like the SGH-G800, the G600 is a 5-megapixel camera phone with lots of photo-editing features. The thin slider design may look like a lot of Moto phones before it, but it has a solid feel in the hand, and the opening mechanism is sturdy.

Features inside include full Bluetooth, a digital music player, a document viewer, e-mail and messaging, a speakerphone, 40MB of internal memory plus a microSD card slot, USB 2.0, a 16-million color display, and personal organizer applications. The SGH-G600 is … Read more

Cell phone/PDAs or other iterations of what you want to call the convergence of handheld devices are featured prominently at the Consumer Electronics Show, no doubt. Whether these devices from Motorola or Samsung overtly claim to be iPhone killers is beside the point. The point is that most devices feature cleaner user interfaces and better bundles of applications that access more and more content. Nearly all of these gadgets are touch-based. Nearly all the devices, though, still don't come close in terms of usability and elegance to the iPhone's user interface. You can check out all the … Read more

Celebrity sightings of people have been pretty slim so far at CES, but we did get to see a celebrity cell phone. Samsung's Armani handset was sitting pretty in Samsung's enormous booth; most of the time it was behind glass, but we did see it up close. Like LG's Prada model, the Armani phone is all about design, and in this case it's decidedly minimalist. A large (2.6-inch), 262,000-color touch screen dominates the entire front face of the candy-bar device, and a slim profile (0.41 inch) means it casts a slight shadow. The … Read more

Today, Verizon Wireless added a new smartphone to its lineup, and it looks to be a goody. Manufactured by HTC, the Verizon Wireless SMT5800 takes after the HTC Vox in design and boasts a compact cell-phone-like form factor yet manages to pack in a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard. There's also an alphanumerical dialpad on the exterior of the device.

The features are pretty much standard fare. It runs Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition and has a 2-megapixel camera, Bluetooth 2.0 (with support for the A2DP profile), and EV-DO. Onboard memory is 128MB Flash/64MB RAM and comes equipped … Read more

Motorola has unveiled the Motorola S9-HD stereo Bluetooth headset, a successor to the Motorola Rokr S9 Bluetooth Active headset from last year. Like the S9, the S9-HD hangs behind the head with the player controls on the side, thus maximizing your freedom of movement while on the treadmill or the track. The S9-HD has a nice bonus though--it now comes with high-definition sound with SRS WOW HD and improved earbuds to block out more noise. It has a rated battery life of six hours of play time and weighs about an ounce overall. Not too sure about the pricing or … Read more