mobile

On Monday, T-Mobile announced the upcoming availability of its latest smartphone, the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8520. The Curve 8520 is slated for release on August 5 for $129.99 with a two-year contract and will come in two colors: frost or black.

This will be RIM's first model with dedicated media keys, which are integrated along the top of the handset, and also replaces the trademark trackball navigator with a touch-sensitive optical trackpad (think Samsung Omnia). Also of note, the BlackBerry Curve 8520 touts Mac compatibility out of the box (via desktop software).

The rest of the smartphone's … Read more

As CNET's Senior Editor for MP3 player reviews, you'd think I'd be losing sleep over the fact that the majority of the mobile phones on the market include some form of integrated music playback. But in spite of manufacturer's efforts to fashion the mobile phone into a portable music powerhouse, there's still a lot of confusion out there when it comes to transferring music from a computer to your phone. Sure, most of us can figure out how to transfer music from iTunes to an iPhone, but what about loading music on your sister's … Read more

Nokia has signed an agreement to acquire Cellity, a small German company that creates social-network contact management and address book aggregation services for mobile devices.

Cellity's 14 workers will become Nokia employees. But the service will be shut down and existing user accounts will not be transferred to Nokia.

Cellity, which was founded less than three years ago, is based in Hamburg.

Terms of the deal have not been made public. The acquisition is expected to close in the current quarter.

Acquiring small start-ups is nothing new for Nokia. It acquired Plazes last year while the locator start-up was … Read more

On Thursday, T-Mobile announced a retail agreement with RadioShack to offer its phones (including the new MyTouch 3G) and services in 4,000 RadioShack stores nationwide, starting later this summer.

"Through our milestone partnership with RadioShack, T-Mobile's presence in national retail stores expands nearly twofold, giving millions more people the opportunity to readily access our products and take advantage of the tremendous value T-Mobile provides its customers," said Doug Chartier, senior vice president of sales at T-Mobile USA.

Prior to the deal, RadioShack offered only a selection of the carrier's products online. Terms of the agreement … Read more

Google Maps for Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60 phones can plot you, your friends, and businesses on a map. Now it can also layer on transit lines, traffic, and points of interest that correspond to Wikipedia articles.

Google Maps for Mobile 3.2's new layers option for its mobile Maps is accessible by pressing the "2" key or by selecting "Menu" and "Layers." In addition to traffic and transit, Google opens the door to personal maps you've saved using the My Maps feature on Google Maps for the desktop. The latest … Read more

A recent report noting some big wins in the mobile-platform space by former database powerhouse Sybase has some interesting observations about what this means for the company's role in the cloud-computing market. Since 1998, Sybase CEO John Chen has been redirecting the company's efforts toward mobility, which he claims is now paying off big time.

Most interesting to me, however, is Chen's claim that cloud computing means a big opportunity for his mobile-platform business. As the article notes:

Sybase's mobile platform may provide a cloud-based lifeline for the likes of SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle, providing those … Read more

Do you constantly pick up your iPhone to check its display? Do you want to use your iPhone with one hand? Or perhaps you're always looking for something to prop up your handset so you can watch videos. If these circumstances apply to you, you need a stand for your iPhone.

Just Mobile's Xtand ($40), which I got to test this week, gives you a place to put your iPhone while making it readily available for one-handed operation or showing it off. I liked the concept, but I didn't find it useful since my iPhone spends most … Read more

We've told you about its cool new packaging, and now we can tell you about the phone itself. It's been a long wait for T-Mobile's second Google Android phone, but the MyTouch 3G has finally arrived. We've given it a shakedown, and we like what we see.

The MyTouch improves on its G1 predecessor in a few ways. It offers a sleeker design, more comfortable controls, and all the benefits of the Android "Cupcake" 1.5 update. And even better, we finally get Microsoft Exchange Server support for e-mail. It's still far from … Read more

On Tuesday, T-Mobile announced the upcoming availability of two new messaging cell phones, the Samsung Comeback and Samsung Gravity 2. The Comeback will be available starting Wednesday, July 22, for $129.99 with a two-year contract, while the Gravity 2 is expected to ship in August (though an exact release date and pricing were not announced at this time).

Perhaps the more interesting of the two is the Samsung Comeback. The handset features a flip design where the screen opens to the right (like a book) to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard. The phone has plenty of messaging options, with … Read more