mobile

Last but not least of today's Verizon smartphone news is the Verizon Wireless XV6900.

In a nutshell, the XV6900 is the carrier's version of the HTC Touch, which has been available in GSM and Sprint flavors for a little while now.

The XV6900 does get a fresh coat of paint, stepping out in a vibrant white, but it seems everything is pretty much the same under the hood. You still get the TouchFLO interface that lets you navigate the phone's menus with the swipe of your finger; a 2.8-inch touch screen; Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition; … Read more

Personal digital assistants, cell phones, smartphones--whatever you want to call them--keep getting smaller, thinner, and lighter. Congrats to the engineers who keep coming up with this stuff, but I'm going blind trying to keep up with them.

My tired eyes could use a break, though I know this is the equivalent of tilting at windmills. We get older and our bodies inevitably start betraying us--sometimes sooner, sometimes later. But if the inventors of tomorrow's gadgets are going to continue to think small, they've also got to start thinking big. From a purely design perspective, Apple did a … Read more

Verizon Wireless opened the floodgates today, introducing a number of additions to its cell phone and smartphone lineup, including the Motorola Q9c shown here.

Unlike the multimedia-centric Motorola Q9m, the Q9c goes after the road warriors with its integrated GPS and VZ Navigator support. In addition, it offers Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition with the Documents to Go suite, Bluetooth 2.0, a 1.3-megapixel camera, and 128MB Flash memory.

Being a more business-centric device, Verizon will not offer the more flashy lime-green version, which was announced for U.S. Cellular and Alltel. The Motorola Q9c for Verizon will be … Read more

Intel is working on technology that would allow handheld Internet devices to wirelessly use big screens.

All technology is a problem looking for a solution (or the converse). Intel is working on technology that would mitigate one of the inherent problems with ultra-small devices: ultra-small screens. Vic Lortz, a research scientist and senior architect at Intel's Communications Technology Lab in Hillsboro, Ore., discussed a technology that would include a wireless display feature on big-screen digital TVs allowing Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs, to wirelessly use the display on a big screen.

"Imagine if digital TVs included a wireless … Read more

Google's Android may get all the attention, but there's more than one industry consortium working to unify Linux development for mobile phones.

The nonprofit LiMo Foundation plans to announce the launch of LiMo Platform Release 1 at the CTIA show in Las Vegas Monday. Release 1 gives handset makers and carriers the basic operating system software needed to run a phone, leaving it up to them to put a crowd-pleasing user inferface and applications on top of that phone software.

"This is a significant achievement for LiMo in that we now have a complete fully released version … Read more

AT&T said Thursday that it will start offering live mobile TV service from MediaFlo in May, but will anyone be watching?

AT&T first announced its partnership with MediaFlo in February 2007. Back then it said it expected the service to begin by the end of 2007. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel told Reuters the company waited until May to offer the service because it was "a brand new service on a brand new network, and two brand new devices."

The new service will operate on two new handsets, the LG Vu and the Samsung Access. … Read more

AT&T today announced two enhancements to its AT&T Mobile Music service that will let users use music to customize their cell phones. With mSpot's Make-Ur-Tones (couldn't they have come up with a better name?), AT&T customers can create their own ringtones using an application downloaded to their cell phone. While that in itself is hardly new, the application gives aspiring musicians a lot more freedom than you might expect. Instead of just offering a selection of Midi tones, users will be able to download an actual music track and then cut their … Read more

There's nothing fun about being on a wait list, especially when you're told the wait just got longer.

Skyfire (video), a new cell phone browser demoed in February, hit such demand in its closed beta program, the company split participation into two rounds. According to a Skyfire statement, those lucky ducks who signed up before March 1 made the cut for Beta 1 and will receive the golden invitation to join the testing in phases from now until the end of April.

This first phalanx of users will also be invited to continue their testing as the second … Read more

Bubble Motion, a provider of text messaging-for-voice technology, has raised $14 million in a second round of funding from Sequoia Capital, Comcast Interactive Capital, and NCD Investors, the company said Wednesday.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company, which was founded in 2003, had previously raised $10 million from Sequoia, an early backer of Google and Yahoo. Comcast and NCD are new investors in Bubble Motion, which develops a short voice messaging service that enables users to sidestep the keyboard. According to the company's Web site, Bubble Motion is available to 100 million people worldwide, with cell phones from carriers … Read more