CTIA

MetroPCS begins serving Las Vegas

MetroPCS may not have a booth at CTIA but the carrier has arrived in Las Vegas. On Friday, MetroPCS announced it would begin providing wireless service to the Las Vegas area. The carrier also said it would open four company-owned stores by July. MetroPCS already serves markets in Georgia, Florida, Texas, Michigan, and California, and Las Vegas will be its first market in Nevada. MetroPCS does not require contracts, and it offers unlimited minutes as a feature of all its calling plans. It offers mostly Motorola phones but it also carries select models from Nokia, Samsung, UTStarcom and Kyocera.

Plantronics unveils the fashionable Discovery 925

Even though Plantronics unveiled the Discovery 925 in New York Fashion Week a month ago, it wasn't really officially announced until today. Thanks to its unique diamond hair-clip shape, the Plantronics Discovery 925 is touted as Plantronics's first foray into the luxury headset market, targeting it especially for the fashion-forward. The company says it's like a piece of jewelry, and its leather carrying case certainly adds to the luxury factor. We had the opportunity to test it out for the past couple of weeks, and we have to say, we really do like its fit and audio … Read more

Jabra BT4010 has a LCD display

Jabra has just announced the Jabra BT4010, which is the latest Bluetooth headset with a LCD display to hit the market. Sometimes we like headsets with displays, since it can help in displaying caller ID, but the BT4010's screen is so small, it looks as if it can only show battery and pairing status. We'll have to wait until we get more information about it to know for sure. It has the usual digital signal processing and a rated six hours of talk time, though we don't know the availability and pricing yet. [Source: Phone Arena]

Bluepulse, MySpace: Better cell phone socializers

What's the difference between Bluepulse, Facebook Mobile, and MySpace Mobile? Unlike the others, whose services were adapted from the Web site to the WAP site, Bluepulse was born on cell phones, and its engineering team focused solely on designing a simple, useful social network anyone can use on a Web-ready phone.

New features Three new features keep to the mantras of simplicity and quick broadcasting while also adding convenience. People are now able to import friends' e-mails from Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL by either cherry-picking friends or importing them all. While there's a way to add friends … Read more

ChaCha lets you, literally, ask a question

This post was first updated at 9 a.m. PDT to correct the CEO's last name, which was wrong in information provided by the company's public relations firm. Also corrected was the number of user queries ChaCha has completed thus far. The post was updated again at 10 a.m. PDT with results of tests of the service and a fixed Web site link.

Forget about paying several dollars to use 411!

ChaCha, the human-powered Web search service, has a service that puts all kinds of local search and other information at your fingertips, for free. The company … Read more

BlueAnt shows off the V1 voice-controlled headset...again

BlueAnt is mostly repeating its CES lineup at CTIA this year, so we won't belabor you too much with old news, though we do want to go into further detail on the BlueAnt V1. If you'll recall, the BlueAnt V1 is what BlueAnt is calling the world's first voice-controlled Bluetooth headset. It uses "BlueGenie" technology, which involves a system of voice recognition and voice synthesis to recognize the voice without a lot of training. Some of the voice commands include the expected "Answer Call" and "Redial" but our favorite is probably &… Read more

Kajeet announces a GPS Phone Locator service

We first heard of Kajeet at CTIA last year--it's a mobile virtual network operator targeted toward families, especially those with tweens. In the wake of family-focused MVNOs getting the boot (Disney Mobile was shut down late last year, for example), it's interesting to see Kajeet still going strong. Today, Kajeet just introduced a new GPS Phone Locator service, which lets you use satellite technology to track down your child's location via Web-based maps. Parents can even schedule automatic location checks at certain times of the day. This also makes Kajeet the only prepaid carrier in the country … Read more

Verizon Wireless XV6900 is white hot

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

Motorola Q9c gets Verizon business customers on track

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