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Talkster has been getting some buzz from fellow CTIA-goers. The new international dialing service is offering free global calls in exchange to listening to a few ads. The VoIP-based, phone-centered service feels like the perfect Skype (download) and Pincity mashup. It's free like Skype, and also relies on a VoIP backbone, but like Pincity, Talkster makes use of local numbers to initiate mobile and landline calls.

It sure sounds irresistible, and I've read a few glowing reviews, but in actuality it's a bit tricky. Talkster members enter their number and the number they're calling, and Talkster assigns a new, local number for callers on each end of the line. Say what?

If I want to call my sister in England, I enter both our phone numbers and receive a third number in my 415 area code. That's my permanent number for the phone number I just entered. My sister will get a number for me too. If I want to catch her at home, work, and on her cell phone for free, I'll need to enter each phone number and get three separate Talkster lines.

It wouldn't be so confusing if that were all, but of course it's not. Initiating a call isn't merely the result of dialing one of my Talkster-issued local numbers. There's an order to the calling system. Let's say I initiate the call to my darling sib using a Talkster phone number. I dial the appointed number in my area code and she picks up. But we can't talk yet. She first has to hang up while I stay on the line. My sister then quickly locates her local number, and while Talkster servers do some speedy math to connect our loose ends together, we both listen to an ad. Or that's the plan as soon as Talkster's ad deals are in place.... Read more

Conference-goers flocked around the Guitar Hero station at Motorola's mammoth tent on the CTIA Wireless conference floor, but it was Hands-On Mobile's modest booth where Guitar Hero Mobile is best experienced. There the game's product manager, JJ Leichleiter, walked me through the mobile version of the popular console game.

Let me dispel all doubt by assuring you that this is the real thing, deputized by Activision, Guitar Hero's console publisher. Loosely based on Guitar Hero 3, the 3D mobile version offers two characters (Axel Steel and Judy Nails), four guitars, and 15 songs. Subscription holders will receive three more songs every month.

Playing virtual guitar has gotten easier with a reduction from five keys on the console game's peripheral guitar to three on the phone. Users can choose whichever keypad row feels best.

This game has a lot going for it--easy fretting, satisfying animation, and killer sound quality. Guitar Hero Mobile uses PMD audio for the BREW platform, which preserves the melody, harmony, vocals, and cacophonous ding every time you miss. Stay tuned for a video demonstration on this space and on CNET TV.

Guitar Hero Mobile will be available for purchase for Verizon Wireless users in December 2007. After that, more networks on the BREW platform will join the fray, followed by J2ME phones.

Second Life may have nudged its Grid onto the mobile screen, but it's Gemini's EXplo platform for enabling mini virtual worlds that earned a spot on Deloitte's Wireless Fast 50 list at the CTIA Wireless conference (coverage).

(Credit: Gemini Mobile)

In S'town, a game built on the EXplo platform, users can chat on screen, buy products, stare at advertising billboards, and meet up with online friends, even whooshing to a meeting point on the other end of the expansive world. That's in Japan, where impressive phones on the Softbank network are already attracting a demographic of "young, active, and 'fun'" 18 to 24 year-old women who don't mind expressing themselves in one of 11 rudimentary avatars.

North America's S'town is apparently a much different world. This audience will be able to integrate with services like YouTube and Facebook. In a demo, Stephen Sims, Gemini's Director of Product Management for EXplo, walked a bouncy, pig-tailed avatar into a Facebook gallery whose virtual walls were decked with album images. In another view, pressing the phone's soft key button reeled through images vertically as if on a giant turbine, from the far "wall."

North American carriers will begin marketing games like S'town using Gemini's platform "sometime in 2008," Sims assured me. Europeans will likely get them much sooner; carrier talks are underway.

It's the year of social networks wrought with the mobile experience in mind. I spoke to five companies peddling their handheld experience as The Next Big Thing; here's how they stack up.

Bluepulse is the most advanced of the bunch, with a messaging service core and a profile, activity feed, and friend-of-a-friend discovery as other central activities. Messaging is easy. The single in-box shows status updates, all message types, and friend requests, and filters within this section highlight new messages and allow search.

You can post photos and 3G videos, but click-to-call is still under development. I dig the automatic spell check and basic grammar correction, but wish the messaging had a drop-down menu or predictive text to quickly choose from among friends. Unlike others, Bluepulse is purely mobile, operating on a slim and simple WAP site that never looks right from the desktop.

Based out of the U.K., Trutap has much more momentum abroad--in the U.S. the closed beta only works on AT&T and limits all-in-one IM to MSN, Yahoo, AIM, and ICQ services. Trutap is more a mobile facilitator than pure mobile social network in that photos and posts push to partner sites--Blogger, LiveJournal, Flickr, and so on. Trutap friends can also chat in-network.... Read more

There are very few essential differences between Whrrl and Rummble, two new social networks built on geotagging, ratings and recommendations within a trusted network, and an amphibian experience of comfortable operation on the Internet and cell phone.

Both Rummble and Whrrl pin users' whereabouts and ratings on a local map so their friends can see. Both also contain stealth settings to dissuade stalkers or shunned friends, and a manual mechanism for updating location if the phone isn't GPS-enabled.

The major differences between the reviews service and Yelp is mostly philosophical. Yelp, too, contains filters for whittling opinions to your network, and privacy settings to cloak your identity. Yet Yelp doesn't place you on a map for all to see, and won't help you schedule a meet-up as a result.

Whrrl's mapping key serves up ratings at a glance.

(Credit: Whrrl)

Between Whrrl and Rummble, Whrrl is much more ready for prime time than Rummble, which is still locked into a closed beta and which sports a much plainer ("faster, more universal") mobile interface. Whrrl's mapping key is also much more meaningful than Rummble's. Yet Whrrl needs a WAP site to get smartphone users to jump on board, and to improve the way information is organized on the phone. And let's not discount Rummble's fancy behavior-based algorithms for adjusting the percentage of trust you have in your friends' judgment.

Whrrl's plans for behavior-based intelligence is linked to ad support. Thankfully not the location-based targeting that pummels pedestrians with coupons as they pass a shop; rather offers associated with actual patronage.

GestureTek Mobile has bestowed the powers of movement-based navigation, popularized by the Nintendo Wii, upon cell phones. The one crucial difference: no Wii tennis elbow.

Since the technology in GestureTek Mobile's EyeMobile Engine is purely optic rather than hardware-based--unlike the accelerometer that tells iPhone when to jump into landscape mode--wrist motion is powerful and specific.

Here's an example from the demo: just click the soft key to zoom in on the map, and tilt the phone back and forth to zoom in and out. Do it again holding the scroll button to activate the motion detection, and tilt the handset from side to side to scroll around.

The zoom, scroll, and slow controls initiate motion response.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The demo also included games on Japanese phones, offering a glimpse of the future for us North American slackers. In one game, I rotated the phone in all directions to guide my sky-diving character through clouds to a landing target, all the while avoiding flying objects and collecting apples for points (apples?!). In a bowling game, I held down the center key to produce a digital bowling ball and whipped my arm upward to release it. It turns out that my GestureTek bowling score is pretty true to real life.

While those cool 3D games won't be available in this continent for a while, some technology, like the map I tested, is already available for Windows Mobile 6 and selected models for Verizon, Alltel, and Cellular South, with more to come. In Japan, advanced phones are already sporting 3D games made with the EyeMobile Engine tilt technology.

AOL may have been one of the first mainstream services to really make its way onto most consumer telephones (with AIM), but the rest of its mobile services haven't exactly been keeping pace with Google and Yahoo's efforts. Today they're trying to change that with several mobile incarnations of AOL services that have been custom tailored for entry level handsets and smart phones running Windows Mobile.

For users with phones that aren't running a "smart" operating system there are two services that have been specially tailored for you. The first is a new WAP portal that serves up news, AOL and AIM Mail, Mapquest, weather, and various other sections of AOL's front page in byte-sized pieces. The other is a new SMS short code version of AIM that lets user sign on and message buddies using their SMS text messages--similar to what carriers offer with built-in AIM apps, sans the actual program. To try it out on your own phone, send a text message to 'AIMAIM' (246246).

AOL's new MyMobile app for Windows Mobile smart phones bundles together several services in one.

(Credit: AOL Inc.)

Windows Mobile users are getting a slightly better end of the deal with a new application that's a lot like Yahoo's Go service. It's called MyMobile, and it's home to a handful of AOL's services like search, Moviefone, Mapquest, and mail. The app will remember your history, so you can speed up searches on the go with your zipcode or address. Users of other Palm and Symbian phones have had something similar for some time now in AOL's software store. AOL intends to release the app "by the end of the year" and make it free with integrated advertisements.

Also of note is a new widget for WHERE users for tracking where your AIM buddies are online. This requires a GPS-enabled phone, and works using Mapquest to let you post your location without having to look up or type out an address--a little bit like Sprint, Boost Mobile (with Loopt) and Helio have done.

AOL is also officially launching their Winamp Remote mobile service, which lets you access music and videos from your Winamp library while on the go. The service is powered by Orb, which is capable of doing similar things with their standalone app on most mobile handsets and modern-day gaming consoles.

The most exciting bit of all of these is the new Windows Mobile app, since it will take some of the work out of using these services outside the confines of your mobile browser. I'm also a fan of Winamp Remote since Orb is one of the more user friendly personal streaming services out there, yet it's highly customizable for advanced users. I look forward to seeing it integrated into other services.

Today bluepulse, a free mobile social network, announced a platform shift that will give smartphone users access to the free service for the first time. Bluepulse is now Webware.

The bluepulse in-box stores incoming and outgoing messages, and status updates.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Until now, the strictly-mobile social network installed on JAD and JAR downloads to Java and Symbian cell phones, but wouldn't run on smartphones like Pocket PCs or Palm Treos. Migrating to a wholly Web-based app opens the door for smartphone users to take advantage of the service's instant messaging and social discovery mash-up.

In addition to making the switch to Web, bluepulse also adds an all-in-one message in-box and out-box that stores status updates, text messages, and friend requests in a single location, much like a Facebook feed. Another feature, group friending, applies the transitive property to help users connect to their friends' friends, thus extending their network.

Adding friends can now also be accomplished en masse through invitations to Facebook, AIM, Hotmail, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail, MSN, and MySpace contacts.

Users can join bluepulse by pointing their mobile browsers to http://www.bluepulse.com.

Thumbplay, a sales hub for mobile ringtones, videos, and games, will announce tomorrow at the CTIA conference in San Francisco, California, that it has also become a free database for user-generated content.

Account-holders can upload and store media from either their cell phone or computer to their Thumbplay "locker." From there, they can send images and clips to friends via SMS or e-mail. Users can also download content from fellow Thumplay members for free, and grab code to affix the image on any personal Web page that accepts HTML embedding. Oddly, there doesn't seem to be a way to assimilate another user's contribution into your personal media gallery. UPDATE: They can, however, be stored in a separate folder for favorites.

Thumbplay will also reveal two upcoming Facebook apps, whose presence will complete the circle of what is essentially a free storage and sharing service with some social networking characteristics.

The first of these is Thumbplay Share, which will display photos from your personal locker and automatically update them when you add a new image to Thumbplay.com. Photo Portal does the reverse, allowing users to send photos from Facebook albums to any cell phone.

The apps won't be publicly available until an unspecified date later this week, though Thumbplay's President and CEO, Are Traasdahl, stopped by CNET's San Francisco office to demonstrate. They look pretty effective so far, but more word on that when I get a chance to try them out in the wild.