CTIA

At this year's CTIA expo in Las Vegas, Electronics giant Samsung has announced its new Galaxy S smartphone, a new Android-based device that features a 1 GHz processor, a 4-inch 800 by 480-pixel outdoor-friendly AMOLED display, the capability to offer "rich augmented reality content," and advanced location-based services. And the Galaxy S will be running Android, rather than Samsung's own still-simmering Bada smartphone… Read More

There’s only so much you can do to dress up a classic clamshell cell phone. But as Nokia proved at this year’s CTIA, there’s also always room for improvement. The Nokia 7205 Intrigue, a phone we already profiled when it was first announced, proved to be just as agreeable in real life as in Nokia’s packet of glossy press photos. It’s slim, slippery, and just distinctive enough to draw eyes without turning… Read More

With Clear’s WiMAX mobile Internet service now blanketing Baltimore, Portland, and many more cities to come, Samsung has decided to roll the dice on the fledging standard’s success and release a mobile Internet device (MID) with WiMAX built in and running Windows Mobile 6.1. We sat down with the long-rumored and now-revealed Mondi at the company’s CTIA booth. An MID is, by default, a sort of awkward device. Too small to… Read More

Last we saw Nokia’s fabled N97, the high-profile prototype was tethered to a company representative’s waist at CES, and crowds were lining up just to get a minute or two to play. This time around, we managed to get some breathing room with the yet-to-be-released phone, and it’s quite a machine. Unlike the N96 that we couldn’t quite believe came from this typically high-quality company, the N97 feels solid and… Read More

As you may recall, one of the biggest names in GPS seemed to be on the rocks around CES time this year, since Mio’s parent company Mitec snapped Magellan up in December. And with the umbrella company already having merged the European Navman brand into its homegrown Mio brand, it looked as if Magellan might be assimilated the same way. Not so, says Raphel Finelli, Magellan’s senior manager of public relations. We caught with… Read More

We never actually had a chance to try them ourselves, but we’re told Jabra’s original BT8030 Bluetooth headset made a fine music-and-talk solution short of one fatal flaw: it’s gigantic. The good folks at Jabra apparently went back to the drawing board and invested in a shrink ray to produce the new Halo headset, unveiled at CTIA, which sports many of the same features but has seemingly been hammered down to near… Read More

After hearing that you could actually silence rings from Sony-Ericsson’s new T707 fashion phone with a simple wave of the hand over the phone, we were a little bit surprised to hear that the company was building such innovative new technology into a phone built primarily for looks. As it turns out, there’s not much to it. According to a Sony-Ericsson rep, the hovering tech is a simple feat of optical recognition, using the… Read More

Although Nokia debuted the original version of its just-announced E71x – the E71 – all the way back in 2008, it didn’t manage to capture too much attention in the States simply because it only became available here in an unsubsidized form. And you would really have to be a Nokia devotee to swallow its $400 price tag without thinking twice. That said, with the magic of carrier subsidizes, the same phone is now making waves… Read More

Though most cell phone companies were quick to jump on the touch-screen bandwagon with unabashed iPhone imitators, Motorola has, for the most part, stuck to its tried-and-true physical keypad models in recent years. It seems to have finally caved this year, though with the introduction of the QA4 Evoke. In true Motorola style, there’s plenty of polished chrome and curvy corners on this phone, but also an obviously Apple-like home… Read More

Consumers have been complaining about the problems associated with DRM technology on their music files: songs can't be transferred between devices, shared with friends, backed up easily, and (in some cases) quick working altogether because an online music service decided to call it quits. Verizon Wireless has apparently listened, and has joined the DRM-free bandwagon in announcing more than 5 million MP3 tracks are now available from… Read More

While TV manufacturers are still struggling to scale OLED technology up to the sizes needed for mainstream televisions, it looks like mobile phones can benefit from the technology just fine in its current state. Samsung became the very first company to bring a carrier-subsidized OLED phone to the U.S. when it announced the Impression earlier this week. We had a chance to see and handle the Impression, which resembles what you might expect… Read More

We've made no secret of our disdain for fingerprint-collecting plastics in the past, and have never been shy about pointing it out in the worst offenders, but Samsung's Propel Pro takes this dirty little trend its peak. This thing just looks gross. We spied the new Propel – one of the six affordable new QWERTY phones available on AT&T – at Samsung’s booth. And though it has a sort of sophisticated-looking… Read More

Of all the phones available to handle, play with, test, poke and prod here at CTIA, the one most conspicuously absent is the one that most techies and analysts would most like to get their hands on: the Palm Pre. The phone is nowhere to be found on the main show floor. Though Sprint's invite-only VIP Lounge serves up cold drinks, sushi and comfy couches, it does not serve up hands on impressions of the Palm Pre – though there… Read More

Though we found a lot to like about HTC’s original HTC Touch Pro (if you could excuse Windows Mobile), a few major snags prevented us from really recommending it as a phone that made sense for day-to-day life. That silky TouchFLO 3D interface, for instance, was only skin deep, and it slowed the poor phone to such a crawl that even routine tasks like making a call became unbearable long and aggravating. The crew over at HTC must have… Read More

Though Android fans may be disappointed that HTC’s 2009 CTIA announcements didn’t include anything new on the Google front, the company did proffer up a smartphone for users halfway between needing a smartphone and something more ordinary: the HTC Snap. We sat down with the slim QWERTY block to see how it measures up. First, the bad news: The Snap runs Windows Mobile 6.1, and unlike the HTC Touch Pro and Touch Diamond,… Read More