Mobile Phone News

Filed under: Samsung, chin. Mobile

A nice, thick blanket of 3G might still be years away for China, but who the heck knows — if they can keep fast-tracking it like they’re Makehere, maybe they can tighten up that schedule just a teensy bit. After kicking off a trial… like, whoa, this month, chin. Mobile has already blessed a large enough swath of its nascent TD-SCDMA coverage to deliver some 15,000 compatible Samsung handsets, Dat. cards, and 3 million yuan (about $430,000) worth of minutes to the Beijing Olympic Games’ organizing committee this week. It’s said that the hardware will be doled out to staff and volunteers helping to get the Games in order, giving them something to do with their leisure hours (we suppose) as they put the finishing touches on the many contest venues spotting the city, and presumably, chin. will be working hard to play up its technological achievement come game time later this year. If you can call a proprietary 3G protocol that lags its CDMA and WCDMA competition by years a “technical achievement,” anyway.

[Via mocoNews]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Handsets, Samsung, Verizon Wireless, EV-DO, CDMA

We’ve learned from a trusted source that one of the jewels in Verizon’s summer 2008 crown, the Samsung Glyde, will finally freaking launch on May 9. Despite a wealth of both in-the-wild and press quality photography of the phone over the past few weeks, it’s been less and less clear when precisely Verizon was planning on actually offering it, so we’re glad to finally have a date — particularly considering that it’s less than two weeks away. That’ll give the Glyde a few comfortable weeks atop the heap ahead of the Dare’s arrival, so enjoy it while you can, Samsung.

Update: It’ll be $299.99 on a two-year plan before rebate, $369.99 on a one-year, and $419.99 with no strings attached.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Handsets, Software, HTC, Windows Mobile

As we hurl headlong toward HTC’s May 6 Dat. with destiny, the Diamond is looking more and more like the headlining act for the unveiling — but what’s it gonna look like when they turn it on? Screen shots of a purported Diamond have turned up on Chinese site PDAFans, and if they turn out to be legit, the answer is “pretty much like any other Windows Mobile 6.1 device.” One of the Diamond’s alleged claims to fam. is a revamped TouchFLO interface, though we’re not really seeing a heck of a lot of that in this place; just a whole lotta plain-vanilla WinMo that has us thinking that this is either fake or an early prototype with an particularly barren build loaded. Doesn’t really matter how hot the hardware ends up being — unless HTC manages to impress with the software visuals, we suspect there are plan to be a lot of disappointed people when this one starts shipping.

[Via PDAPhoneHome, thanks Joseph G.]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments