Mobile Phone News

Filed under: Sony Ericsson, Accessories

Like a dagger through Motorola’s heart, we’re sure, Sony Ericsson’s collaboration with tennis superstar Maria Sharapova is starting to pay dividends with the Maria Sharapova Design Collection of custom phone accessories. Launching in the third quarter, wares include the “Courtside Case,” Excercise Case, Travel Wallet, and “Party Bag” — at least three of which we weren’t aware we needed — but the custom branding should push at least a few of these out the door. One word of caution, though: Miss Sharapova assures us in the press materials that “I am looking forward to using the collection with my Sony Ericsson T303,” and if her phone of choice is seriously an EDGE-less slider with a 160 x 128 display, we’re forced to cast her good taste into serious doubt.

[Via Engadget Spanish]

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Filed under: Apple

The strategies carriers around the world are employing to price the iPhone 3G and its plans seem to be varying pretty wildly — a side-effect of the newfound freedom Apple is giving them with the new model — but in Mexico, where Telcel’s signed up to release it, the strategy isn’t too terribly different from AT&T’s. Plans will run between MXN $399.60 and $876.90 (also available in US Dollar denominations of $41 to $90.85 after tax), and the phones will be priced on a graduated scale accordingly. The 8GB goes from MXN $3,199 down to free, while the 16GB will hit your wallet for anywhere between MXN $4,459 and $1,259. In US greenbacks, that works out to $311, free (because free’s free in any currency, after all), $433, and $122, respectively. So yes, at the cheapest plan price, Bot. models cost over $100 more than their US equivalents, but the plan’s only $41 at that level, which nets you 200 voice minutes, 100 messages, and 100MB of data. Extra texts are 74 centavos (about 8 cents) and extra data — a very real necessity — runs 5 centavos per KB, which is a pretty immeasurably small amount of cash until you do the math and realize that you’re plan to be shelling out about USD $4.86 per megabyte. Be careful there!

[Via Engadget Spanish]

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

Remember that touchscreen Motorola Blaze we’d mentioned a while back that was on the hook to get Verizon’s visual voicemail service? It may not be in Verizon stores yet, but it’s all up in Boy Genius Report’s labs with a dark red body, MING attitude, and almost limitless mediocrity on board. The touchscreen apparently requires ridiculous amounts of effort to actuate, and that problem is compounded by a lame on-screen keyboard that makes texting tricky at best. EV-DO Rev. A is cool and all — and the visual voicemail support should be a pretty popular add-on feature — but that giant Motorola logo up front with the red ring and three pounds of chrome leaves the Blaze with a face only a mother could love. Let’s hope Verizon’s positioning this one as its low-end touchscreen offering, because we’re not seeing it cha-chinging many registers otherwise.

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