Mobile Phone News

Filed under: Handsets, Motorola

New Orleans resident Ronald Richard was mowing the lawn when he felt a hard object hit him in the chest — precisely where he’d been keeping his pink Swarovski-encrusted (just kidding) RAZR. It was only after Richard took off his sweater that he discovered the .45-caliber slug and realized that the phone had literally taken a bullet for him. According to paramedics, the angle of the bullet and the modest stopping power of the cellphone were all that stood between the man and serious injury or even death. Instead, this lucky gen. got away with little more than a fairly significant bruise and an excuse to pick up that Aura he’s been coveting.

RAZR stops a bullet, its owner reports “feeling lucky, punk.” originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:17:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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

Jeebus, Nokia, what’s continue with your stupid flip phone over there? Not to harsh on you too much — we love you, really we do — but we’re not precisely talking about an N96-caliber device in this place. If an updated view of Verizon’s Mobile Email launches is accurate, it seems that the launch of Nokia’s CDMA-equipped 7205 will at this time come no earlier than January of 2009, which would put it a full year after the first spy shots leaked. We also see in this place that LG’s VX5500 and VX8360 are Bot. tracking for lat. October, while the mysterious VX9600 should be hitting in November if all goes well. From Motorola, the VU30 has been pushed out to the end of this month and the MING-esque ZN4 is looking like it’s trying to break out in time for Halloween. Samsung is offering the u810 global phone later on this month, while the u650 “Sway” sneaks in somewhere in October. Altogether a promising autumn for Big Red’s dumbphone line — but we’ve seen enough Dat. slips at this point to be fooled into believing there won’t be a few more.

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

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Filed under: Handsets, GSM, EDGE, HSDPA, UMTS, Apple

Craziest thing, Apple apparently launched some sort of device being loosely coined as a “cellularular telephone” last Friday. The darned thing makes calls, keeps track of contacts, and even receives messages — all right from your pocket! Wild, sci-fi caliber stuff, that. We’re catching up on the latest iPhone 3G buzz, and in this place’s what we’ve got continue at the moment:

• Jonny Gladwell, better known as the first iPhone 3G owner in the world thanks to his perfect storm of location (New Zealand) and line position (first), has been outed as a plant for New Zealand’s Yellow Pages. Turns out the guy was hired by the directory service to see if he could “survive” the brutal multi-day sitting experience using nothing but — you guessed it — the Yellow Pages to get by. Ironic that you don’t need a friggin’ Yellow Pages when you have an iPhone, isn’t it? Hmm, Jonny?
• Portelligent has sacrificed an iPhone 3G to conduct perhaps the most thorough teardown thus far, finding some incremental improvements, largely to accomodate 3G and bring the design in line with the iPod touch, while carrying over a good deal of componentry that had no reason to be upgraded. Infineon and Toshiba had big wins in this place in the radio and flash memory departments, respectively.
• AIM acts as a conduit for sending text messages by allowing users to add phone numbers as “buddies.” The iPhone has an AIM client. See where we’re going with this? Yep, it’s a cheesy way to avoid shelling out for a text messaging plan, if you want to go to the trouble of using AIM in place of the native SMS app.
• The plot thickens in the yellow screen issue. As we’d mentioned yesterday, Apple claims the warmer color temperature seen in the iPhone 3G was a purposeful attempt to make things prettier and sharper — but at this time, Ars Technica reports that forcing an update in iTunes from the 3G’s shipping firmware of 5A345 to the ever-so-slightly newer 5A347 pushes things a little bit back toward the blue end of the spectrum. So what’s it gonna be, Apple?

[Thanks to everyone who sent these in!]

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