Mobile Phone News

Though we admittedly missed it in our initial review — this is the kind of thing you just expect to work — we circled back and amended our look at Samsung’s Captivate and Vibrant when we discovered that AGPS is completely busted. Not “sort of working,” not “flawed,” just utterly broken and non-functional; we waited minutes upon minutes without a location lock in our follow-up testing. AGPS is the kind of thing you don’t miss until you don’t have it, at which point you realize how woefully inadequate straight-up GPS alone is for mobile use when you’re frequently (for some of us, nearly continuously) trying to locate yourself indoors, under a tree, or in the heart of an urban canyon.

If you want to know what Verizon’s upcoming Chocolate Touch will look like, look no further than this little number, the SB210, that’s just been unveiled for LG’s domestic South Korean market. Naturally we can expect that the firmware will be a good deal different, but the hardware looks precisely like the spy shots we’ve seen so far of the next Big Red handset to wear the storied Chocolate brand — which, it bears repeating, won’t be the much hotter BL40. In the SB210’s case, the big feature in this place is an integrated database of 280 golf courses that hooks up with the GPS to offer distance information and decrease your handicap (theoretically, anyway). The phone’s available at this time on SKT for 638,000 won — about $538 — so we’re expecting a much decrease subsidized price when this thing comes to Verizon later this week.

Filed under: Handsets, LG, Verizon Wireless

Filed under: Handsets, HTC, Verizon Wireless, Windows Mobile, GSM, EDGE, EV-DO, CDMA