Hasta La Gadget!

It’s getting cold outside, and soon your nimble fingers will be covered in warm, snuggly gloves that keep your digits warm but make it virtually impossible to navigate your iPhone. In fact, any capacitive touch-screen is pretty much beyond your reach (resistive works fine, thank you very much).

So you take off a glove and live with the cold, so you can touch your iPhone and virtually any one of the other 400 million capacitive touch screen devices you encounter–ATMs, gas stations, checkout counters, and the like.

On the other hand, you could simply use TouchTec’s new nano-technology-impregnated gloves and never remove them for a touch screen again (unless you want to). Check out my “hands-in” report in the video; more details after the jump.

Following the lead of Orange and Vodafone in the UK, a second Canadian wireless carrier is set to get its hands on the iPhone. Bell Canada will join Rogers Communications in carrying the popular handset, breaking that carrier’s exclusive contract with Apple.

Bell is set to begin selling the phone next month, utilizing its new $1 billion wireless network. Does this signal the coming of a similar move in the US? Fingers crossed.

The floodgates, it seems, have opened on the iPhone in the UK. A day after announcing that Orange will be getting the device in the country, one more carrier has thrown its hat into the Apple handset ring. Next year, Vodafone will become the third company to sell the iPhone in the UK, joining Orange and O2, the latter of which has had an exclusive contract for the device the past two years.

No word on an exact date for when the phone arrives on the carrier in the UK and Ireland, beyond “early 2010.” Handset and data plan prices also have yet to be announced for the iPhone 3G and 3GS.

The iPhone is finally coming to China in an official capacity in
October. The handset is via China Unicom, that country’s second largest
carrier, which signed a three year deal with Apple back in August.
Unicom is hoping that the anticipated device will mark a successful
launch of the carrier’s 3G network.

The phone, which has already been available in China through less
legitimate means, will be selling for a lofty $732.50, a price that is
expected to push
a lot of users toward device-subsidized contract plans.

Market research firm Interpret recently made some discoveries about public perception of smartphones that should shock, surprise, and amaze you. The just released report, dubbed “Signature Smartphones: Gaining Mindshare in Order to Gain Market Share,” reveals that despite being massively disadvantaged in the marketplace, Palm managed to nab a huge chunk of mindshare with the Pre — in fact, the report suggests that the Pre is number two only to the iPhone 3GS in the metric. The study looks at the driving factors behind purchaser’s decisions to buy a smartphone, narrowing down the list to three major components: belief that the phone is “smart,” belief that the phone is “hip / cool,” and belief that the phone will make them more productive. Rating a swath of phones (BlackBerry Curve and Storm, G1, iPhone), the report found that only the iPhone and Pre balanced the three factors in a way in which consumers felt the higher price tags were warranted. More to the point, only the Pre and the iPhone 3GS managed to strike that balance at all; offerings such as the two BlackBerrys were lopsided. There’s not much more meat to the study, though it does shed some interesting light on just how Palm managed to squeeze its way back into the limelight (of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a product that’s actually kind of cool). Check out the whole PDF for yourself over at that read link.

Disclosure: Engadget columnist Michael Gartenberg is an employee of Interpret, and worked on the study cited above.

Filed under: Cellphones

New study says Palm Pre second only to iPhone 3GS in mindshare originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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