Hasta La Gadget!

Sprint  just turned on WiMAX service in a number of cities last week, and now the carrier is throwing in a little extra motivation for prospective customers: a price cut.

FierceWireless reports that Sprint has quietly lowered the monthly cost of its 4G CDMA/mobile WiMAX service $10 to $69.99 per month. Plus, Sprint is now promising a month of free service as a sign-up bonus.

The carrier is also selling its 3G/4G USB Modem U300 (pictured) for free with a two-year service contract and after rebate, compared to its initial cost of $149 back in December, the report said.

T-Mobile announced that the Samsung Gravity 2 messaging cell phone is now available. The Gravity 2 is a horizontal QWERTY slider with support for e-mail, SMS, MMS, video messaging, and instant messaging.

The Gravity 2 also includes a microSD card slot that works with 16GB cards, stereo Bluetooth, a music player, a Web browser, A-GPS that works with the optional TeleNav-powered navigation service, and a 2 megapixel camera with a video recorder.

T-Mobile is offering the Gravity 2 in either metallic pumpkin or berry mauve. It’s on sale for $29.99 with a two-year service agreement and data plan after rebates.

Samsung has announced three new Bluetooth headsets, all of which retail for under 100 bucks, that will hopefully improve on its most recent model’s ineffective noise cancellation.

The Samsung WEP470 is a small, lightweight headset with background noise filtering and echo cancellation. It’s not a dual-mic design, but claims to offer the same benefits due to its packet loss concealment technology. It also includes an LED battery indicator, power switch, and crystal ear hook for $39.99.

The WEP850 (pictured), meanwhile, offers a minimalist design with a true dual-mic configuration for improved noise cancellation and echo reduction for $69.99.

Finally, the complex $89.99 WEP870 offers everything the WEP850 does, plus multi-connection technology for pairing two Bluetooth devices simultaneously. It comes in chrome and graphite, a detachable stereo earbud for listening to music, and the ability to switch between music listening and incoming or outbound calls. It also has a tiny LCD screen that displays battery level, call status, and connection status. All three are available beginning today at www.samsung.com/accessories.

Well, Slacker certainly got our attention with this one: the popular streaming Internet radio service has announced that it is covering the up-front cost of BlackBerry Curves–essentially, making them free–for all four major carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile).

AT&T subscribers will get a BlackBerry Curve 8310, T-Mobile subscribers get the Wi-Fi-enabled Curve 8320, and Verizon and Sprint fans get the CDMA-based, 3G-capable Curve 8330.

What’s the catch? There isn’t any, aside from the usual two-year contract shenanigans. If you were to buy these handsets on your own, they’d all be pretty cheap — averaging $49 up front — but free is better than $49 by a wide margin. To get started, head to www.slacker.com/freephone. Oh, and to be nice in turn, I’d say give the free Slacker for BlackBerry a whirl, since I imagine that’s the point of the giveaway. (It’s good, too.)

INQ Mobile has unveiled two cell phones aimed at the social networking crowd. The INQ Chat is a QWERTY slab that looks a lot like a T-Mobile Dash 3G. It features a built-in proprietary e-mail client with push Gmail (!), as well as native Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and IM apps. It also comes with a 2.4-inch QVGA screen, a 3.2-megapixel camera with auto-focus, and a built-in GPS radio.

The INQ Mini, meanwhile, is a slim candy bar that offers many of the same services, but in a smaller device with a numeric keypad. Both devices include 3G radios and can function as modems for laptops. They can also be customized with a choice of seven different back panel colors, and offer seamless media sync with PCs and Macs. A 2.2-inch QVGA screen and 2-megapixel camera round out the design.

Both handsets will be available sometime in the fourth quarter of 2009; no word yet on a carrier or price.