Hasta La Gadget!

If you’re looking for a deal on a smartphone and are stuck signed up with Verizon, this may be your chance. According to Boy Genius Report, the carrier has cut most of its smartphone prices to $99 or under (with a two-year contract and after rebates, naturally).

There are some good ones in the bunch, such as the much-improved BlackBerry Storm, the Windows Mobile-based Samsung Omnia, and the powerful-if-inconsistent HTC Touch Pro. All three now cost just $99 with a two-year contract, which is several hundred dollars less than before in some cases. The only ones above $99 are the BlackBerry Tour and the Samsung Saga. (The HTC Ozone and BlackBerry Curve 8330 remain at $49 and are both great deals, incidentally.)

All this does is bring Verizon’s pricing in line with the $99 iPhone 3G on AT&T–at least while we wait for the Storm 2 and other new handsets to reach Verizon stores. But we all win as a result, so who cares why Verizon did it?

The stellar Palm Pre gave Sprint a desperately needed sales boost, but it wasn’t enough to stem the tide of customers leaving the troubled carrier. As eWEEK reports, Sprint lost another 300,000 customers in the second quarter, leaving Sprint with 48.8 million–and another $384 million net loss for the same time period.

On the plus side, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse told investors that the Palm Pre was the most successful launch in Sprint’s history. He cited the extra training boost to Sprint employees and a possible softened impact from the iPhone 3GS launch on AT&T in June (which hit the market two days after the Pre did), according to the report.

“When there’s a new device launched, say the iPhone in particular, you’ll see a blip for a period of time, in increased churn,” said Hesse in the article.

Hesse also confirmed that Sprint retains an exclusive for the Pre “into 2010,” which of course could mean January 2nd.

HTC and T-Mobile have finally unveiled the long-awaited Touch Pro2, a Windows Mobile 6.1 smartphone with 3G and Wi-Fi radios. The Touch Pro2 will come in a mocha finish and sport a 3.6-inch WVGA (800-by-480) touch screen, which is 0.1 inches bigger than that other device from Cupertino. There’s a revised, slide-out QWERTY keyboard–although the old one was quite good, at least if you avoided the Verizon version–along with a 3.2-megapixel camera and video recorder.

HTC also upgraded its beautiful-if-skin-deep TouchFLO 3D interface. The handset hooks into Microsoft Voice Command for playing music, making phone calls, and looking up calendar and contact information. Finally, a new Straight Talk app lets you respond to e-mail from a call, set up a conference call from group e-mail, and “turn any location into a conference room.”

Here’s hoping HTC and Microsoft did a better job of integrating TouchFLO with Windows Mobile than they did last time. If the two companies can pull it off, then it doesn’t necessarily matter that Microsoft’s creaky mobile OS is underneath the proceedings. The Touch Pro2 will hit T-Mobile stores and T-Mobile’s online Web site on August 12th.

Novero has unveiled TheFirstOne, a Bluetooth headset with dual-mic noise-canceling and one-touch controls for dialing or conferencing in a third party. It comes with a bunch of accessories, including a desk stand, a charging cradle that keeps the headset close by when driving, and a necklace and wearable clip.

TheFirstOne comes in lily-white with silver accents, and can automatically pair with handsets that are turned on and within range. The headset lasts for 4.5 hours on a single call and offers 100 hours of standby when not in use.

TheFirstOne will cost $149 at launch, which is $20 higher than both the Plantronics Voyager Pro (our current Editors’ Choice) and the Aliph Jawbone PRIME, the two best headsets on the market today. It does come with more accessories than those two, but still, this thing had better perform well. There’s no release date yet.

T-Mobile and Research in Motion have unveiled the BlackBerry Curve 8520, a Wi-Fi-enabled smartphone with the same newer form factor as the excellent BlackBerry Curve 8900.

The Curve 8520 will come in black or frost colors, and will also work with T-Mobile’s Unlimited HotSpot Calling plan. It also offers unlimited nationwide calling to five people with T-Mobile’s usual myFaves service.

The handset features a 512 MHz CPU, 256MB of Flash memory, a 2-megapixel digital camera with video recording, Bluetooth 2.0, and built-in access to BlackBerry App World. T-Mobile said in a statement that the handset will also be Mac-compatible out of the box, meaning that it may be the first model to come with BlackBerry’s new Desktop Software for Mac.

The BlackBerry Curve 8520 will be available on August 5th for $129 with a two-year contract and after rebates–interestingly, about a month ahead of RIM’s original September target for the new Mac software.

Update 7/28/09: A RIM spokesperson contacted me to let me know that the Curve 8520 will also be available from Wal-Mart for $48.88 with a two-year agreement or qualified upgrade.