Hasta La Gadget!

Verizon and CBS Corporation on Monday announced a deal that will bring full-length CBS programming to Verizon V CAST subscribers. Verizon now has the mobile rights to broadcast shows like 60 Minutes to customers who subscribe to its V CAST mobile video service.

The deal also includes the national, video on-demand rights – in standard and high-definition – for shows like CSI, NCIS, Survivor, and Numb3rs. Verizon will also continue to offer CBS programming via its FiOS TV video service.

“Verizon subscribers will have continued access to [CBS] not only through FiOS TV, but also through V CAST on the mobile phone, which enhances our profile on a key emerging platform,” Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of BS Corporation, said in a statement.

Of course, the Palm Pre is the hottest phone at CES. But lurking at the Microsoft booth here is an unusual Windows Mobile phone, the Mobinnova ICE.

The ICE is unlikely to come to the US, but it’s a striking design: when it’s off, it’s a big, black slab with no visible buttons on the front. Everything on the front is touch-sensitive and only lights up as needed, whether we’re taking about the 3″, 240×400 touch screen, the bar of action buttons next to the main screen or the virtual cursor pad that pops up when you touch it. The phone relies heavily on haptic feedback – vibration – so you know what you’ve touched.

According to Microsoft, this phone is pretty kitted out. It’s running Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional on a 528 Mhz Qualcomm 7201A processor. It has 3G, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a 3-megapixel camera, TV out, an FM radio and an accelerometer.

Mobinnova’s put some custom software on here to differentiate themselves from the mass of Windows Mobile phones. “MobiFriends” is a carousel of pictures of your friends, much like T-Mobile’s MyFaves but with eight friends instead of five. Tap on a photo, and you get all the various ways you could contact someone. Mobinnova also loaded in a bunch of custom menus with large icons so you can easily get to various features without having to pull out a stylus.

But alas, press the wrong button and the old Windows Mobile home screen pops up. Not only that, but you can summon a mode where the screen is cluttered with icons in different orientations – it’s hard to figure out which way to turn the phone! Windows Mobile looks, and works, great sometimes, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s holding some of its more innovative licensees back, and it looks downright 20th-century compared to, say, the Palm webOS.

More photos after the jump.

Does Marks Enterprise know something I don’t? Maybe they’ve got a mole in the Obama administration telling them this DTV transition thing is just hot air. At CES, Chinese company Marks was showing a huge array of analog TV phones – phones whose main selling point will go totally dead when the US turns off analog TV signals on Feb. 17 (or maybe later, it seems.

Otherwise, the Marks phone lineup has all the hallmarks of cool Chinese phones that will never be sold in the US. They’ve got dual SIM cards (so you can have two lines at once), for instance. But companies like Marks are never quite able to get their acts together to make coherent presentations to US carriers, so their phones never come to US shelves.

Verizon Wireless has completed its $5.9 billion acquisition of Alltel, making it the largest cell phone company in the U.S., according to the Associated Press. Verizon said that it will also take on $22.2 billion in debt from the company (which explains the original $28.1 billion acquisition figure announced last June).

Much of Alltel’s executive staff will be axed—probably on the order of 3,000 employees—but everyone below that level will be retained in the merger. “Alltel employees below executive level will continue in their present jobs as Verizon Wireless assesses staffing needs required to best serve customers and achieve synergies,” Verizon said in a statement.

As part of the deal, Verizon also gets Alltel’s 12.9 million customers, bringing its U.S. total to 83.7 million (after about 2.1 million get sold off in territory that will be sold later). That puts it significantly above AT&T’s current 75 million-ish total, which has been bolstered recently by the runaway success of the iPhone. Verizon plans to change out the Alltel name in stores over the second and third quarters of this year.

The CEO of cell-phone company PCD, Philip Christopher, has a tendency to say outrageous things; he famously compared his company to the Viet Cong two years ago at a press conference.

This year, he threw out the tidbit that 30% of all iPhones end up returned. “It’s not because the phone is defective, it’s because people find it complicated,” he explained, saying that 25% of all phones end up returned because people find them too complicated. Needless to say, AT&T had no comment on Christopher’s statement.

Christopher also said 10% of all phones end up coming back to stores with water damage. “You’d be surprised how many people drop their phones in the toilet. We get all kinds of people dropping their phones in the toilet,” he said.