Hasta La Gadget!

Jitterbug announced that it has acquired MobiWatch for the latter’s Mobile Personal Emergency Response Technology (M-PERS).

Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed. Jitterbug plans to offer customers personal safety features through its various Jitterbug handsets, such as the ability to call trained emergency response personnel. Jitterbug said in a statement that it plans to begin offering those services in late 2010.

Back in August, Verizon announced that the Samsung Jitterbug J would now run primarily on Verizon with new plan pricing. Before that, Jitterbug phones had run primarily on Sprint’s network, and roamed on Verizon and other carriers.

This one is big: numerous big telecoms around the world have finally agreed on a standard for voice and SMS communication over upcoming LTE 4G networks.

Dubbed One Voice, the new initiative defines an optimal set of
existing 3GPP-specified functions for designing compatible LTE devices. AT&T, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon, Vodafone, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony Ericsson are all in on the new standards.

The point is to ensure that next-generation LTE devices don’t just offer faster Web browsing and data services, but also work together properly for voice calls and text messaging. Otherwise, the entire market could fragment–and would make the U.S.’s GSM-versus-CDMA problem look like nothing.

Verizon is widely expected to be first with LTE deployments in the U.S. sometime in the second half of 2010.

Many of the 2,000 Verizon retail stores will open early Friday so customers can get their hands on the new Motorola Droid smartphone.

Some Verizon Wireless Communications Stores will open at 7 A.M., while others will open at 8 A.M.. Customers should check with their local stores for exact times, Verizon said. Stores that are located within shopping malls will not open early.

The device is available for $199 after a $100 rebate, with a two-year contract. It will be sold at Verizon Wireless stores, online, and at Best Buy. The advantage of buying the device at Best Buy is that the retailer will offer the $100 rebate at the point of sale. Customers who buy the Droid at Verizon stores have to go through the mail-in process to secure their rebate.

All of a sudden, Google Android phones are everywhere: the Acer Liquid A1, the Samsung Moment and Behold 2, and of course, the Motorola Cliq and Droid. Well, add the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, or “Rachael,” to the list.

At present, the Xperia X10 stands out as perhaps the premier Android phone for amateur photographers, if only because of its camera hardware: an 8.1 megapixel camera sensor pushes the X10 into the point-and-shoot camera category, and the phone contains a 16X digital zoom, auto focus, smile detection, geotagging, and even image and video stabilization.

There’s one additional nifty photo feature: face recognition, which can
apparently identify up to five faces per photo and link them to your
contacts and social connections. If this works as advertised, it seems like a
real step up over other platforms.

The phone’s screen is a 4-inch, 480-by-854 pixel touchscreen that Sony Ericsson touts as “scratch-resistant”. TrustedReviews, which obtained a phone for a hands-on impression, reported that the touchscreen is capacitive. Inside is a 1-GHz Snapdragon QSD8250 processor and an 8 GB MicroSD memory card. The operating system is Android 1.6, however; Android 2.0 wasn’t listed as an option.