How much would you pay for a refurbished BlackBerry Bold? $549? $449? How about… nothing?
Yes, another BlackBerry deal: For one day only, AT&T’s site is offering RIM’s fantastic little smartphone for the low price of free, with the purchase of a two-year contract. That, as always, is the rub–but if you don’t mind locking in for 24 months, this handset is a pretty great way to go.
Smartphone sales will account for 20 percent of all cell phones worlwide by 2013, doubling their current market share, according to a new study by research firm In-Stat, MediaPost reports.
In North America, smartphone sales will increase by 15 percent every year, eventually more than doubling to over 62 million in 2013. Already, 36 percent of cell phone subscribers own one in the U.S., and a third of regular cell phone users said in 2008 that they’d upgrade to a smart device the next time around, according to the article.
In an interesting twist, while the iPhone reigns supreme for now, In-Stat predicts that phones powered by open mobile operating systems like Android will surpass the iPhone over the next few years. This certainly wasn’t evident at Mobile World Congress a few weeks ago, but my hopes remain high for Android, given how good the T-Mobile G1 already is.
“Google and its partners have the potential to aggressively enter the smartphone segment of the market by creating a development environment that is to be the most convenient for mobile applications development,” the In-Stat report said. “This will lead to even greater interest in the smartphone market segment.” The study also cited how other carriers have scrambled to introduce iPhone-like handsets, none of which have done as well as the iPhone but are serving to dilute the market and give consumers more choice.
![](http://www.gearlog.com/Palm_Pre.jpg")
Let’s face it–no one expected Palm’s most recent earnings report to be spectacular. And the fact that the smartphone manufacturer hasn’t exactly been churning out handsets recently certainly hasn’t helped its case with investors.
Trusted Reviews points out a fairly interesting irony in all of this, however. It may in fact be the Palm Pre–the same device that Palm is banking on to save itself from certain doom–that ultimately helped caused the company’s numbers to take such a tumble. After all, with such a coveted device being announced during CES, who really wants to buy an old Treo in the time leading up to its release?
“The much-anticipated launch of the Palm Pre remains on track for the first half of calendar year 2009, but as expected we’ve got a difficult transition period to work through,” Palm CEO Ed Colligan said in a statement. “Despite the challenging market environment, the extraordinary response to the Palm Pre and the new Palm webOS reaffirms our confidence in our long-term prospects and our ability to re-establish Palm as the leading innovator in the growing smartphone market.”
Palm has yet to announce the official release date for the touchscreen iPhone killer, though it’s expected at some point in the first half of this year. The Palm Treo Pro, meanwhile, is expected on March 15. No telling how many users will be tricked into buying the latter thanks to poor reading comprehension.
ASUS just unveiled the quad-band P835, a Windows Mobile 6.1-powered smartphone with a 3.5-inch WVGA (800-by-480-pixel) touchscreen and an HSDPA 7.2 data radio.
Engadget Mobile reports that the handset comes with Opera Mobile, a trackball that seems oddly redundant with the touchscreen, a 528MHz Qualcomm 7201A processor, and six to seven hours of talk time on a single charge, according to the company.
There’s also a 5-megapixel camera with auto-focus, 4GB of internal storage, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR (Enhanced Data Rate), and an A-GPS radio. Interestingly, the phone can double as a WiFi access point to share its cellular data connection with up to ten other wireless devices, according to the report. No word yet on a price, carrier support, or release date, but it’s coming.
Is it getting hot in here, or is just your smartphone? If you’re a Blackberry Bold owner, DoCoMo Inc strongly suspects the latter. Japan’s biggest mobile provider has pulled the popular handset off of shelves due to overheating concerns while charging.
According to Reuters, DoCoMo received complains on 30 of the 4,000 Blackberries that the company has sold thus far. RIM addressed concerns stating, “This issue appears to be specifically limited to the BlackBerry Bold devices sold in Japan since last week and sales of BlackBerry Bold devices in other countries are unaffected by this matter.”
While battery problems have been ruled out, the BlackBerry manufacturer is still attempting to get to the root of the problem.
Nokia announced that the E63, the company’s newest, lower-cost unlocked smartphone, is now available in the U.S. The $279 handset features a full QWERTY keyboard, a 2-megapixel camera, 3G and Wi-Fi data radios, and a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack; it’s basically a poor-man’s version of the stellar Nokia E71.
The E63 also comes with a free 12-month subscription to Files on Ovi and 1GB of online storage, which lets you access important documents, music, or photos from your home or work PC even when you’re out and about.
Nokia’s challenge, as usual for their otherwise-excellent unlocked smartphones: convince people in the U.S. accustomed to subsidized, low-cost-up-front handsets on AT&T or T-Mobile to pay extra for the freedom of an unlocked device. To date, it’s been a real slog. But the E63’s $279 price point could nab them some additional sales.
The Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference reminds me a bit of a university faculty party: pretentious (just like this post’s title), hyperintellectual, noble — especially as the conference Webcasts its pearls of wisdom before the unenlightened masses just. Every. So. Often. But I have to say that this presentation sounds wonderfully, magically cool.
Wired brings word of Pattie Maes and her assistant, Pranav Mistry, who created a way to project a gesture-powered, connected, wireless display onto ordinary objects, which could then be read and interacted with by the user.
Pleo, the adorable robotic dinosaur from Ugobe and the mind of Caleb Chung, is struggling to avoid Jurassic-like extinction.
As we noted late last year, Ugobe’s CEO Bob Christopher stepped down and the company moved its operation to Idaho (Pleo was on my “Maybe Buy” list for these and other reasons). Now Wired’s Gadget Lab reports that the company’s situation may have gone from bad to worse. Liz Gasper, who took over for Christopher and spent most of her time cutting costs, left the company in January.
Meanwhile, fund-raising efforts stalled and the entire Ugobe board resigned. Co-founder Caleb Chung is now back in charge, but he didn’t speak to Wired. Company President and COO Dough Swanson painted a rosy picture for Gadget Lab, telling the blog that, while the company has just 20 employees left, it still plans on delivering a Pleo update sometime in 2009. It’s unclear if that’s another one of the company’s semi-frequent Pleo software updates or new hardware.
When was the last time your iPhone made you coffee? And no, I don’t mean “pointed you toward the nearest Starbucks”—I mean actually brewed a cuppa joe.
Introducing the Pomegrante Phone, the first smartphone to offer e-mail, Internet browsing, an MP3 player, and GPS navigation in addition to such atypical “extras” as a harmonica, an electric shaver, and a coffee brewer.
What? Is this for real? Well, no. But it is a pretty clever, albeit expensive, viral ad campaign.
The L.A. Times explains:
The Pomegranate Phone is part of a $300,000 ad campaign put together by Nova Scotia. Yes, that Nova Scotia, the small province in southeastern Canada.
Indeed, clicking the “release date” link in the upper right-hand corner of the Pomegranate Phone’s microsite reveals the truth:
“Someday you’ll be able to get everything you want in one device,” reads the text that appears on-screen as you’re redirected to Nova Scotia’s tourism site. “Today you can get everything you want in one place.”
I only wish that more of yesterday’s Superbowl ads had been this clever.
[via SwissMiss]
Is there room for yet another name in the already fairly crowded world of smartphone manufacturers? Sure–the more, the merrier. Rumor has it that Dell is following in Acer’s footsteps by becoming the next PC manufacturer to throw its hat into the cellphone ring.
The company’s fittingly code-named iPhone killer, the MePhone, is apparently set to be released in both Google Android and Windows Mobile flavors. According to speculation on the part of The Wall Street Journal, the company will use the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to announce the device(s).
The upcoming e-mail-enabled phones are rumored for a September 9th release.
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