Hasta La Gadget!

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.)

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?

Motorola spent most of their quarterly analyst conference call today talking up the wonders of Android, and they didn’t have a word about Windows Mobile. Not a word. The phrase “Windows Mobile” was not spoken during the whole discussion of their consumer mobile-phone business. Instead, you got quotes like this:

“The majority of our new devices will be smart phones, as we expand Android across a broader set of price points,” Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha said.

The conflation of “smart phone” with “Android” to the exclusion of Windows Mobile led me to ask for clarification from a Motorola spokeswoman. She said,

“For 2009, mobile devices primary strategy is Android. With that said, Windows Mobile is very important for our enterprise mobility business.”

Motorola’s enterprise mobility business, formerly known as Symbol, designs hard-core handhelds for big businesses. Is Motorola’s line of consumer Windows Mobile phones, such as the Q9h, done with? I notice they didn’t specifically say that, but it’s really sounding like it.

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.

In April, innovative Spanish router maker FON launched the La Fonera 2.0 router overseas. Last week, FON announced the router here in the United States, calling it the “Fonera 2.0n”.

Retailers will begin selling the 2.0n router beginning in October for $99. As the name suggests, the router supports 802.11n, which is scheduled to be finalized in September.

The FON hook is the fact that it creates two parallel Wi-Fi connnections, one reserved for your private use, and the other open to the public. If you own a La Fonera router, therefore, those public channels are open to you when you travel, and your router is also available as a public hotspot for your FON buddies.

FON also claims that the new router contains an advanced processor that will help it sync connected applications running in the background, instead of waiting their turn for a single channel.

Some users might also be interested in the router’s ability to process some BitTorrent torrents (RapidShare and MegaUpload are specifically named) while saving the downloaded content to a user-supplied USB hard drive that can connect to the integrated USB hub. I was a bit worried about this when I talked to Hitachi about their $79 SimpleNAS device that transforms a USB drive into a NAS; it’s not clear whether the La Fonera requires you to reformat the drive or not. Still, for just $20 more, you’re getting a lot more functionality. You can also use the software to turn a 3G dongle into a shared Wi-Fi connection, according to FON.