As well as their headline smartphone announcements this morning, Verizon have also officially confirmed a couple of featurephones that have each been rattling around the rumor mill for a while. The LG Chocolate Touch and Samsung Convoy – a touchscreen candybar and rugged flip, respectively – don’t have the Android magic or hardware QWERTY of the Verizon DROID Eris by HTC or the BlackBerry Curve 8530.
It comes as little surprise given we’ve already seen it unboxed and know the pricing, but Verizon Wireless have officially announced that, as of tomorrow, they’ll be offering the DROID Eris by HTC. Basically another version of the HTC Hero, the HTC DROID Eris packs a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen, 5-megapixel autofocus camera, EVDO Rev.A and the HTC Sense UI.
Samsung’s latest AT&T cellphones, the Samsung Mythic and Samsung Flight announced last month, will both go on sale today. Each handset has a touchscreen and the Flight throws in a slide-out QWERTY keyboard; neither are going to cause as much excitement as a proper smartphone, though, and the Mythic’s support for Samsung’s TouchWiz UI will seem like little consolation when your friends are taunting you with Android.
Remember the talk in early October about a third Verizon Android smartphone from a small company and certified through the carrier’s Open Development program? The HTC DROID Eris and Motorola DROID pushed that mystery device to the back of our minds, but an FCC filing has seemingly revealed the device as the Saygus VPhone V1, another sliding form-factor with a 3.5-inch 800 x 480 capacitive touchscreen, 624MHz Marvell PXA310 processor and a 5-megapixel autofocus camera.
Remember the LG GW620, the QWERTY slider Android smartphone that rocked up with its own mini-site last week? The handset has now made its way to Canada for a debut as the Rogers Wireless LG Eve, promising a Social Network Services (SNS) Manager that pulls together Twitter, Facebook and Bebo updates, a 5-megapixel autofocus camera and – stealing a jump on the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 – automatic face recognition tying images into contacts entries.
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We suppose we can't really fault Verizon too much for wanting customers to honor their contracts rather than paying an early termination fee (ETF) of around half the phone's value and then selling the handset for a profit on eBay, but our natural dislike of ETFs is perking up this morning. According to a leaked slide that found its way to the BGR, Verizon are now planning to charge up to $350 in termination fees on "Advanced Devices" - we're guessing they mean smartphones or high-end featurephones - whose owners don't complete the full term of the agreement.
AT&T’s occasionally janky 3G coverage has become a generally acknowledged thorn-in-the-side for iPhone users, but the carrier still isn’t pleased that arch-rival Verizon Wireless have called them on it. Verizon’s “There’s a map for that” adverts compare AT&T’s 3G network with their own, an act which the latter claims is “misleading” and – as you’d imagine was Verizon’s intention, really – has caused them to lose “incalculable market share”. While subscribers would be happy with AT&T deciding to fill in those gaps, the carrier has taken the easier option and filed a lawsuit against Verizon.
With the holidays fast approaching cell phone carriers are stocking up on inventory and amongst the new Motorola DROIDs, HTC Heroes, and Palm Pixies are a slightly larger, yet unfamiliar crop of devices – netbooks. AT&T is all giddy about its exclusive availability of the Nokia Booklet 3G and Sprint announced just yesterday that it will be selling the Dell Inspiron Mini 10V. Verizon already has three netbooks in its arsenal, including HP’s new powerful Mini 311. Clearly, lining up the selection isn’t a problem, but what the carriers haven’t figured out yet is that selling netbooks requires a totally different approach than selling phones. The deals and the subsidized model, in my mind, make as much sense for netbooks as building and then plowing a virtual Farmville farm!
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Apple and carrier Orange have announced that their exclusivity agreement in France has ended prematurely, after telecoms regulators decided the deal was "a new rigidity factor in a sector that already suffers from lack of competition." The news comes after a temporary injunction filed back in December 2008 - and later upheld in a review in February - following complaints from network rivals Bouygues Telecom and SFR.
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Color us confused again. While Orange claimed that in offering the iPhone 3GS in the UK in opposition to hitherto-exclusive rival O2 they'd "increase value" to buyers, some bizarre limitations in the terms & conditions have us wondering whether life really was better with O2. As we pointed out earlier this week, Orange define "unlimited data" as 750MB; however there's also a potentially more limiting cap on what streaming and IM services - such as internet radio and Facebook messaging - can be used.
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