phones

This doesn't come as a complete surprise since Research in Motion already revealed the existence of CDMA-flavored BlackBerry Pearls, but today Sprint officially announced its plans to offer the RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8130. The sexy little smartphone will be available starting next month, but you can sign up on Sprint's Web site to be notified of commercial availability. The carrier did not reveal pricing at this time.

Taking full advantage of EV-DO and built-in GPS capabilities, Sprint's model will work with the carrier's various Power Vision services, including the Sprint Music Store and Sprint TV, and … Read more

Is the Asia phone market getting too unpleasantly crowded for the likes of Samsung? In its latest mobile launch outing, the Korean chaebol has bypassed its Asian neighbors including even its own backyard, to court Europe. While we are awaiting word from the consumer electronics giant on the availability of the devices in our region, here's what Samsung fans in Asia are missing out.

Two of the models, the SGH-F330 (slim HSDPA slider) and the SGH-F210 (swivel stick), are already out in Germany for 260 euros ($368) and 280 euros ($396), respectively. The third model which resembles the Nokia N95 … Read more

So this month I will have traveled more than 20,000 miles via plane, train and boats to various destinations and various time zones. The iPhone has proven adept and adaptable - so long as you activate the international roaming and data plans - which you have to do in person or via AT&T's operators before you leave the country - as my friend Max found out the hard way.

Anyway, upon landing at each airport the iPhone will find the applicable AT&T network or AT&T compatible network - oftentimes in seconds. But … Read more

While GrandCentral may have been stealing headlines lately, there's another suffix-sharing phone call management service called RingCentral that can make small businesses look and function like larger ones with some pretty neat telephonic tomfoolery. The service has been around since early 2004, and today is introducing a slew of VoIP plans called DigitalLine that give users the option to use VoIP instead of, or on top of their existing landlines.

So what can you do with RingCentral? Small business owners will love it, since you can set up a ridiculously extensive set of rules to handle incoming calls, or reroute them on the fly with a virtual phone call manager called SoftPhone. The idea is to take a single or multiline setup and spread it out intelligently, while putting all the options online for you to manage and tweak while away from your office.

Like GrandCentral, you can set up calls to be routed to different phones or line extensions, there are also handy business-centric settings to tweak the response people get when they call at off-business hours. For fans of GrandCentral's multiphone ring system, RingCentral has also gone the extra step of letting you add three-digit passwords to an incoming phone call to keep unintended pickups from happening. This feature actually stemmed out of users wanting to keep their children from answering a business phone call when they had forgotten to turn off the home forwarding options off, or couldn't get to their own phone in time.

The new VoIP implementation is fairly straightforward. All incoming calls can be set to be received via VoIP, letting you receive and manage phone calls while away from your landline. You can also get various minute packages to use VoIP to make outgoing calls, including an all-you-can-eat plan of outgoing VoIP for around $25/month. In contrast to consumer VoIP services like Vonage, Skype, or Comcast's DigitalVoice, RingCentral isn't aiming at cheap outgoing long distance providers, as much as the multi-line business crowd who's looking for a way to handle several lines without the hardware or staffing.

For a shot of the call log interface, click the read more link below.

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Some phone and gadget makers have understandably sought to make handsets based on Star Trek communicators, but that approach is apparently too subtle for others. Why limit yourself to a single replica, after all, when you can do the whole ship?

The "Star Trek USS Enterprise Telephone" is exactly that, a limited edition that GeekAlerts says even bears the inscription of William Shatner himself. When a call comes in, a red alert sounds and the engines light up.

It's not a mobile phone, however, so your bragging rights will be confined to your own conn. But it … Read more

In between jobs, I'm lucky to have a few weeks off for vacation. My first destination was Iowa City, Iowa, m hometown. Iowa has been great for fiber optic connections and is not as rural as one would expect. That said, my parents don't have a broadband connection instead opting for a quaint dial-up connection. Lucky for me, EDGE network as actually faster than my parent's desktop computer.

But, the iPhone proved a lifesaver when it came to a very Iowa pastime - a presidential election event, i.e., an appearance by Sen. Barrack Obama. Somehow I … Read more

From time to time, I'll post a brief summary of some interesting items I come across during the day that I don't have time to call out in more detail. If you see anything interesting out there, drop me a line at tom dot krazit at cnet dot com. Take that, you e-mail harvesters.

LEGAL DEPARTMENT: There's some news about a couple of items that will soon await new Apple General Counsel Daniel Cooperman. Information Week notes that the company has been sued over the iPhone--again--this time by a man claiming that Apple is breaking … Read more

You'd think that years of being a CNET Asia reviewer would have taught me a thing or two about making tech purchases. Apparently not.

Prior to arriving in San Francisco for an Intel event, I had done my homework and somewhat set my mind on getting an iPhone. The $200 price cut that the Cupertino company had recently announced was just too good to pass. Not to mention that I was as fallible as the next customer when it came to the iPhone, from the impressive touch display interface down to the sleek Apple styling that's simply irresistible. … Read more

How do you make a bricked iPhone stand out among all the paperweights on your desk? Easy, coat it in luscious gold.

That's exactly what Goldstriker is coming up with--a 24 carat gold plated 8GB iPhone, though it didn't say whether it will be locked by AT&T, upgraded with the latest software, or simply an iBrick. Not all things gold will get our attention, but with the amount of flak the iPhone has gotten lately, this could jolly well end up as a valid reason for current owners in Asia to turn their iPhone into a … Read more