Cell phones

The GSMA Mobile World Congress doesn't begin until next week, but Sony Ericsson isn't wasting any time rolling out new models. On Tuesday the company announced two new multimedia phones: the C903 Cyber-shot and the W395 Walkman. Both phones feature slider designs in multiple colors.

As a Cyber-shot phone, the C903 puts digital photography front and center. The 5-megapixel camera offers a wide variety features such as a flash, image stabilization, face and smile detection, a 16x digital zoom, auto-focus, geo-tagging and picture blogging.

You'll also find messaging and e-mail, USB mass storage, a voice recorder, stereo … Read more

The wonderful and torturous thing about GSMA Mobile World Congress is that you get to see handsets from a number of international manufacturers that are beyond imagination but will most likely never make it Stateside.

Take ZTE for example. It may not be a recognized cell phone brand in the United States, although the company does offer a couple of its handsets through MetroPCS, including the ZTE C79 and the ZTE C88, but it happens to be one of China's largest handset manufacturers.

ZTE will, once again, make the voyage to Barcelona this year and revealed on Tuesday that … Read more

Nokia unveiled its latest XpressMusic phone, the Nokia 5630, on Tuesday.

The new phone, which is less than a half-inch thick, is a full-featured multimedia handset designed for music lovers. It will debut next week at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The phone comes with a 4GB microSD card for music, but users can also get external memory cards with up to 16GB of storage. Users can listen through an integrated 3.5mm headset jack or on stereo headsets via Bluetooth. Another cool feature is the "Say and Play" function, which lets people control the music … Read more

Getting an early start on the competition, LG Electronics announced Sunday that its new Arena KM900 smartphone will debut at the upcoming Mobile World Congress.

LG is touting the touch screen's user interface as featuring a 3D cube-based layout with four customizable screens for accessing the phone's features.

"The direct, intuitive, and dynamic S-Class UI will be unlike anything that has appeared on a mobile phone before," Skott Ahn, president of LG Mobile, said in a statement.

The Arena features a 3-inch WVGA touch screen with 800?400 resolution and a 5-megapixel camera that promises "… Read more

Apparently, Nokia just can't wait for the GSMA World Congress next month. On Thursday, the Finns introduced three new phones: the 2700 Classic, the 6303 Classic, and the 6700 Classic. The three GSM models all sport candy bar designs, but vary a bit in functionality.

The 2700 Classic offers a 2-megapixel camera with video recording, quad-band world phone support, a music player, an FM radio, voice commands, messaging and e-mail, a speakerphone, PC syncing, a voice recorder, USB mass storage, a 3.5mm headset jack, Bluetooth, a microSD card slot, a wireless Web browser, and personal organizer options. It … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO - Cell phones have become almost as important to American teens as the clothes they wear, according to a nationwide survey of teenagers released last week.

The wireless trade association CTIA and Harris Interactive surveyed some 2,000 teens across the country and learned that teens feel that cell phones have become a vital part of their identities. They also believe that they can gauge a peer's popularity or status by the phone he or she uses.

Findings of the survey were presented on Friday at the CTIA Fall 2008 trade show in San Francisco. Trip Hawkins, … Read more

CTIA Fall 2008 has finally come to a close. Though it was a relatively small show in comparison to its spring counterpart, we still heard quite a number of announcements about the latest cell phones and mobile applications. We've compiled them all in our CTIA Fall 2008 blog, plus we have plenty of slide shows and video of the new handsets as well.

The big announcements came from Sprint on the first day of the show. They debuted five new upcoming handsets, the Samsung Rant, the Samsung Highnote, the LG Lotus, the Motorola i576, and the HTC Touch Pro.… Read more

On September 10, CTIA reported that American cell-phone subscribers are sending more text messages than ever despite the rising cost. About 75 billion SMS text messages were sent in June alone, according to the report. Of course, texting is only a relatively recent boom here in the U.S.--people from Europe and Asia have been sending and receiving text messages for years, most likely due to the low cost of texting over there.

With that in mind, many manufacturers are racing each other to develop messaging-centric phones with full QWERTY keyboards, but that aren't smart phones. The recently … Read more

I finally had a chance to take a closer look at the Virgin Mobile Shuttle yesterday at the Mobile Focus show at CTIA. As you might recall, the Shuttle is Virgin Mobile's first ever 3G handset with EV-DO. It also has GPS functionality, and borrows a couple of Helio location-based services such as Buddy Beacon, a friend-finder application, and Where, which lets you find nearby restaurants or gas stations.

Despite its high-end features, the Shuttle looks and feels like any other Virgin Mobile phone. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we were expecting a more sophisticated Helio-esque … Read more