Cell phones

CTIA has come and gone and as we rest our tired feet we look back at the cell phone brouhaha that was. Though the show wasn't quite as exciting as the GSMA World Congress, it still produced plenty of snazzy cell phones to behold. And to help you take it all in, we've compiled the top show news into one convenient blog. Also, check out our CTIA show floor slide show.

Samsung had a very good show. Its new Instinct for Sprint won our award for the best cell phone in Las Vegas. The iPhone competitor features a … Read more

You know you're in an expensive shopping mall when even at the cell phone store you can't afford anything. While walking through the posh Wynn Hotel at CTIA, I stopped by the Vertu store to gawk with the other tourists. Of course, Vertu is Nokia's ultraluxury handset line with design accents such as gold plating, leather skins, and real diamonds. They can run in the five-digit range, but in all seriousness, if you have to ask how much they cost, you probably can't afford them. The store's formidable staff discouraged extended browsing, but I recommend … Read more

While waiting at Las Vegas' McCarran airport for my flight home to San Francisco, I spotted one of the most interesting things I've seen during my CTIA trip. Sitting between a water fountain and the restrooms was a nifty cell phone charging stand. For $3, it delivers 30 minutes of charging time, which can be just enough juice if your phone is dying but you left your charger in your checked luggage. The machine included connectors for 12 types cell phones, including Kyocera, Samsung, Nokia, Palm Treo, RIM BlackBerry, LG, and Nokia. It also had connectors for iPods and … Read more

Casio showed off its new G'zOne Type-S for Verizon Wireless in black and silver at the UTStarcom booth here at CTIA. It's almost exactly the same as the original rugged clamshell, but it now supports push-to-talk capabilities. The rest of the Type-S Casios will have this feature as well, it's just that the black and silver version is the first out the gate with it. It's saddled with only a VGA camera, but a rugged phone like this doesn't need a lot of bells and whistles. Verizon is offering it now for $99.99 after … Read more

LAS VEGAS--AT&T's top wireless man told the Wall Street Journal at the CTIA tradeshow here this week that the company is considering using Google's Android handsets.

Ralph de la Vega, head of AT&T's wireless unit, told the Journal he has reviewed the technology closely and is "confident it is something we are going to want in our portfolio."

This is good news for Google, which benefits greatly from having as many carriers and handset makers as possible using its new operating system.

When Google announced it was developing the open-source, Linux-based Android platform last year, … Read more

Two months ago at the GSMA World Congress, Samsung unveiled the SGH-G810. We weren't able to handle it then, but here at CTIA we finally got to play touch and feel.

A 5-megapixel camera phone and an upgrade to the Samsung SGH-G800, the SGH-810 is a bulky slider phone in shiny silver. As expected, it's heavy on the camera features with an autofocus, a 3x optical zoom, and a xenon flash and it looks like a standalone shooter when viewed from behind. The large, full-color screen is lovely, and the controls and keypad buttons were pretty easy to … Read more

Call me jaded, but it's been a while since a new smartphone has knocked my socks off. I mean, of course, I get excited when a new product comes out, but (iPhone aside) it's usually pretty much the same innards in a slightly different package. So perhaps that's why I'm stoked on a new company called Velocity Mobile, which debuted at CTIA.

Velocity Mobile is a collaboration between Inventec and a team of industry veterans (including some from the Microsoft Windows Mobile camp). It's not so much the hardware that wows me, but it's … Read more

Sony Ericsson may have been a sleeper at CTIA, but one good thing came out of it: I finally got my hands on the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1. Unlike at GSMA where you had the battle the crowd and public relations folks just to get a picture of the darn thing, I was able to spend a few minutes with the highly anticipated smartphone and all I've got to say is "me-ROW."

It's pretty easy to see why there's so much buzz about Sony Ericsson's first Windows Mobile device. The hardware is elegant and … Read more

Standing on the corner of New York's 56th and Lexington 35 years ago Thursday, Marty Cooper was nearly run over. And no wonder. Drivers were hardly used to seeing people gabbing on the telephone while walking down the street. Not to mention that the phone was impossible to miss.

"It was huge. It weighed 2-1/2 pounds. It was about 10 inches high by an inch and a half wide by perhaps 3 inches deep," Cooper recalled. "The battery lasted only 20 minutes, but that was no problem because you couldn't hold it up for … Read more