ctia

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

ZTE is certainly trying to get into the ground floor in the U.S. market this year, with two brand new handsets -- the C78 and the C79 -- debuting at CTIA, mostly for the entry-level market. The C78 is a fairly basic handset with a VGA camera and Bluetooth, while the C79 is a slightly more advanced clamshell with a 1.3-megapixel camera, an MP3 player, stereo Bluetooth, and a microSD card slot. The C79 even features external music player controls right on the front surface. Check them out in our brief ZTE photo gallery.

Sanyo only had a couple of basic phones to show at CTIA, but there's still a market for these things, so we're fine with that. First up is the Katana LX, which is a shinier successor to the Katana II, plus it has a translucent OLED display. It only has a VGA camera however. Then there's the Pro Series phones, the Pro-200 and the Pro-700. Both of them support Sprint's new QChat push-to-talk service, and are made for business use. The Pro-700 is the more rugged version, and is military certified to withstand harsh environments like … Read more

LG had a very impressive showing at CTIA this year, especially with the LG enV(2) for Verizon Wireless and the LG Vu for AT&T. The LG Vu is the star of the show, with a full 3-inch touch screen interface that makes it a great device to debut AT&T's new live TV service called AT&T Mobile TV. It has a full HTML browser, a 2.0-megapixel camera, a music player, plus 3G support and access to AT&T Mobile Music and AT&T Video Share. The LG enV(2) is … Read more

Day two of CTIA 2008 is over, and it was quite a breather compared with day one. Our feet actually did not hurt at the end of the day! Here are some highlights from day two of the show.

Nokia kicks off the day by announcing two new basic CDMA/AWS handsets: the Nokia 1606 and the 3606, both of which are probably set for the entry-level to midtier market. Next, Senior Editor Kent German talks up the Samsung Alias, which we knew about before, but was officially trotted out at CTIA.

Sanyo also put out a few new devices, … Read more