Cell Phones / Accessories

Verizon Wireless’ new BlackBerry device, the Tour, will be available on July 12th for $199 with a 2-year contract and after a $70 mail-in-rebate.

You can think of the Tour as a Curve on steroids: It has a better 3.2MP camera, a newer operating system, a high resolution display, and a larger more spacious keyboard.

Also, if you’re a world traveler, you can take advantage of the phone’s world-phone support for access to GSM networks in 220 countries using its built-in SIM slot.

We’ve had a few chances to play with the new Tour and have loved what we’ve seen so far. While we’d love to see Verizon Wireless announce a next-generation device, we can’t complain when we see a BlackBerry that has a beefy spec list.

The Tour will also be available on Sprint. Stay tuned for full reviews of both.

If you haven’t heard of Tegra yet, you will. This system on a chip, which packs in powerful graphics and video capabilities, is the guts inside the upcoming Zune HD from Microsoft and a host of mobile Internet devices, like the Mobinova elan we played with at Computex. And now MobileCrunch and others are reporting that we will see a phone from a top-five manufacturer by the fourth quarter of this year powered by Tegra for $199.

So why all the hype around Tegra? The technology promises a first-class Flash experience, console-quality gaming, and up to 1080p video playback (depending on the device). Plus, Nvidia boasts that Tegra offers five times the battery life of current netbooks.

We sat down with Michael Rayfield, general manager of mobile business at Nvidia, to find out more about Tegra’s potential and how it compares with competing technologies vying for a bigger slice of the smartbook/smart phone market.
Here are the quick highlights:

• Nvidia claims that Tegra is superior to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and Freescale’s technology because it’s working with Adobe to accelerate Flash using the GPU.
• Tegra will initially support only Windows CE smartbooks, but the company is already working on bringing Tegra to Android phones and will embrace the platform for larger screen devices once it’s mature enough.
• Nvidia believes that Tegra is superior to the latest iPhone 3GS when it comes to gaming. “Tegra has more graphics and 3D capability than any device that’s shipping in a mobile handset today.” Whether or not this capability will be leveraged on the Zune HD or later devices remains to be seen.

Read on for the full interview and all the juicy Tegra details.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, Dell is considering joining the Mobile Internet Device brigade. The article claims that the pocket-sized device is ARM-based and powered by the Android operating system.

But don’t call the device a smartphone. It is being positioned as a Apple iPod touch competitor or, as the headline says, a “pocket Web Gadget.” In our opinion, MIDs have been tweener devices that don’t yet have voice capabilities (yes, we did say they make no sense).

Other than ARM and Android, there are not too many details, except that the project could be “delayed or scrapped entirely.” All in all, we have more questions than we know what do do with. What will be the internal platform? Nvidia’s Tegra? Qualcom’s Snapdragon? Is this the rumored Dell smartphone we have been hearing about for months? And above all…do people even want a Android MID? Tell us in the poll and in the comments.

The BlackBerry Tour wasn’t the only beautiful new smart phone we saw last night, we also had a chance to peek at the new Nokia E72.

The E72 is a follow-up device to the E71 that landed on AT&T as the sharp metallic-black $99 E71x, and it does a much better job of combining the multimedia aspects of the N-series with the business features of the E-series.

The E72, at first glance, looks nearly identical to the E71, but upon closer examination we found a few noteworthy enhancements. The quick-launch keys have a few location tweaks, but most noticeable is the new optical track pad. You can swipe your finger around on the pad to move through menus, or if you prefer, you can use the same 5-way multi-directional pad for selecting and navigating. We imagine the optical pad could be a good way to quickly zoom around large spread sheets of image galleries. It was responsive and easier to use than the Samsung Epix’s similar optical pad.

The E72 also has a full 5MP camera as opposed to the 3MP one on the E71, which should allow for some pretty good shots if the N-Series line has anything to show for it. Its 3.5mm headphone jack is the icing on the cake.

We hope to see this device land as a follow-up to the E71x soon, but Nokia hasn’t announced a U.S.carrier or whether that would ever happen.

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Last night at the Pepcom event here in Manhattan, we had a chance to go hands-on with the BlackBerry Tour, the latest CDMA/EV-DO Rev. A device that will land on both Sprint and Verizon Wireless later this summer.

The Tour looks and feels a lot like the current Curve 8900, but it has a 3G radio inside for faster data speeds. Unlike the aforementioned 8900 and the Bold, though, it doesn’t support Wi-Fi networks, so you’ll need to rely only on its EV-DO Rev. A connection, and that means compelling applications like Primetime2Go are out of the question (for now, anyway).

The phone has a large keyboard that a few of us on staff were divided over. Some liked its Bold similarities–larger toothed keys that are closer together–and others preferred the wider spacing of the keys on the original Curve.

The Tour is also noticeably heavier than both the Curve 8900 and the Bold, so it felt a bit more like the Storm in terms of weight.

As noted the device will launch later this summer for $199 with a 2-year contract. Stay tuned for a full review as soon as we get one in house, so far we’re impressed by what the design and hardware of the Tour.

Read on for a full gallery.

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This morning HTC launched its third Android phone, the HTC Hero, as well as a new software approach to its devices, HTC Sense.

The HTC Hero is a premium 3.2 inch touch screen device that will be launched first in Europe with a tweaked version expected to come to the United States this year. It features 3G connectivity, GPS, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a 5MP camera,  and the tight integration with Google’s services like GMail, Google Maps, and YouTube, that we’ve come to expect. It’s the first HTC Android device with full Exchange support for syncing with your corporate contacts, calendar, and e-mail. What really makes the device desirable is its new HTC Sense software approach.

HTC Sense, from what we gathered, is the idea–and not necessarily the software–behind a new Android overlay that will also be featured on other devices, including Windows Mobile phones. It expands Android’s 3-screen user interface into 7 different screens, which you can load up with widgets. HTC Sense has three roots: Make it Mine, Stay Close, and Discover the Unexpected.

Make it Mine means user customization. HTC will provide tons of widgets that you can add to the home screen, like Facebook, Twitter, a variety of clocks, photo galleries, and more.

Stay Close helps you stay connected with your friends, family, and co-workers. Like the “Inner Circle” on the HTC Snap, you can sort your contacts into lists to view messages and e-mails from a select group of people, view Facebook status updates of friends, or link up their contact photos with Flickr accounts.

Hit the jump for a full hands-on gallery.

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AT&T just launched the Telenav powered AT&T Navigator software to the Apple App store.

The application will bring voice-guided turn-by-turn directions to the iPhone, as well as traffic alerts, 3D maps, in-route customization, trip planning, and more.

AT&T Navigator has 10 million points of interest for finding destinations like local restaurants, ATMs, or gas stations. It’s available for $9.99 per month now, and the app will automatically apply the charge to your monthly AT&T bill.

Telenav’s press release states that it’s available for the iPod Touch, too, but we assume you’ll need to be an AT&T subscriber for it to work.

Stay tuned for hands-on impressions.

You can never have too much tech in your car. So when Ford Fiesta Agent Jill Hanner asked us to tech out her car we sped up to the red light.  In what they are calling the Fiesta Movement, Ford selected 100 Internet celebrities to spend 6 months behind the wheel of their own Fiesta, which will be making a comeback in the U.S. in 2011.

You can check out the video of us teching out a pink Fiesta below. We brought everything from the new Tom Tom Go 740 GPS (which got us to a Google searched car wash in no time) to a Verizon MiFi and Acer Aspire One netbook to livestream from the road.

You can get more info on our top road trip gadgets picks here.

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Today T-Mobile announced the follow-up to its popular HTC G1 Android phone, the myTouch 3G. The myTouch 3G is the second Android device in the United States, and it’s also manufactured by HTC.

The myTouch 3G does not have a physical QWERTY keyboard like the G1 does; it has a digital on-screen one. We had a chance to go hands-on with the device not long ago and found the keyboard akin to the iPhone’s. Typing was accurate and easy both in landscape and horizontal modes.

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The iPhone 3G S (S is for Speed) arrived in our offices today, and the first thing we wanted to find out was how much “Speed,” that ‘S’ really added to the new iPhone.

Like a fine wine, the iPhone 3G S should improve with age. That’s because it supports AT&T’s new 7.2Mbps HSPA network, which has not fully rolled out yet. Even still, we’ve seen massive speed improvements over the original iPhone 3G. And why shouldn’t we? That phone is said to have a speed cap around 1.4Mbps, far below the maximum throughput of the 3G S, and the new iPhone also has a zippier 600MHz processor. We put the new iPhone against the 3G in head to head tests to find out just how much “Speed,” the 3G S offers.

Our first trial was loading the New York Times’ full HTML home page in our office and then again on the ground. Next we ran the SpeedTest.net iPhone application to get some hard data on just how fast our download and upload speeds were. Finally, we loaded the Associated Press iPhone application to see how much faster the processor could launch an app.

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