Todays & Tomorrows Technology

We’ve been singularly cellularly obsessed here at SlashGear over the past seven days, and it’ll come as no surprise that the run-up to the iPhone 3G S has occupied much of our attention. The new Apple smartphone may not look much different to its predecessor, but if our hands-on first impressions are anything to go by, Cupertino have done their best to make the user-experience as polished as the casing. Still, it’s not just shiny Apple hardware that’s caught our eye this week; Novatel Wireless’ GSM MiFi 2352 piqued our interest when we talked to the company themselves on Monday, and then proceeded to impress us considerably in our full review.

Elsewhere, Nokia’s long-awaited N97 finally reached North American customers’ hands, ours included, and you can find our unboxing and first-impressions here. It’s a decent smartphone, and understandably the flagship of Nokia’s line, but can it hold up in the face of iPhone’s upgraded OS 3.0 software? We’ll have our full review this coming week.

If it’s a QWERTY keyboard you’re after, but you prefer your phones berry-flavored, then the news that both Verizon and Sprint would be offering the BlackBerry Tour 9630 in the near future will probably come as some relief. 3G, GPS, for all the specs check out the official RIM video. Finally, Samsung took the wraps off of the Omnia Pro B7610, complete with a glorious OLED touchscreen display and slide out ‘board.

It’s not all been smartphones, though. SlashGear sat in front of a small screen, in the shape of Fujitsu-Siemen’s Amilo Mini Ui 3520 netbook, and a big screen (albeit a virtual one) with the Q-London 3D 80″ Video Eyewear. Oh, and in the name of extreme destruction, we watched Lenovo’s ThinkPad T400s go head to head with a 26,000lb DOW truck. If you want to see whether a slender ultraportable notebook can cope with getting comfortable between rubber and gravel, check out the video.

Finally, Microsoft confirmed that the Zune HD PMP will use NVIDIA’s Tegra chipset, making us even more keen to see what this potential-iPod-killer (yes, we know, a cliché if ever there was one) brings to the table. And for your high-definition home entertainment, PopcornHour delivered their C200 Blu-ray ready media-streamer. If you’ve ever looked at your media collection and wished there was a set-top box that could handle it all without breaking a sweat, this is the gadget for you.

Sprint and Verizon may be keeping relatively quiet about the BlackBerry Tour 9630’s functionality, but unsurprisingly RIM themselves are pretty keen to get the news out there about exactly what their new “world phone” can do. The smartphone is primarily intended to use CDMA EVDO Rev.A connectivity, but it also packs UMTS/HSPA 2100MHz support and quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE for use when abroad.

Elsewhere there’s a 480 x 340 resolution display, 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus and image stabilization, and 256MB of onboard storage with a microSD card to augment that. The Tour 9630 also has GPS with support for photo geotagging.

BlackBerry Maps is pre-installed, and there’s a mediaplayer with support for non-DRM iTunes synchronization. Bluetooth 2.0 including support for the A2DP stereo profile is there, plus a 3.5mm headphone socket, and there’s obviously the full QWERTY keyboard and trackball. RIM rate the battery life as good for up to 5hrs talktime or 14 days standby.

No specific release dates for the smartphone, but Sprint have suggested it will come “later this summer” priced at $199.99.

New BlackBerry models are few and far between -- particularly of the CDMA variety -- so when one is announced, the usual carrier suspects typically fall in line within a few weeks of each other and announce their branded versions in rapid succession. This one was particularly tight, though: Sprint has announced its plans for carrying the Tour 9630 just minutes after Verizon. It'll launch "later this summer" for $199.99 after $150 worth of rebates and a two-year contract, which makes the Pre comparison virtually inevitable. Keep the comments civil, though, alright?

Hacking the Pre isn’t just about running Doom on the smartphone: it also promises to unlock currently forbidden functionality such as tethering. The Pre Dev Wiki had been one such team working on that, but after a “polite” warning from Palm themselves have ceased publicly discussing it: it seems Palm is concerned, not that webOS might be modified, but that Sprint may demand the manufacturer step in and prevent users overstepping their contracts.
Sprint do not currently offer a tethering option for the Pre, and as such attempting to use it as an external 3G modem for a laptop or other device would contravene a subscriber’s contract. If that happened, Palm obviously expect the carrier to turn up on their doorstep looking for the hackers responsible to be curtailed, something Palm doesn’t seem particularly concerned about doing themselves.

Of course, we’ve already seen one hack of the Sprint CDMA Pre which bypassed the carrier’s activation and turned it into a WiFi-only device. That can’t be something Sprint would find particularly appealing either, especially if it’s as easy as reported. This seems a fine line for Palm to be walking: they seem to recognize that supporting – or at least not hindering – fan community tinkering can in fact boost the profile and appeal of a new platform, as happened with the original iPhone, but they of course have to keep on the good side of their carrier partners.

Virgin Mobile USA have announced a pay-as-you-go mobile broadband service, which will be exclusively available through Best Buy Mobile. Broadband2Go uses a Novatel Wireless EVDO Rev.A USB modem, and offers contract-free data from as little as $10; however, there are limits over how that data access can be used.

The USB modem itself will be priced at $149.99 when it goes on sale from late June. On top of that, you can buy 100MB of data use for $10, 250MB for $20, 500MB for $40 and 1GB for $60; all but the 100MB package expire after 30 days, with the cheapest offering needing to be used within 10 days. Virgin Mobile have designed a new monitoring site, which can be used to track data use, when your package will expire, and to buy more access.

Compatible with Macs and PCs, the dongle also includes a microSD slot happy with up to 16GB cards. Virgin Mobile USA use Sprint’s data network, so anywhere they have coverage you should be good to go. This is really a deal for anyone unwilling or unable to sign a data contract: for the money, regular users will get a better deal committing to two years.

Prepare for more Palm Pre carrier confusion, as the Wall Street Journal reports that their source tips a Pre launch on Verizon Wireless come January 2010. The leak comes mere days after Sprint CEO Dan Hesse suggested that rival Verizon may like to “check its facts” over the length of the Pre exclusivity deal Sprint has signed with Palm.


That retort came after Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam’s well-publicized suggestion that handsets “like the Palm Pre” would be showing up on their shelves in the next six months. The comment led to speculation that Palm and Sprint had arranged a six month exclusivity deal that would likely run up until the end of 2009.

The WSJ doesn’t name its source, only claim it is a “person familiar with the situation”. As we pointed out on Friday, Hesse’s comments did not lay out exactly the length of the sole-provider agreement, nor did it confirm or deny that it was any longer or indeed shorter than six months. Sales of the Pre over its launch weekend set new records for Sprint, but the freshly-announced iPhone 3G S and the ongoing talk of a Verizon version may dampen enthusiasm over the rest of 2009.

Over 50,000 people may have taken home a box just like this at some time over the weekend, according to J.P. Morgan analyst Paul Cooster. While Palm and Sprint are yet to comment regarding first-weekend Pre sales, analysts have tentatively pegged the figures as ranging from 35,000 to 60,000, with shortages of the smartphone having a significant impact on numbers.