Today the Motorola VE440 became available for sale from MetroPCS. This monoblock-style phone is billed by Motorola as a music phone and has dedicated music keys, a 3.5mm headset jack, stereo Bluetooth, and support for microSD cards up to 8GB. The VE440 is a tri-band 800/1700/1900 CDMA device that is limited to 1x data but it has GPS. Other features include a 1.3 megapixel fixed-focus camera and support for MetroPCS’ chatLINK service. The VE440 costs $129 and is available online.

This Ping app by the guy who made PushGmail is a mix between text messaging and instant messaging. What you need to know is that it’s free and it’s fast.

Ping is designed to look like the SMS app, and behaves much the same way. The messages you send arrive at the recipient’s screen instantly—similar to IMs—but also pop up with a Push Notification if you’re not actively using the phone.
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So you haven’t graduated away from those white earbuds yet, but Playboy is hoping that they can at least make them sexier for you. Currently available at the Playboy shop are earbuds for your MP3 Player that comes in the color Black/White, Pink/White, or Pink/black. The buds feature the famous Playboy bunny symbol along with the word Playboy on the earbud. The Playboy Earphones retail for just $12.

The actual iPhone 3G/3GS unlock here at iPhone Unlocking Solutions.

The current generation phone, iPhone, has the features of a PC, an iPod, a digital camera and a mobile phone. It is one of the most preferred phones having features of networking and browsing. But it gets expensive to buy an iPhone because it comes with a contract of limited use and you cannot run your iPhone after some time as mentioned in the contract of its provider. Unlocking helps you to run iPhone on any carrier of your choice and it releases an iPhone from Apple’s network. It simply means you are not bound to any network to run your iPhone and your iPhone is usable even after the end of the contract. Benefits of unlocking an iPhone are that it helps you to run third party applications and play retro-games.
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Nokia appear to have seen reason and implemented a much needed change in policy in the Ovi Store regarding re-downloading content. Up until now customers’ purchases were tied to the device they used to purchase the content, not their account. That is if a customer bought content on their N97 they couldn’t just download the content on another handset as it was tied to the N97.
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Orange UK has just rolled out the ROM update for their HTC Hero, where it is touted to offer a boost in system speed, alongside touch-to-focus capability in the Hero’s camera. Orange has also tested the new software to make sure it is fully compatible with the network when released. As for T-Mobile, they claim that their update is more or less imminent, but nothing official has been heard from them yet as at press time.

The Garmin-Asus Nuvifone is vaporware no more! Boy Genius has unveiled some information about several upcoming AT&T smartphones, the G60 among them. The nuvifone G60 is a collaboration between the famed GPS manufacturer Garmin and PC-manufacturer Asus. It will cost $299 with a 2-year contract after a $100 mail-in rebate.

That’s a bit pricey for even a high-end smartphone. The G60 has a 3 megapixel camera, a 3.5″ touchscreen, a Linux-based OS, 3G capability, and a Garmin GPS. To be honest, the nuvifone doesn’t sound quite as awesome now as it did a year ago. That said, having a quality GPS built-in will save users the expense of a TomTom car set. No release date has yet been announced, but it’s expected out before the end of October.
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Mobile phone giant KDDI has teamed up with Tokyo-based Flower Robotics to develop a new concept mobile phone/robot system designed to monitor and learn the user’s behavior and communicate via a home TV set. Pink Tentacle reports.

“Called “Polaris,” the prototype system consists of a mobile handset that monitors the user’s daily activities and an artificially intelligent robot sphere that charges the handset and displays data on the user’s TV.The Polaris system is designed to learn the user’s lifestyle by collecting data, analyzing activity, and identifying trends. The robot keeps a database of information accumulated through the handset, such as the user’s daily travel and walking habits, calls and email messages sent and received, and online transactions. Using this data, Polaris learns to predict the user’s behavior and offer relevant advice and information.”

This is a pretty simple construction that actually doesn’t look as ridiculous as it sounds. The dock rotates, taking advantage of the iPhone and iPod Touch’s accelerometer and making use of allowing movie-viewing landscape mode. Not bad!

Today at the Mobilize Conference, Motorola and T-Mobile announced the Motorola Cliq, a new Android handset. They call it “the first phone with social skills.” It is a touch-based handset that has Motorola’s new MOTOBLUR service on board. The Cliq is a sideways slider that has a full QWERTY keyboard and 3.1-inch HVGA touch-screen display. It has a 3G, Wi-Fi, 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, video capture at 24 frames per second, 3.5mm headset jack, full HTML Google browser, and Google services. It will support microSD cards up to 32GB. It will be available in titanium and white, pricing wasn’t disclosed. It will be sold worldwide as the DEXT starting in 2010.

Kwikset’s SmartKey has been lacking in intelligence for quite awhile, but at long last, the outfit has finally added a pivotal feature here at CEDIA: true remote locking and unlocking. The new remote access control solution is being dubbed SmartCode with Home Connect — an unnecessarily lengthy way of explaining how the company’s keyless locks can now communicate wirelessly with other devices. Users can also check-in on door lock status when they aren’t automatically arming / disarming, and you can initiate customized scenes upon entrance and exit in order to more accurately pretend that you’re Prince. There’s no mention of pricing, but given that you’ll need to hit up a Control4 retailer to get your hands on this puissant technology, we’d recommend bringing the bank.

HTC has been getting in on the act today with the unveilling of the Touch2, a compact WinMo smartphone that will be one of the first devices to run WinMo 6.5, which will itself be unveiled on 6th October. Other pioneering efforts include support for Windows Marketplace and Microsoft My Phone. HTC’s TouchFlo UI has been given a revamp with lessons learned from the popular Sense UI found on HTC’s Android devices.
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“Not a day goes by that someone doesn’t want some piece of the huge Michael Jackson pie. So it was only a matter of time that more wares kept popping up authorized or not displaying his image.  So without further ado I present the Michael Jackson IMITO A8 Cell Phone Ultimate EDITION. Basically a cheap phone with a laser image of MJ on the back of it….lovely.  Available in blue, silver, rose red, purple, green, and brown. The Michael Jackson IMITO A8 Cell sports a Dual Card Sim Card option, Stereo Bluetooth,FM radio,Phone call tracing, Multiple language support ( so people from other countries can get ripped off too), and 2.0 TFT screen.  All  this for the bargain basement price of $82.15. I’m sure the attorneys for Michael Jackson’s estate will get a Google alert right – about – now.”

In a potential advance for the forces of paid content, The Economist is introducing a trial program today that lets New Yorkers use their cellphones to order overnight home delivery of the new issue at the regular newsstand price. AdAge reports.

“New Yorkers who have signed up for weekly texts announcing each issue’s topics will also receive a URL for a web page they can visit to order the issue. Those who order by 9 p.m. are guaranteed a hand-delivered copy by 6 a.m. the next morning — in time to beat the commute.The weekly texts go out on Thursday afternoons, meaning recipients can get overnight copies before newsstands get them at about 9 a.m.
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The once rumored Nokia Xseries is now official as Nokia has just announced two devices to spearhead this new range of phones: the Nokia X6 and the X3.

The Nokia X6 is their latest full-touchscreen device that features 3.2-inch display, Carl Zeiss equipped 5-megapixel camera with dual LED flash, WiFi, Bluetooth, TV-out, on-device video editing tools, A-GPS, Ovi Maps, full web browser with Flash Lite support, 32GB memory, and an astounding 35 hours music playback battery life. Unlike their previous touchscreen phones such as the 5800XM and 5530XM, the Nokia X6 is definitely much slimmer measuring a mere 0.55-inches thin. It’s due in Q4 with a price of 459 Euros (around $652) excluding tax and subsidies.