June — now officially dubbed the month of the mobile — is almost upon us and among the myriad of exciting new handsets that will debut or at least become official this month is the Nokia N97. Our Finnish friends have high hopes for this pricey little piece of kit, which will be Nokia’s first Nseries to sport a touchscreen along with the S60 5th Edition OS. As for the NAM edition, it’s now looking like that rumor of pre-orders shipping in early June might just pan out — we’ve received a few tips from people who have pre-ordered the handset from Amazon and they’ve apparently received emails stating the handset will ship the week of June 15th. It stands to reason of course, that units will begin shipping directly Nokia before then or at least by that week. Does that mean we could actually see the handset released in the US before Europe? Well, our Euro pals, at least you can enjoy Nokia’s newly-posted N97 support pages while you continue to wait for orders to be filled.
A week prior to its rumored June 7th debut, the Sprint version of the HTC Snap, (aka HTC Willow aka HTC Cedar) has made an appearance on Best Buy’s website. All the glorious details are there, including a few stock photos and a $519 out of contract price tag. Expect Sprint to make this handset official sometime this week along with actual pricing and availability. One word of caution for any n00bs out there, if you head over to Sprint on the 7th to pick up a Pre and it is out of stock, don’t let them sell you the Snap instead. This baby is for Motorola Q lovers looking for a boost, not potential Pre owners.
This past week, Microsoft announced a major milestone for its Xbox 360 console. According to Redmond, the 360 has officially surpassed the 30 million sales mark. For comparison sake, Sony’s PlayStation 3 has sold around 21.3 million units and Nintendo has pushed out about 50.4 million Wii consoles. Both the Wii and PS3 were released in 2006 whereas the Xbox 360 was launched in November of 2005.
The winners of our recent Slacker Radio Plus giveaway won’t be the only ones excited to learn that Slacker Radio’s mobile app has just received a major upgrade. Version 2, 2.0.2 actually, is now available and it includes a variety of bug fixes and enhancements. Highlights include faster performance / app response and much (MUCH) shorter gaps between songs. Transition gaps were one of the few complaints users had with Slacker but now once the app gets rolling, users can move through that 4 million-track library with almost no interruption. The BlackBerry version is available immediately via direct download (uninstall the current version, reboot and visit www.slacker.com from your BlackBerry browser) and it will show up in BlackBerry App World this coming week. Likewise, the updated iPhone app is currently awaiting approval and should hit the App Store this coming week as well.
HTC hooked us up with a couple of bad ass new phones — the much awaited Touch Pro2 and the Touch Diamond2. The Touch Pro2 has stole our hearts, we’re not going to lie. But, we’ve got reviews cookin’ on both of these, so in the meantime check out some flicks, comparison photos, and other random snaps on this wonderful Saturday!
LG has announced two new handsets, the GW520 and GT505, that do their best to target the social networking, business-oriented crowd. Both handsets feature push notification of updates from various social networking sites, push email from personal accounts and Microsoft Exchange support. The GW520 is a QWERTY side slider with a 2.8-inch touchscreen, 7.2Mbps HSDPA and a 3 megapixel camera. The GT505 is a candybar with a 3-inch touchscreen, 3.6Mbps HSDPA, Wi-Fi and a 5 megapixel camera. The GT505 also comes with a 30 day trial of WisePilot for LG which offers turn by turn navigation. Both handsets are expected to be available in June 2009 with the GT505 launching on Orange while the GW520 to debut with various, yet-to-be-named carriers.
Yesterday, news that the Palm Pre was capable of synchronizing content with iTunes hit just about every tech and gadget blog on the planet. In fact, it even reached mainstream media blogs that typically shy away from little tidbits. Really? Fair enough — it’s pretty cool for Pre proponents to know that their future handsets will sync with iTunes out of the box. The level of excitement over this story got us thinking though… If people are this excited that the Pre can sync with iTunes, does that mean they think many current handsets cannot sync with iTunes?
Ok, BlackBerry Storm owners, you’re probably still in a euphoria-induced haze after having learned that an OS update is finally headed your way this Sunday from Verizon. It’s time to calm down and focus though fellas, as one of our ninjas just came through with the change log. The Storm OS has been a sore spot ever since we spoke of it in our early review of the handset and now, 155 years later, we’re finally going to see some fixes. Four pages worth of fixes in fact! Hit the jump for the full run down and get ready for some serious update love next week.
So let it be written, so let it be done. Rejoice, Verizon Storm owners, because the OS update you’ve been literally dying for has finally arrived. We just received official word from our pals at VZW that a new Storm OS, 4.7.0.148, will be released on Sunday, May 31st at 3pm. According to Verizon, this is a “general maintenance release that improves the overall user experience.” Proactive users can hit blackberry.com/update at that point in time to get the ball rolling. For users with a less urgent desire to upgrade their OSes, a rolling OTA upgrade (Options> Advanced Options > Wireless Updates) will begin at 10pm on the same day. Who’s excited?
