Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace for Mobile is reportedly instituting a very customer friendly application sharing policy. According to circulating reports, customers who purchase apps from the online storefront will be able to install those apps on up to five Windows Mobile devices at no additional cost. Most normal people, BGR readers aside, will not own five Windows Mobile 6.5 devices so customers will presumably be able to share purchased apps by authorizing the mobile phones of close family and friends. Daniel Bouie, senior product planner for Microsoft, says that the company “sees this as a permanent feature, and we’ve gotten great positive feedback from the vast majority of developers we’ve talked with about this.” Happy developers, happy customers — is it too good to be true?
News from Boost Mobile this morning brings its subscribers a new international texting and walkie talkie option that will definitely turn heads. Dubbed International Connect, the $10 plan enhancement affords customers unlimited SMS and PTT from the US to Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Chile. Though the new International Connect option is hardly worldwide as the header on Boost’s press release would lead you to believe, it’s still a hell of a package for $10. No? Hit the jump for the full release or we’ll send Mickey Avalon to do a live show in your front yard.
The Motorola Renew isn’t exactly an unheard of device, but T-Mobile has gone and scooped ‘em up. Don’t expect to be taking 8-megapixel flicks here, as this is as low-end as you basically get. How low end? Well, how does $9.99 on a two-year sound? Yeah, it’s that inexpensive. There are some perks to owning a Motorola Renew, however. First of all, you’re looking at around nine whole hours of battery life — awesome. Second, the entire case of the phone is made from recycled water bottles and thus is 100% fully recyclable. Additionally, the box it comes in is also made from recycled material and the phone ships with a postage-paid envelope to a recycling center when the phone’s time on the earth is done. Not to get all gushy over the green aspect of the device, but as a final aside, Motorola has completely offset the carbon dioxide required to make, distribute, and operate the phone through investments in reforestation and renewable energy sources. Pretty damn cool, if we do say so ourselves.
This is unconfirmed as a whole at the moment, but we got a couple tips that AT&T sales employees were about to go on strike as “corporate is unwilling to budge on benefits and compensation.” We asked one of our ninjas about this and they said that it is definitely “possible” and there was a contingency in place. We’ll keep digging, but if you suddenly realize your Bold exploded in your hands and you need a new one, you’ll know why your local AT&T store is surrounded by picketers and protesters.
Well, it’s no Curve 8900 and it’s certainly no Bold but BlackBerry fans with a need for buttons will be happy to learn that the Pearl 8230 Flip should be landing soon on Verizon shelves near you. This SureType clam shell is probably among RIM’s less desirable newer handsets but options are never a bad thing as they say. Pricing and availability are still a bit of a mystery but we know silver will be among the color options, obviously. Test units have gone out however, so the launch can’t be too far off. Unsolicited advice for our pals at Big Red: If you’re planning to launch this puppy with a giveaway contest of some kind, hire a new team to run it.
So, here’s the deal… One of our infamous ninjas just sent us a shot of an unreleased and unseen Acer handset. They told us it would be announced by Acer at MWC in a couple weeks, and that it is “pretty awkward.” We agreed. For one, it has a swivel keypad as evidenced by the photo they sent, it also has a touch screen but our ninja wasn’t sure if it ran Windows Mobile or Android. No hard specs, but we’d imagine a nice CPU, decent camera, 3G, GPS, and the like. Oh, and one more thing: they also said Acer had an iPhone competitor that… looked like an iPhone. Hard to imagine, right? Larger shot is after the breakage!
We, along with just about everyone else out there, have spent our fair share of time bashing Sprint. Despite its numerous flaws, however, the beleaguered carrier has been taking a stab at making amends as of late. The most recent addition to their stable of appeasement tools is the Sprint Premier program. Designed to reward loyal customers, the program provides the following benefits:
Mobile World Congress might not be for another couple of weeks but that doesn’t mean we have to wait to see some new handsets work their way out through the cracks, or leaks as it were. Here we have another glimpse at a new handset, this time on its way to the US courtesy of LG and AT&T. No, it’s not the sexiest gear in the room, but you can expect the LG Neon to be the envy of tween texters across the country. Start with a painful color palette, mix in some QWERTY slider, add one 2.4″ touchscreen and you’ve got yourself a handset that can woo a 14-year-old girl like it was Justin Timberlake. Release timing and pricing are still a mystery at this point but expect it to be priced well enough for parents of tween girls to give in after a few days of incessant begging.
The next two weeks are sure to test the patience of American G1 owners as a T-Mobile rep has confirmed by way of the official forums that a new firmware build, 1.1 RC33, will be coming sometime soon (although it has been said that the update has already been seeded to “a small number of users” as of yesterday). We’ll start off by stating the bad news that Cupcake will not be a part of the new release, although RC33 does feature many sorely-needed improvements. Specifically, it will “include new system enhancements such as the ability to save pictures or files to file by long-pressing an item, check for system updates, and use the Google Voice Search feature.” Other than that, some bugs have been fixed here and there but that’s all she wrote. Okay, it does kind of suck, but Google Voice Search is a pretty good consolation prize, no?
Yesterday we reported a major data outage plaguing BlackBerry users across the country and while certain regions seem to be back in action today, many BlackBerry users are still left wondering when their service might be restored. Issues in the southern region reportedly resulted from the severing of a fiber line but that can hardly account for the massive outages experienced all day long, spanning from coast to coast. We’re still waiting for word on possible causes but while service has been restored for many BlackBerry users at this point, many more are still left without data. We spoke to our pals at AT&T, one of the carriers whose customers are still affected, and information was scarce at best. All they could tell us was that BES is still down for many, it’s a RIM issue and RIM’s engineers are “working on it”. We know several areas of the Northeast are still without service, including many in the New York / New Jersey region, but AT&T claims only enterprise customers are still affected at this point.
