Today, you can buy a smartphone with a color screen, which lets you listen to MP3s, surf the web, check your email and keep a calendar. It has a touchscreen. It runs Windows. It does everything—everything—better than its ancestor did, in a much sexier hardware package. Plus it makes calls! It will cost you less than the $450 Jornada 548, though you'll probably have to sign a two-year cellphone contract. Amazingly, though, its software looks and feels almost exactly the same as its ten-year-old brother.

I don't just want to beat up on Microsoft here, because disregarding aesthetics and UX, Windows Mobile has evolved a lot since it was just a twinkle in Windows CE's eye. But not as much as the competitors around it, and not fast enough to stay relevant. So instead of looking back, let's look forward: Microsoft, Windows Mobile 7, whatever it is, is your chance to win us back. The mobile space moves faster than it did back at the turn of the millenium, back when you had some of the best mobile software on the market, but it also has a shorter memory. Show us what you've got; we're eager to see it.

I got robbed on the subway in Brooklyn about 2 weeks ago, my iPhone (and some other crap)was taken. I called the police who were very helpful , they searched the area for a little bit, follow protocol and all that fun stuff.

Anyways, fast forward to yesterday when I get a email from Apple that someone had filed a request for a replacement phone due to a software malfunction from Apple CareService. I suspected that since I made an appointment with an Apple genius before, the Serial number on the phone was associated with my email. I called Apple to confirm this, after Apple and AT&T transferred me back and forth a few times I had the confirmation from the two companies the phone was mine , I had the address the service request was coming from (in the email) and a phone number (from an Apple rep).

I'm so excited that I can get my phone back! Until the cops arrive at my house, they tell me that since I didn't file a police report they can't do anything. I didn't file it because in order to file one, I would have had to go to a precinct downtown (like an hour away) look through books of pictures to try to ID the thief, whose face I only saw from the side for a millisecond. And really, what would a police report do for an iPhone that was stolen on a NYC subway a week before Christmas?(plus i had a final that night) The two officers also told me that even if I had a police report it would still be up to Apple and AT&T to decide how to proceed with the situation.

So I call AT&T... and over the course of 12 hours I speak to a bunch of people who are all very sorry that this is the situation I'm in, but their hands are tied — they have to honor the warranty and it does not matter that it's clear the phone is mine. They would need the authorities to tell them to do otherwise.

So I head to the police precinct where an officer calls the rep I spoke to last (aka the authorities speaking to Apple). The officer spends about an hour on the phone with Apple telling them that once the current holder of the phone ships the phone back to Apple, they should ship me the replacement. He gets the same answer I got—they will not do anything, they do not care that the person who has the phone currently is using a stolen phone and is not using it with AT&T (AT&T confirmed the phone # I got from the Apple rep is NOT an AT&T number).

It's not even about the phone anymore (I bought a blackberry—$600 is a TAD ridiculous for a new iPhone) its the principle of the situation, basically Apple is siding with someone who will most likely jailbreak the phone as opposed to helping a loyal customer (I've been using Apple products forever—iPods, Macs and iPhones (since the first gen)) who legally bought the phone from Apple and is using it with AT&T.

The whole situation is just illogical to me.

Yeah, illogical is a good word. Absurd is another. Does anyone out there know if this is purely about not filing a police report, or is there some other reason why Apple is being such a dick about this? [Consumerist]

UPDATE: Shortly after sending the email to Consumerist, Alisa obtained a police report. Apple still refuses to do anything. Perhaps sending an email to sjobs@apple.com might remedy this situation, as this email is widely known to lead to a high level customer care service. Steve has even been known to handle some issues personally.

All we've got for now is a crude rendering and a dubiously sourced Chinese leak, but given the recent spate of Snapdragon-powered Android phones, the specs are within the realm of plausibility: crammed into the slim body, there's a processor capable of decoding 1080p video, an 8-megapixel camera, and an HDMI port, masked by a 4.3-inch, 800 x 484 screen, as compared to the Droid's 3.7-inch display of the same resolution.

If true, this means that there's an Android phone that's at least as powerful as, and thinner than, Google's überbuzzed Nexus One sitting just over the horizon, which strikes yet another blow to the mythos of the be-all, end-all Android device. [Mobile1 via BGR]

Because after all, who doesn't want a 10.1-inch Dell phone? Err... [Shanzai via JkkMobile]

The Symbian S60 phone beams images in VGA 640 x 480 resolution, with a diagonal dimension of 64-inches (4-inches more than the first Bolt model). Battery life is pretty poor though, with the 2hours of projecting only just enough time to watch a film. Unless you're projecting, you can get 3hours of talk time, or 200 - 250 hours of standby time.

A lousy 2.6-inch QVGA screen ensures you'll be watching all of your content via the projector function, though interestingly enough it also has a TV tuner, though we'll have to wait until CES next week to find out more about the specifics there. There's two cameras, the forward-facing camera is 1-megapixel and the back cam is 3-megapixel, and a microSD card slot is present for storing extra content.

Logic Wireless has promised to show off their second projector phone next week at CES, though with all these external projector add-ons floating around for the iPhone and other handsets, the need for a dedicated projector phone is diminishing by the minute. That goes for you too, LG. [AVING]

I think these ten minutes cover nearly the whole Nexus user interface and give a reasonable idea of what to expect when we finally get our very own gadgets to play with. Gorgeous!

Heads up: There are a few not-so-safe-for-work seconds around the two minute mark. So you might want to skip over that if the boss is near (or if you don't enjoy Californication). [via nowhereelse.fr—Thanks, Steve!]

Translation:

For Diamond 2 firmware is not planned. Of the existing communicators on the market, only the HD2 firmware to get WM7.

Of course, I really wouldn't qualify this as "official" just yet. [twitter via MobileTechWorld]

Specifically designed for cars and airplanes, the mCube Mini can be powered by either a 12V or a 15V outlet and can support netbooks and laptops that need up to 65W of power at 15-21V. It also has a USB port so you can charge other portable gadgets at the same time. Again, it's small—60 x 26 x 18mm to be exact, so it's fairly comparable in size to a typical cellphone. Available now for $70. [Innergie via Slashgear]

Verizon's lineup, according to BGR's tipster, will consist of the Palm Pre Plus (codenam: Russell) and Palm Pixi (codename: Romo), which apparently look exactly like their non-plus predecessors, and will both run the currentl version of webOS, 1.3.5, at launch—a fact that jibes with the previously-announced "early next year" launch time, since Palm's been updating the OS at a steady clip.

So anyway, what's "Plus" about these phones? It could just be change in moniker, engineered by Palm and Verizon to inject a little energy into their existing lineup, but I'd expect something more more substantive: a faster processor, larger battery and in the case of the Pre, reengineered keyboard are all plausible guesses. Whatever it means, please, Palm, please don't tell me your CES keynote is just going to be a glorified carrier announcement. Palm needs new hardware. We need new hardware. Hardware! Ungghhhhhhhh. [BGR]

We try to not put much weight on analysts' speculations, but Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry is confident that Motorola "may announce" two new Android phones, one on AT&T, the second on Verizon. Both will have, according to him, OLED screens and a slide-out QWERTY for the AT&T model, with the same handset shunning MOTOBLUR in favour of the Google Experiences interface.

Could that AT&T model be the Backflip/Enzo we've seen leaked pics of? Though the screen doesn't sound like it's OLED, admittedly. Or perhaps the Sholes or Opus One will make a cameo next week? Stay tuned for our CES coverage, in any case. [Barron's]

Image Credit: Phandroid

The high 2.0.1 figure is a good indicator of how quickly the Droid has caught on, which makes sense given all of the positive hype. However, the number of 1.5s running out there was kind of surprising—meaning that there are plenty of people out there with the HTC Hero, Droid Eris and the like—although updates to several phones in this category should be coming soon. [Android Developers]

Addressing network congestion as the result of iPhone users utilizing data services exactly as you'd expect them to, O2's CEO Ronan Dunne told the FT (via AllThingsD):

Where we haven't met our own high standards then there's no question, we apologise to customers for that fact,

Now, remember AT&T CEO Ralph de la Vega's qualified admission about the general crappiness of the company's network in some major cities:

[It's] performing at levels below our standards.

So far, so familiar. Dunne takes the next step in what appears to be a step-by-step guide for carrier mea culpas, and claims that it's really not a huge deal:

But it would be wrong to say O2 has failed its customers en masse

Which, again, sounds extremely familiar. AT&T?

We have 98.68 percent nationwide voice retainability, which means that the difference between AT&T and the industry leader is less than 2/10 of a percentage point on this important metric.

Finally, users get a ray of hope. Vague hope, but hope nonetheless:

[Dunne] said "any short-term blip" in O2 's "network reputation" would be "more than addressed" by three solutions to the difficulties.

which corresponds rather neatly to:

This is going to get fixed," Mr. de la Vega said. "In both of those markets, I am very confident that you're going to see significant progress.

But it's not just the PR damage control that runs parallel here, it's the entire situation. O2, like AT&T, was the first carrier in its country to offer the iPhone, and the only one for quite a long time. iPhone users' increased data use was unprecedented in both markets, and brought the companies infrastructures, which were previously thought to be robust, to their knees. The next analog is how they somehow failed to predict this: they've known how data-hungry iPhone users are from the start, and they've been watching sales climb at a steady rate. So why weren't these carriers, two of the largest iPhone providers in the world, able to keep up?

That comes down to the last, most important parallel: they're both cheap. Like pretty much every carrier! Where they go from here looks like it could be different though, with AT&T hinting at "incentives" to tamp down data use, and O2 admitting outright that this is an infrastructure issue that needs to be solved, which counts for something.

To be fair, it is the iPhone that caused their problems, with a potent combination of broad appeal and transparent, heavy data use. It's just the carriers' fault that they couldn't foresee that, or that they just didn't care. [FT via AllThingsD, WSJ]

Joining the Lotus clamshell is the DP570MH portable DVD player, which will play DVDs and over 800 channels of live digital TV thanks to the LG2160A ATSC-M/H chip, which LG's offered to Dell for use in its laptops, and manufacturers of in-car receivers such as Kenwood. The DVD player has a four hour battery life when playing TV, which is only two hours less than the iPod Touch.

I'm all for DTV devices, but surely LG could've picked a better handset to introduce to the US market, considering the Lotus has been floating around since the end of 2008? [LGE via Engadget]

The algorithm in question has been used to encrypt GSM calls since 1988, but this past week, at the Chaos Communication Congress, a four-day computer hackers' conference, an encryption specialist by the name of Karsten Nohl disclosed how he and about 24 other people cracked the code. He also revealed that the resulting two terabyte "code book" which is "a vast log of binary codes that could theoretically be used to decipher GSM phone calls" is available on various BitTorrent websites.

Whether you should begin to worry about this news depends on whom you listen to. The telephone companies are proclaiming that the A5/1 algorithm, a 64-bit binary code, will soon be phased out for its successor, the 128-bit A5/3 algorithm, and that even just a simple modification to the existing code would be enough to thwart any attempts to intercept calls.

Some security experts on the other hand are saying that the "hardware and software needed for digital surveillance were available free as an open-source product" and that this new development could "reduce the time to break a GSM call from weeks to hours."

Either way, it doesn't seem like it's time to shout about yet another breach of privacy just yet, so let's go back to focusing on crotch pat downs once again. [NY Times]

Photo by Taberna de Ingrid

Dubbed Mobicast, the system requires two sets of software, one for the phone and one for the server receiving the footage. When two or more phones are in the same place capturing the same scene, the software synchronizes their clocks so the framing lines up correctly. Image recognition technology on the server then figures out how the footage should physically mesh, using features of the landscape or scene to recognize parts of the images that match. It then blends the images to create a wider, more detailed view of the scene, sort of like PhotoSynth for video (but without the 3-D – for now).

The coolest part, of course, is that Mobicast can do all this in real time, so an event can be captured and broadcast live to the Web by several cameras at once. Users also receive feedback to their phones showing stills of the stitched video with their contributions highlighted, helping them to see how they can better position themselves for the best contribution.

Before going public, there are some issues to sort out, like how to tell if several phones are in the same vicinity filming the same scene (GPS?). Until then, all we can do is keep on filming and dream of the day that celeb scandals break in full 360-degree 3-D.

[New Scientist]

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Bluetooth, in particular, is a notable addition in the dock (since Bluetooth is already in the phone). In other words, you're docking a Bluetooth device into another Bluetooth device. Why could this be?

Really, there are many explanations—and Bluetooth is cheap enough at this point that it need not be a luxury. Maybe HTC wanted you to have a headset that you kept at home. Maybe Bluetooth was chosen for remote accessories. Maybe Bluetooth just sounds cool to engineers.

Regardless, the thing'll have Bluetooth. Oh, and from the looks of it, the dock will hook into your home theater as well. [FCC via AndroidForums via Engadget]

Mignon Clyburn, a member of that FCC committee, wrote a letter with a laundry list of issues she has with Verizon's treatment of its customers and makes it a point to say that she looks "forward to exploring this issue in greater depth with [her] colleagues in the New Year." Yikes. Not such great news for Verizon, but it could lead to some good for consumers. [FCC via Engadget]

Modder WebAcoustics says of the hack:

"Please note that this involves rooting your phone, installing a custom recovery image, and a custom kernel. This is not for the faint of heart"

If that doesn't intimidate you, then hop on over to DroidForums for the details. [DroidForums via The Gadgets via Engadget]