Five Friday Phone Features

American Eagle is giving away smartphones, Trillian aims for Android, T-Mobile drops the Garminphone's price, Motorola's BackFlip gets an update, and living wallpaper goes digital.

Eric Zeman, Contributor

July 9, 2010

2 Min Read
InformationWeek logo in a gray background | InformationWeek

Best Buy today announced that it will be the sole place to buy a white version of the HTC EVO 4G WiMax phone. The device, which has been available for several weeks now, was originally sold in black. Best Buy will start taking pre-orders June 18, though the device won't be available until July 11. It will cost $200 with a new agreement. If white phones are your thing, Best Buy's got your back.

Verizon Wireless customers apparently don't use all that much wireless data. Verizon Communications CFO John Killian said in a recent interview with Bloomberg that its customers typically use between 600 and 800MB of wireless data per month. For comparison, AT&T has said that 98% of its smartphone customers use less than 2GB of data each month, and in fact, 65% use less than 200MB per month. Turns out data hogs are actually few and far between.

Everyone's doing it -- at least, when it comes to sending text messages while driving. A new study says that 47% of "texting adults" admitted to sending or receiving a text message while driving (does receiving one count if you don't read it?). For comparison sake, only 34% of teenagers admitted to sending/receiving texts while driving. Apparently it's a case of do what I say, and not what I do... The study says that overall, only 27% of all adults said they've sent text messages while driving. That's still too many! Adults were much worse than teens when it came to gabbing on their phones while driving.

Analysts are now predicting that Apple will sell between 2 and 3 million iPhones during its opening weekend sales (June 24 - 27). These latest guesstimates come from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster and Susquehanna Financial's Jeff Fidacaro. More than 600,000 pre-ordered the iPhone 4 (or at least attempted to) on June 15.

Last, earlier this week Palm did its best to confirm the unconfirmable. Is it launching a new version of webOS? Is it building new devices? Gee, I wonder. Palm’s Josh Marinacci would only admit to the follow: “I’m not allowed to talk about future road maps, especially because we’re in the process of being acquired by HP. But yes we have a road map. We are working on future devices. And a new version of the OS. So I think you’re going to find the next year very exciting."

That's all! Have a good weekend!

About the Author

Eric Zeman

Contributor

Eric is a freelance writer for InformationWeek specializing in mobile technologies.

Never Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.

You May Also Like


More Insights