Mobile Phones: Mobile Miscellany: week of August 22, 2011

Sunday, 28 August 2011

Mobile Miscellany: week of August 22, 2011

This week was packed with news on the mobile front, so it was easy to miss a few stories here and there. Here's some of the other stuff that happened in the wide world of wireless for the week of August 15, 2011:

Phone Releases

Fido launched the Samsung Galaxy Q, also known as the Gravity Smart in the US, on Thursday. [via MobileSyrup]
The BlackBerry Curve 9360 can already be purchased on Telus for $50 with a three-year contract, and the Torch 9860 will be available on August 30th. [via IntoMobile and CrackBerry]
SouthernLINC Wireless announced the immediate availability of the Motorola Titanium, offered for $150 with a two-year commitment.
T-Mobile released the Samsung Gravity TXT, a basic messaging phone that's on sale for $10. [via UnwiredView]
Cricket has begun offering a new messaging phone called the Samsung Comment, which offers a full QWERTY keyboard, stereo bluetooth, a microSD slot and 1.3MP camera. It can be had for $90 with no commitment required. [via PhoneScoop]

Other news

The government of South Korea, in reaction to Google's planned acquisition of Motorola, now intends to form a consortium of local companies that will work together in building a brand new mobile operating system. [via IntoMobile]
Randall Milch, Chief Counsel for Verizon, is so frustrated with the patent wars going on that this week he filed an appeal to President Obama, asking for him to provide assistance in the matter. [via PhoneScoop]
The Motorola PRO is expected to debut in the UK in mid-September, though pre-orders are already taking place at select authorized resellers. [via UnwiredView]
Leaked posters indicate the BlackBerry Torch 9850 will be offered by Verizon and screenshots show the same phone going to US Cellular, though we're still unsure of the release date or pricing. [via CrackBerry(1) and (2)]
Last week we reported on the rumored Sony Ericsson Nozumi, a smartphone that will likely feature a 1.4GHz single-core Qualcomm S2 CPU, Adreno 205 GPU, and 4.3-inch display with 1280 x 720 resolution. At the time, it was assumed to be only selling in Japan; however, there's a good possibility the Nozumi will end up available globally instead. [via XperiaBlog]
Pantech's LTE phone on Verizon may actually end up being called the Breakout (rather than the "Apache"), according to a leaked screenshot. When released, it'll feature a 1GHz CPU with 512MB of RAM, dual cameras, and will be preloaded with Gingerbread. Not much to write home about at this stage in the game, considering these are incredibly similar to the specs of the LG Revolution. However, it would be the first 4G phone on Big Red that has a 4-inch display. [via AndroidCentral]
T-Mobile may be planning to throw a data pay-per-use feature onto any smartphone that currently has its internet access blocked. If this happens, it will affect current customers as well as new ones. [via TmoNews]
Dish has petitioned the FCC for permission to use 40MHz of allocated spectrum to begin building out an LTE-Advanced network. [via PhoneScoop]