For the first time, Canadian mobile carriers are offering unlimited data plans for much less than the price of your arm and leg. Bell Mobility introduced the HTC Touch a few weeks ago with an unlimited data plan for 7 dollars Canadian, or $7.04 US. The plan is also compatible with other wap-based consumer phones, and only allow for wap-access.  Unlike the consumer based unlimited wap plan, the unlimited data covers unlimited HTML based internet browsing (through EV-DO/CDMA 1X) and unlimited email and instant messaging. For PDAs, the HTC Touch is currently the only phone that the $7 plan is compatible on.

Days earlier, Telus Mobility introduced an unlimited instant messaging/e-mail plan for $15 for all PDAs and Blackberrys, but many customers have been given free unlimited data as part of the package to compete with the plan by Bell. Currently there is very little information whether Blackberry devices are compatible or not.

Rogers Wireless introduced an unlimited email and messaging plan for exclusively Blackberry devices for $15, it does not include any web browsing data, nor has Rogers responded to Bell’s $7 unlimited data yet, and they may not until much into the future.

Many believe the unlimited data plans introduced by Bell and Telus are to prepare to combat against the iPhone that is to be released on Rogers sometime in the imminent not-so-distant future.

Two restrictions that the Bell and Telus data plans have is audio/video streaming and tethering to a computer, both carriers forbid customers from doing either on their phones due to the extreme pricing on the plans.

Yesterday we posted about a man who died, and police thought it was caused by his cell phone exploding.

The man had broken ribs, damage to his lungs and heart, the phones battery was even melted into his shirt pocket. But according to CNN, an autopsy performed on the man says that his injuries were to severe to have been caused by an exploding cell phone.

So maybe LG was right in saying their phones couldn’t of killed the man, but hey cell phones have exploded in the past, just ask Nokia.

When people go phone shopping, they look for a phone that will offer them all the features they want. It has to look good, and be affordable, but most of the time you only find a phone with decent features and a high price tag.

Well Nokia has put an end to that with the Nokia 6555. The Nokia 6555 is stylish and feature filled. It has just a $39.99 price tag with a 2 year contract with at&t wireless. The Nokia 6555 is loaded with features, such as Bluetooth 2.0, a MP3 player, a 1.3 Mega Pixel camera that does both stills and video, capable of 3G, full color internal, and Push to talk (PTT) capable. The phone comes in Black and Red.

The Nokia 6555 has a nice form factor and is also light weight. It isn’t as thin as the Motorola Razr, but it does look better in my opinion. For such an affordable phone, the Nokia 6555 doesn’t feel as if it were cheaply made.

So, how does the phone perform? Well it performs pretty nicely. I for one like a phone with a nice user interface (UI) and one that’s easy to use and program. The UI for the Nokia 6555 probably isn’t the best I have seen, but it’s pretty good, and it is probably one of the easiest to use. I never had to read the manual to find out where what feature was and how to change any of the settings. Everything was where you’d expect it to be.

I tested the phone throughout New York City, and I never had any problems with the signal strength. At&t’s service in the city has improved a lot over the past 2 years.

Sound quality on the phone was superb. Every call was clear even on the speaker phone. A lot of times when you have a call on speaker, you get crackling and sometimes the person you are talking to sounds garbled. Not the case with the Nokia 6555. Calls were clear as day even on the speaker phone, no crackling, and the person I was talking too did not sound garbled.

Keeping on topic with the speaker the phone has, when playing music on the phone be it music stored on your phone or a microSD card or streamed music from XM, the sound is great! I see a lot of people, especially here in Brooklyn, walking the streets with their phones, and they have the phones playing music so everyone can hear. What’s worse is that you can barely understand what they are saying in the song because it sounds garbled. I for one find it annoying when people do that, but seeing as people do like to do this I thought I’d mention you can do it with the 6555 and hear the song perfectly as if playing it were from a traditional mp3 player. Oh, and if you are the type of person that does this, there is something called headphones; use them!

Continuing with the speaker I mentioned above, the Nokia 6555 supports PTT. What is PTT? PTT is Push to Talk and is basically a walkie talkie feature that you can add to your at&t phone provided your phone supports it. The service cost an additional 9.99 a month or 19.99 for a family plan.

PTT uses the speaker on the phone as well, and because the speaker delivers such good sound quality, your PTT communications come in loud and clear. I had a Nextel, and when I would use the walkie talkie feature a lot of times I couldn’t understand what someone would say because the speaker on the phones I had weren’t that great. You won’t have that problem with the Nokia 6555.

Just a little note, if you have used the PTT feature with Nextel and then switch to at&t, you cannot communicate with your Nextel contacts via at&t. The at&t PTT also seems to take a second longer to connect, but it isn’t noticeable. I only got to test the PTT feature in a limited fashion, but for me the quality of the PTT communications were better on the Nokia 6555 than they were on my Motorola phone with Nextel.

The PTT feature with at&T is also a lot better. You kind of set it up like you would a buddy list, and you get to see who is available, who is busy, and who is offline, which is good because sometimes you don’t want to be bothered, and you can set yourself as away or offline.

Ok, Ok, let me stop talking about how great the sound quality on the speaker is. I think I spent a little too much time on that, but then again I was impressed with it and wanted to express that.

The phone also takes advantage of the at&t 3G network, and it’s a lot faster than what I remember when I was an at&t subscriber. Streaming music and video to the Nokia 6555 is a breeze, and as I said before the sound quality is great, but the video quality is also great. On phones such as the HTC Touch and my T-Mobile dash, video, when streamed, looks pixilated, but on the Nokia 6555 while the video did look a bit pixilated it wasn’t as extreme as on my Dash and a little better than the HTC touch.

You can also lower the volume of what you are watching or listening too without having to lower the phones volume, which is cool because sometimes you don’t want what your listening to too loud but you still want your ringtones volume etc high, or vice versa.

The Video Quality from recorded videos you make with the camera is pretty good also. It’s not great but good, and the picture quality for still images is pretty decent as well.

Battery life was pretty good also, I got nearly 9 hours from the phones battery when having a few 10 to 20 minute conversations, texting a lot, browsing the web and using the PTT feature. I didn’t try to over do anything when testing the phones battery life, I used it as if I would use it normally.

Overall the Nokia 6555 is fantastic: great look, great sound quality, great features, and great price. We award the Nokia 6555 our 5 Star Kick Ass award (Using our sister sites HardwareGeeks.com award).

The Nokia 6555 is available now from at&t wireless for $39.99 with a 2 year contract, and although the phone is as cheap as a no frills phone, it is loaded with features and a great phone to have. It is perfect for kids, teens, and even adults.

The 6555 will also make a great gift these holidays, I think I will get one for my mom who recently lost the Pantec C150 I got her 2 months ago.

If you are interested in buying a Nokia 6555 you can do so at attwireless.com, it’s available with a monthly contract or prepaid.

With a lot of reports of exploding cell phones, mainly due to uncertified batteries overheating and exploding, I always wondered when one would actually kill someone.

Well it seems to have happened in South Korea, a man was found dead with his cell phone battery melted to his shirt. Police believe his cell phone exploded, and say the phone was made by LG Electronics.

LG confirmed to the Associated Press that their cell phone was involved but said that such an explosion is impossible.

I guess LG needs to talk to Nokia about exploding cell phones if they think it’s impossible.

Starting today November 28th you can get your hands on the new XV6800 from Verizon. A lot of Verizon customers have been waiting for this phone for nearly a year.

The XV6800 is an upgrade to the UTStarcom XV6700, which many thought was bulky. The XV6800 will have Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition (allows you to edit office documents), a 2-megapixel camera, intergrated wi-fi, EVDO support, bluetooh 2.0, touch screen, full slide out QWERTY keyboard, and support of up to 4 GB microSD cards.

For those who are not familiar with the phone, this is basically the same phone as the Sprint Mogul and T-Mobile wing. While many users are happy with the Mogul some complain that the Wing lags a bit, but from what a friend of mines told me from Verizon the XV6800 performs pretty good.

The XV6800 has a retail price of $499,99 but with a 2 year contract you can get it for $349 with a $50 mail in rebate.

For more information about the phone visit the VX6800 product page on Verizon Wireless.

When I first saw the Motorola Q, I liked it a lot, and when a friend’s birthday came around, I pitched in with her sisters to get her one, and she loved it. Why wouldn’t she? Motorola makes great phones. The Moto Q isn’t just a great phone a great smartphone geared towards business professionals, and with her being a “classy” business lady, she needed a phone that could keep up with her busy schedule.

On the 1st of November, at&t announced they would carry the Moto Q 9h Global exclusively. The 9h Global is a phone that literally works all over the world. 135 countries to be exact, and with an upcoming planned trip to Europe, I decided to test out its global capabilities. I was heading to Spain for Microsoft’s TechEd Europe, but sadly that planned trip fell through. However, we did test the phone overseas thanks to help from a HardwareGeeks.com partner Patrick O’Malley who is a developer for a large company here in NYC, who did attended the Microsoft TechED Europe event.

But before the phone headed to Europe, I decided to test it out state side. But before we get on with the review, let me tell you what the phone features.

The MOTO Q global offers users an ergonomic, integrated QWERTY keyboard, great voice quality, and fast broadband speeds up to 3.6 Mbps via AT&T’s UMTS/HSDPA-based BroadbandConnect network. On various speed tests I performed, I was able to get 3.3 Mbps down constantly with a slight improvement during the nighttime hours. It also has Windows Mobile 6, built-in GPS capabilities, Documents to Go® for document editing, Opera browser, and Internet Explorer. However, Opera is set to the default browser. It has seven dedicated shortcut keys, a 2.0-megapixel camera with flash, and let’s not forget Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity.

So, now that you know what the phone features let’s get on with the review.

I live in NYC, and I am a T-Mobile subscriber and have been a loyal subscriber with T-Mobile for the past 6 months and a not so happy customer for the past 2 months. After using at&t for the past month or so on my review of the Pantech Duo and now the Moto Q 9h Global, I kind of regret my decision to switch providers after a dispute with an at&t CS agent 9 months ago.

The service at&t provides here in the states is exceptional, way better than what T-Mobile has to offer here in NYC anyway, and it’s on par with Verizon and Sprint, if not a smidgen better than those two.

Their BroadbandConnect network is probably one of the best available in the US. Sure Verizon and Sprint may offer faster speeds, but I have used all 3, and if I were to grade them I would grade at&t with an A + as I have never had trouble connecting to a webpage or checking email and Sprint with an a B since I have had some connection issues with Sprint and some slow downs during peak hours, Verizon receives a C; I have had major speed issues with them, especially in major cities. 

The at&t network is rock solid, and being a t-mobile customer for the past 8 months has made the saying “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone” ring true to me.

We now know that at&t offers great service in the US, how about overseas? Well, we almost didn’t find out how their service is overseas, because I committed a major faux par. We were given a sim card to test out the Pantech Duo and the Moto Q 9h Global. When I handed the 9h to Patrick, I had neglected to swap the sim card from the Duo to the 9h. Luckily, Patrick is an at&t customer and had no problem using his sim card on the phone while in Spain and Italy.

According to Patrick, while he was in Barcelona and in Rome he never had an issue with getting a signal. The internet speed on the phone was pretty good; however, when he ran some speed tests on the phone he only was able to achieve 2.3 Mbps a second, but that’s still pretty damned good.

He said he used the built in GPS feature to get around Barcelona with the help of Microsoft Live Search. Although, it took him a bit of trial and error to get it to work correctly. I my self was unable to get it to work.

Now we know the at&t service works great globally, but how does the phone perform?

The sound quality the phone delivers during a phone call is amazing. It made me feel as if the person I was talking too was right next to me. Everything was crystal clear, and when I went back to using my T-Mobile dash, I missed the sound quality the Moto Q had.

But the sound quality doesn’t just end there. I played music on the phone, and the sound quality was just as good as the sound quality I get from my Toshiba T400. This surprised me a lot, because most phones have semi decent sound when it comes to music, but this was not the case with the Moto Q 9h. The sound was superb. Who needs an MP3 player when you have a phone that has sound like this?

The Moto Q 9h is a big Smartphone, a bit bigger than what I am used to. At first, I really didn’t care for the size, and when I met with Motorola, I kind of implied I wasn’t too happy with the size, but I got used to it. After using it a while, I like that it is big, because it’s easier to type on it and feels comfortable in your hands. With most phones that have a QWERTY keyboard, you find yourself using the tips of your thumbs to type. However, since the keys on the Moto Q 9H were larger than the keys you’d find on the T-Mobile Dash, Sidekick, and Palm Treos, you don’t find yourself using just the tips of your thumb. Also, you find yourself making less typing mistakes.

Big Smartphone also equals big screen, and the Moto Q has a nice sized screen which offers a 320x240 color display that automatically adjusts itself to the light conditions in the room you are in which is a kick ass feature to me. The screen is one of the best colored screens I have seen on a phone. I literally watched some recorded TV shows on it that were stored on a SD card, and it was as if I were watching them at home on my TV. Well, not exactly, but the Picture Quality was pretty good. I also watched some streaming TV on mobile Slingbox, and again, the at&t service performed as advertised. The PQ on the TV show was what you’d expect.

The 9h also has a built in GPS, and while I ran into trouble with the telenav software and couldn’t test it fully, my friend Patrick did get it to work while he was in Spain and said it worked great. I, for some reason, constantly got a signal is weak error even when I was on the roof of my apartment building. Telenav actually told me they didn’t support the phone when I called them for help, even though they have software specifically designed for the phone. I guess their tech support scripts hadn’t been updated when I called. So, I basically gave up on trying the GPS out for myself, but again Patrick said it worked for him.

Before we end the review, we have to mention the camera. The Moto Q 9h has a 2 megapixel camera with built in flash. The camera software and the picture quality are really good, and probably gave me better shots than my old 3 megapixel Kodak camera I have laying around somewhere.

The Moto Q 9H is a great Smartphone for the business professional on the go. It runs Windows Mobile and comes included with Documents to Go, a great program that I use to use on all of my palm pilots. Documents to Go allows you to edit your Microsoft office documents on the phone itself.

Overall the Moto Q 9H is amazing. It has great sound quality for calls and music, great video quality to watch video clips on, and a great camera that takes decent pictures. For all of its greatness, we award the Moto Q 9 h our highest award the 5 Star Editors Choice.

The Moto Q 9h is available exclusively from at&t wireless for $199 with a 2 year contract and after a $199.99 mail in rebate.

Nokia is sending us the Nokia 6555 to test out, and hopefully we will get it soon and be able to bring a review to you guys with in a week or two of getting it.

The phone was announced back on August 21st. The phone features an external and internal color screen, mp3 functionality, bluetooth and a camera.

The phone is probably one of the nicest looking phones available, but sometimes pictures can be a bit deceiving.

Over the past several months I have become a Pantech fan. From their C300 to the updated C3B and even the C150, I have fallen in love with the look and feel of their phones. They honestly seem to put a lot of thought into their phones and focus on what we as users really need and want.

Pantech continued their stylish and consumer oriented ways with the new Pantech Duo released on the 29th of October. (Some pictures at this link)

The Pantech Duo is a Windows Mobile based phone. It is loaded with cool features such as a 2.2 inch QVGA screen, voice commands, messenger programs (AIM, Live Messenger, Yahoo), a 1.3 Megapixel camera, support for microSD cards, Quad-band GPRS/EDGE with dual-band UMTS/HSDPA so you can use it around the world, Bluetooth, and a battery that promises 250 hours of standby time.

So, why is it called the Pantech Duo? It’s called the Duo because it’s a dual slider. What’s a slider phone? It is a phone whose keypad slides in and out. What’s a dual slider? It is the same thing as a slider except you get an additional keypad, or in the case of the Pantech Duo, a full QWERTY keyboard.

Now that you know a little about the phone, let’s get on with the review.

I have had the Pantech Duo for a little over ten days, and I have to say have been enjoying every minute with it. Each day I discover a new feature. The phone is fun to use, easy to learn, and does everything you want it to for a lot less than similar phones with the same or less features. It is probably one of the most fun phones I have used in a while.

The first thing I noticed when I first held the Pantech Duo, is that it isn’t as heavy as it looks. It only weighs 3.88 ounces with the battery. That’s far less than any Sidekick.
Speaking of the Sidekick, the Pantech Duo is a good alternative to the Sidekick. Being a previous sidekick owner, I often suffered with the not so great t-mobile network. While I didn’t have trouble with phone calls, the t-mobile data network constantly had outages. Over the past 9 days, I used the Duo in the same way I used my sidekick when I had one. I constantly had it connected to AIM, Yahoo, and Live Messenger, and I set it up so that I could receive my personal email on the device. There were occasions where I would receive a text message as many as 5 seconds after it was sent, I never experienced an outage of data service. While my friend who has a Sidekick had issues with receiving Instant Messages, especially at night.

Emailing, Messaging, and Texting on the Duo is comfortable and easy. Because of the full QWERTY keyboard, you’re able to use both your hands. Even if you just need to use one hand, you can use the numeric keypad. It may take you a bit longer to type something up, but you won’t end up dropping your Duo in the toilet like my friend Chrissy did; she dropped her Sidekick in the toilet while applying makeup.

But the Pantech Duo isn’t just for messaging. It has a dual purpose. Not only is it good for your everyday life, it’s also good for your work life. It’s a phone that’s cool enough to take to the club yet sophisticated enough to whip out during a business meeting to check your schedule, look up a contact, or check the web for some information.

I tried out the call quality on the phone. I have to say it’s pretty impressive. It’s better than the call quality on my T-Mobile Dash and the HTC Touch from Sprint. On my dash, I sometimes have to stick a finger in my left ear so that I can hear the call clearly from my right ear, even if the volume is all the way up. I really didn’t have that problem on the Duo.

I also have to give props to at&t. The signal I have had with them this past week and a half has been great. I have not had one dropped call all week. I can’t say the same for my T-Mobile phone service, and I now regret switching to T-Mobile. (Can read why I switched here) I think I will be switching back soon enough.

The Duo also has a 1.3 mega Pixel camera which does both still and video images. The picture quality and video quality were decent for a 1.3 mega pixel camera, and the sound quality in the videos was really good.

Speaking of Video and Sound quality, the Duo comes included with at&t Music and Cellular video. 

The at&t music feature works with eMusic, Napster, Yahoo Music, and XM Satellite radio. You have your pick of music service. You can also put music onto a microSD card and listen to it via the Windows Media Player in Windows Mobile. The sound quality is great with or without headphones.  Part of at&t music is that there is a MusicID feature which will help you ID music you are listening to. How does it work? Well you ask it to ID a song, you place the phone near the music source, and you will get a message that tells you what song it is. I tried it, and it worked pretty well.

The Cellular Video feature is also pretty cool. You can watch music videos and news. If you can name it, you can watch it. The video quality is a lot better than what I experienced with the HTC Touch from Sprint, and it was a lot crisper than the video quality on my T-Mobile Dash.

After I checked out the call quality and quality of the at&t services, I tested out the battery life. Again Pantech has amazed me with the battery life on the phone. With the default settings, I got nearly 12 hours of battery life with normal use for me which is about 5 to 10 phone calls ranging from 10 seconds to 30 minutes, browsing the web to check my weather, and sending a couple hundred text messages. I got 11 hours and 43 minutes exactly of battery life. Pantech advertises the Duo as having 3 hours of talk time.

The Pantech DUO is also probably the only Sub 200 dollar Windows Mobile based Smartphone that takes full advantage of the power of Windows Mobile.

For example, Windows Mobile 6 has Voice Commands, and I have used several smart phones. While the voice command feature works on them all to an extent, the Pantech Duo is the only Smartphone I have used this year that takes advantage of it fully; meaning you can hold a button and say “Call Home” and provided you have a contact named Home it will dial it for you, or you can say “text messages” “email” and your messaging center will be displayed.

Another cool thing about the voice commands on the Pantech Duo is that they can be set to read your text messages to you when you receive them. However, if you do enable it to do this, make sure you don’t receive any embarrassing text messages. As Deborah from Pantech pointed out, it can be very embarrassing. If you are curious as to how the voice on the phone sounds, it is the same female voice Windows Operating systems have. So, if you are running Windows, go to your control panel, select Text To Speech (in Windows Vista) or Speech (Windows XP), make sure Microsoft Anne is selected, and click preview voice. It’s not that bad sounding, but a bit robotic.

Just like other Windows Mobile smartphones, the Pantech Duo can handle your contacts, your appointments, and allow you to take your work with you; with the proper software, you can read and edit or create a new word document.

Overall, the Pantech Duo is fantastic, and the at&t service is better than what I remember. For that, we award both Pantech and at&t our 5 Star Editors choice award, because both companies have delivered a product and service that is dependable and reliable. At $199 with a 2 year contract, It is one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest, Smartphone on the market.

The Pantech Duo is available at all at&t wireless stores and online at http://www.attwireless.com. For more information about the Pantech Duo visit: http://www.pantechduo.com/ .

T-Mobile has a huge Black Friday deal. From November 23rd through the 25th, if you sign up with T-Mobile and get a MyFaves plan you will also get one free round trip ticket to New York, NY, Orlando, FL,Boston, MA, Atlanta, GA, Chicago, IL, Washington, D.C., Miami, FL, Los Angeles, CA, Las Vegas, Nv, Dallas, TX. It gets even better, if you sign up for a Family MyFaves plan you will get two tickets. For more information visit: http://www.t-mobilefreeflight.com/

So take your family on a vacation on T-Mobiles tab.

If you are a current T-mobile customer and are jelouse of this promotion, don’t feel left out, visit: http://www.t-mobilewinaflight.com/ and enter for a chance to win 1 of 5,000 round trip tickets.

Today SANYO announced that its sleek S1 mobile phone will be available for Sprint via RadioShack and select retailers starting today, the phone will be available at Sprint Stores and Online starting in January.

The SANYO S1 has a sexy yes sophisticated look to it and has a satin like feel to it, so its great to go clubbing with. It also only 11mm thick and only weights 2.5 ounces.

So how much will the phone cost? Well minus instant rebates and a 2 year contract free. So not only doe sit look good it’s free.

Here is a break down of the pricing; $220 MSRP; Less $150 with 2-year contract; Less $70 instant savings.

Listed below are some features for the phone:
PRODUCTIVITY
• Sprint Vision® enabled
• Integrated Bluetooth® Wireless Technology
• High-quality speakerphone
• Text and SMS Voice Messaging
• Voice-activated dialing
• T9 Text Input
• Phone as Modem capable
• Wireless Backup
• Parental Controls restrict calls and limit access to Vision services
• Built-in productivity tools including a calendar, scheduler, to-do list, world clock, calculator, stopwatch and alarm clock
• Internal phone book holds up to 200 entries each storing six numbers for a total of 500 numbers and up to 400 email and 200 Web addresses
• 2.5mm universal jack accommodates most standard headsets

ENTERTAINMENT AND PERSONALIZATION
• Downloadable screen savers, ring tones, applications and games
• Customizable favorites menu

SPECIFICATIONS
• Dimensions: 4.4” x 1.8” x 0.4”
• Weight: 2.5 ounces
• Display: 1.0” x 1.3” 65K color TFT LCD (128x160)
• Micro USB connectivity (cable available optionally)
• Standard rechargeable Lithium (LiIon) battery provides up to 3.5 hours continuous talk time

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