Nokia’s Ovi service was originally a simple photosharing system that took emailed, uploaded, and MMSed images from your phone or computer and put them online. Fair enough. Now, however, Nokia is adding some compelling features to the online suite to make it considerably more usable for personal and enterprise PIM and sharing purposes.

The first and most important update is their file sharing system. After installing the Nokia Ovi Suite on your PC or laptop – it doesn’t work with Mac although there is some talk this will be remedied – you can visit all of your files remotely via a browser on your phone or on another computer. You can preview and download any file – from documents to your CONFIG.SYS file – and upload files to your computer. Obviously you have to have your computer on to do this, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

[svgallery name="ovi"]

Ovi also as improved PIM functionality and can bring your calendars and contacts to the website where you can edit and sync with almost any Nokia phone. The service also has improved music and N-Gage game access.

These additions are clearly part of a move by Nokia to make casual users think of Symbian as a smartphone operating system rather than just something that Nokia happens to have on their phones. With casual smartphone use on the rise, sync has become the number one sticking point with most users and Nokia has long had a fairly anemic sync system.

320×240 Internal and external displays
OS 4.6
Large SureType keyboard
Built-in Wi-Fi
2-megapixel camera
Enhanced media player
3.5mm headphone jack
external microSD/SDHC card
HTML browser
Available in Red and Black

Now all of you corporate types who carry around a BlackBerry and flip phone can have the best of both worlds. I know you’re out there because I see you on the streets of Manhattan every single day.

Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ:RIMM)(TSX:RIM) today unveiled the BlackBerry® PearlTM Flip 8220 smartphone, the first BlackBerry® phone to come in the popular flip form factor.

The new BlackBerry Pearl Flip provides flip phone fans with all the power of a BlackBerry smartphone in a fun and familiar design. One quick flip of the handset opens up a world of possibilities with the industry’s leading mobile messaging solution and a wide range of impressive Internet and multimedia capabilities, all in one powerful yet approachable smartphone. You can send a message to your friends or family, make a call, browse the web, snap a picture, watch a video or listen to your favorite song. It’s all in your control with a simple flip.

The quad-band EDGE based BlackBerry Pearl Flip smartphone presents a sophisticated look with a sleek design and a chrome-finished frame surrounding its smooth, luminescent face. Packed with an abundance of powerful features, it weighs only 3.6 ounces and measures approximately 3.9″ x 1.9″ x 0.7″. Featuring two high-resolution, light-sensing color displays, the external LCD makes it easy to preview incoming emails, text messages and phone calls without opening the handset, while the large, 240 x 320 internal LCD displays messages, videos and web pages with impressive detail and contrast.

“The popularity of BlackBerry smartphones has grown tremendously around the world and the introduction of this exciting new flip phone will help extend the reach of the BlackBerry platform even further,” said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO, Research In Motion. “The BlackBerry Pearl Flip is a full-featured smartphone with a unique and friendly design and it is a natural choice for flip phone users who want to start doing more with their phone than just talk.”

FIRST CLASS PHONE

The BlackBerry Pearl Flip smartphone is a top of the line mobile phone that flips open and cradles the face naturally and comfortably during phone calls. It delivers exceptional voice quality and includes many premium phone features, including Speaker Independent Voice Recognition (SIVR) for Voice Activated Dialing (VAD), support for mp3 ring tones, smart dialing, conference calling, speed dialing, call forwarding, voicemail attachment playback and enhanced background noise cancellation. It also features a speakerphone and Bluetooth® 2.0 for use with hands-free headsets, stereo headsets, car kits and other Bluetooth peripherals such as a GPS receiver. The removable/rechargeable 900 mAhr battery provides four hours of talk time and over 14 days of standby time.

MESSAGING POWERHOUSE

Featuring a large SureType® QWERTY(i) keyboard that makes typing messages and dialing numbers fast and easy, the BlackBerry Pearl Flip, like all BlackBerry smartphones, provides integrated access to the industry leading BlackBerry wireless services. Users are able to easily access up to 10 supported personal and work email accounts, send and receive text and instant messages, and connect on popular social networking sites with friends, family and co-workers. The DataViz® Documents to Go® software suite is also preloaded, allowing users to edit Microsoft® Word, Excel and PowerPoint files directly on the handset. The BlackBerry Pearl Flip is supported on BlackBerry® Internet Service, BlackBerry® Unite!, BlackBerry® Professional Software and BlackBerry® Enterprise Server, which provides tight integration with corporate email systems and the security and IT policy controls that enterprise customers require to confidently allow smartphones in their organization.

MULTIMEDIA TO GO

With an advanced media player for displaying pictures, listening to music and watching videos, the BlackBerry Pearl Flip is the perfect on-the-go entertainment center. Videos play smoothly on the large internal display, playlists can be managed directly on the handset and there’s an equalizer with 11 preset filters – including “Lounge”, “Jazz” and “Hip Hop” – for customizing audio ranges when using headphones or external speakers. The BlackBerry Pearl Flip works with the new BlackBerry® Media Sync application that makes it easy to sync iTunes digital music collections with the smartphone(iii) and it also features a conveniently accessible microSD/SDHC memory card slot that supports up to 16GB(ii) for plenty of storage. High Speed USB 2.0 support allows files to be quickly transferred between a desktop computer and the smartphone and the BlackBerry® Desktop Manager software includes Roxio® Media Manager for BlackBerry® to help users easily manage their music and video files. Roxio Photosuite® 9 LE is also included for creating photo albums and editing pictures.

FULL FEATURED FLIP

The BlackBerry Pearl Flip packs an impressive range of features into its compact design, including phone, email, messaging, organizer, browser and multimedia applications, and it can also support thousands of other mobile lifestyle and business applications. It features a 2 megapixel camera with flash, zoom and video recording(iv) to capture memories while on the move, and includes BlackBerry Maps to deliver maps and step-by-step driving directions quickly and easily. An enhanced HTML browser displays web pages beautifully in either “Column View” or “Page View” and different emulation settings allow users to choose between desktop-style HTML content and the mobile version of web pages. The browser also supports RTSP for watching online streaming video from sites like m.youtube.com. In addition, the BlackBerry Pearl Flip smartphone features built-in Wi-Fi® (802.11 b/g) with support for UMA (unlicensed mobile access), extending wireless email and data coverage and supporting carrier enabled voice calls over home Wi-Fi networks, enterprise wireless deployments and Wi-Fi hotspots.

ACCESSORIES

The BlackBerry Pearl Flip comes with a variety of accessories including a stereo headset, travel charger and USB cable. Additional accessories for BlackBerry smartphones, including holsters and totes, charging pods, premium earphones, Bluetooth headsets and the BlackBerry® Remote Stereo Gateway are available through retail outlets or online at www.shopblackberry.com.

AVAILABILITY

The BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 smartphone will be available from wireless carriers around the world beginning this fall. The BlackBerry Pearl Flip will be available in the United States exclusively from T-Mobile beginning this fall. Specific availability and pricing details will be announced at a later date.

For more information please visit www.BlackBerryPearl.com

T-Mobile USA customers can check out more details about this new flip phone and register to be notified when the BlackBerry Pearl Flip is available at www.BlackBerry.com/T-MobileBlackBerryPearlFlip

At CES we had the Blounge™ , which was nice and spacious. It also provided us the luxury of not having to deal with other media or lack of Internet connectivity. Microsoft provided a much fancier Blounge™ at Macworld, but security wasn’t as tight and some random weirdos managed to sneak in and the general public viewed us like we were wild animals. Thanks to Samsung, we had ourselves a media lounge in which to set up camp during the show.

Doug and I enjoyed the simple pleasure of having a room in Samsung’s ginormous booth where we could kick back and crank out some CTIA goodness. The lounge was open to all media, but thankfully not that many knew about it. Samsung Mobile kept us comfortable and well fed throughout the show. Plush office chairs allowed us to cool off our puppies or take a quick cat nap. Every day we were met with various beverages, sandwiches, cookies, chips, fruit and ice cream. Doug really, really liked the ice cream. We didn’t have to bother with Wi-Fi here. Power surges, a fancy HDTV and DVD player were provided as well as having the chance to rub elbows with some other journo’s and bloggers. Others should take note and offer the same thing at other shows.

Just returned from a meeting with Velocity Mobile. The 103 and 111 are impressive devices in their own right, but what VM wants to do with Windows Mobile is even more impressive. They don’t want to put a top layer over it with something flashy, which others have done and failed at a number of times. I’m excited to see the finalized version in a few weeks when we get the devices in for review.

What I can tell you right now is that they’ll eventually have a OS X-like dock that pops up from the bottom whenever you need your list of favorite apps. The current version of the OS is just a hint at what VM has in mind for Windows Mobile. All VM employees have worked with every iteration of WinMo since its inception in one capacity or another. Their goal is to make it less crappy and more user friendly. I hope they succeed because the hardware is pretty nice and I really like the all black finish.

Here’s something that excites me greatly. It’s a prototype of a tiny projector that fits inside of a cell phone. Jim Hallas of Texas Instruments’ DLP group gave me a brief overview of the chipset and here’s some brief information along with my thoughts;

The chipset is ready to go. It’s up to device manufacturers to integrate it into their products. I’d think that we’d see these things popping up pretty soon. The chipset is designed to be very low power but TI can’t comment on how much extra power you’d need because it’ll vary depending on which types of devices are used.

In a well lit room, the projected images and videos can be blown up to about the size of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. In a darkened room, it can do between 30 and 60 inches. The implications of this type of chipset extend far beyond cell phones. I lustfully imagine a “headless” laptop that projects the screen onto your wall. Very nice.

It’s interesting that there is so much noise being made about every revision of every model of every phone out there. Why do we bother? Phones have been the same for years, and they’re perfect. The amount of improvement possible is infinitesimal, especially when compared with the fanfare accompanying every press release. We’ve already reached the pinnacle of engineering and usability with the phones we have, so why bother trying to improve them?

Let’s take a look at why this is true. First of all, honestly, is your phone not small enough? I often lose my Samsung Trace in my wallet. My Helio Ocean could be a little thinner, but it’s being revised soon and really most of its functionality is still there in the remarkably small Mysto. But basically their form factors are flawless — to say nothing of the iPhone’s. And I already have both!

What are you hoping “next generation” phones will do? Rock you to sleep? Test for poison? A phone is a phone, and every service you could possibly want is already integrated into this generation of mobiles. You can call anyone in the world from wherever you are. You can check your email, send messages, order pizza, even watch porn. Many phones now have GPS built in, that was pretty much the last piece of the puzzle. Do you need an office suite on your phone? No. Do you need any games more complicated than Bejeweled or Tetris? No. Do you need an integrated taser? Maybe. But really, no matter how much stuff you pack in there, it will never make you as cool as Michael Douglas, and he was phone-cool back when when “bricking” phones meant getting some mortar and building a house with them.

A lot of people are pumped for the big cameras in newer phones. The next generation will have five megapixels! Joy! Of course, the lens is the same one you’d find on a $6 disposable so your pictures will look just as good. And have fun viewing them on a small screen made for showing numbers. The PMP aspect of phones has reached its peak as well; the iPod Touch is a great little gadget, but it’s incompatible with the growing presence of HD. Unless you’ve got yourself one of these, you’re not getting the color and resolution you deserve.

By the way, don’t forget that every useless feature you gain, be it torrent downloading, video wallpaper, or Wi-max capability, every single thing is providing another drain on the battery. And I think we’ve all seen Moore’s law and the convergence trend overtake battery technology. My Trace will last for days and days without a charge. Can you say the same about your iPhone? Just wait for the 3G version or the new Instinct to turn in some honest battery usage reports. You’re going to spend more time tethered to an outlet than actually using the thing.

Seriously. All these people are getting excited over microscopic improvements, or over features they won’t use or will only be able to use for an hour before they’re out of juice. Current phones are tiny, durable, and last forever. The fantasy phones people seem to want can’t be smaller, can only get more fragile, and will die in hours. Everything you need from your phone is in the phone you have in your pocket right now, or at the very most, is available at the your local mobile retailer for a bill or two. And everyone at CTIA and all the other summits, conferences, and trade shows is part of the problem. Stop glorifying this excess. The phones are all right!

Yes, I know, the pac-phone in the top picture is an advanced Linux-based smart phone. But it looks old school if you squint. How come GIS has no side views of old clamshells?

[Shakes head disapprovingly]

CrunchGear.com — your most trusted source for political news — brings you the Day Three keynote from the CTIA Wireless 2008 conference. Today’s speakers are the honorable Fred Thompson and the equally-honorable John Edwards.

9:30 – The lights have gone down and some inspirational softcore techno music is thumping. If it was a stock music file, it’d be called “Driving Glory” or something like that.

9:33 – President and CEO of CTIA, Steve Largent takes the stage and welcomes everyone, saying that it’s been an incredible week. Clearly he wasn’t at Blush in the Wynn hotel the other night. That bar was NOT incredible. I don’t care for very loud gangsta rap and super expensive domestic beer.

9:40 – A video of consumers is playing — people talking about how they don’t want to pay extra taxes for wireless service.

9:41 – John Edwards takes the stage. Makes some funny remarks about traveling after running for president. “If everyone I met that told me they were for me had actually been for me, I wouldn’t be here right now.” Everyone laughs. His hair looks great.

9:43 – Asks the audience to raise our hands if we can a) tell the difference between Obama and Clinton’s health care plan, b) the difference between Clinton and Obama and McCain’s health care plan, and some other examples. His point is that the media doesn’t cover this stuff — the media covers the “horse race”.

9:46 – Says YouTube is a good thing. People use it to watch campaign speeches. Wireless is good too because it offers non-stop access to candidates. It also changes how campaigns are funded. He cites that when he ran, people could text the word “hope” to a certain number to join his supporters. It democratizes the process instead of having campaigns funded by a few people with a ton of money.

9:50 – We have a lot of work to do as far as educating the public on political issues. Wireless is good because it can inform people and get them motivated to vote.

9:52 – Everything is connected. The notion that healthcare and foreign policy and the economy are separate issues is wrong. They’re all connected. Population growth and interconnectedness is important too. Things that happen in China affect us, etc. America has got to lead the way on environmentalism. Whatever we do won’t matter, though, unless the rest of the world joins us because everything is connected.

9:54 – Impoverished nations need the technological tools to support themselves economically. Talks about Africa but says that it affects other places as well. We have to be the leaders — need to step up to the plate and lead.

9:57 – Says thank you and leaves the stage. Here comes Fred Thompson.

10:00 – Thompson makes some jokes. “I was at a craps table last night and though to myself ‘I haven’t been amongst this many losers since my last presidential debate.’” People laugh. “People gave me bad advice while campaigning…they told me to be myself…that’s exactly why I’m standing before you today instead of campaigning.”

10:03 – Talks about the campaign process. Says it’s easy to criticize, so let’s do that. The process is too long. You need to start campaigning as a junior in high school. It also helps to be born rich. People laugh. I enjoy his smart-looking suit.

10:05 – Re-emphasizes what Edwards said about the media covering the horse race instead of the actual issues. It prevents people from joining the process — both potential candidates and voters.

10:06 – I begin to get the sinking feeling that this event has very little to do with wireless, technology, gadgets, or anything that’s normally featured on CrunchGear.

10:07 – My chin stops quivering as Thompson starts talking about technology. Talks about technology’s downside as it relates to sophisticated weaponry that our enemies are able to build. He then talks about how this generation is bankrupting the next generation because of technology allowing people to grow much older.

10:10 – Talks about the cynicism of the American people. People have no confidence in their leaders. We need credibility in our leadership. Says John McCain is the greatest comeback since Lazarus. Nowadays people are looking more for personal qualities and less at party affiliation. The pendulum should naturally be swinging back towards the democrats this election, yet McCain is ahead of Obama and Clinton.

10:15 – Thinks that technology is good for politics as far as keeping up with everything. When you get off the bus, you’re expected to know what happened on the other side of the world within the last twenty minutes and have a comment about it.

Says something very interesting. “You’d think that with all this technology, campaigning would be shorter.” Everything’s so much more condensed and instant, yet campaigning gets longer and longer.

10:17 – Thompson is done talking. Now it’s time for Q and A.

Q: Who are your political heroes?

Edwards – Bobby Kennedy.

Thompson – Howard Baker.

Q: How has the 24-hour news cycle affected the political process?

Thompson – You have to watch what you say at all times. There’s nothing worse than a writer facing dead air that needs to file a story. Controversy is the name of the game.

Edwards – It creates an imperative that there be fighting and controversy. You’d expect that a 24-hour news cycle would result in a more informed electorate but it mostly results in fighting.

It’s amazing to see how bloggers have affected the mainstream media. Most bloggers are out ahead of mainstream media and as a result, candidates check blogs first thing in the morning before they check regular news outlets. [Dismissive laughter from the Star-Belly Sneetches present from the mainstream media outlets.]

It’s fascinating to see how bloggers are able to leverage technology to the extent that it puts them out ahead of mainstream media.

10:30 – All done. Pretty short Q and A.

Did a little fondling of a prototype device from Qualcomm that’ll be hitting the market soon at under $300. It’s basically a super beefed-up Windows Mobile machine similar in size to the Nokia N810 (and with a QWERTY keyboard to match). The big feature is the 1GHz processor that it’ll have and its ability to play HD movies.

Devices like this will be here the second half of this year. Hit the jump for more specs.

Form Factor
• Pocket-sized communication, entertainment and navigation device
• Day long battery life

Ubiquitous Connectivity
• Seamless connectivity through WWAN, Wi-Fi  and/or Bluetooth technology

Productivity and Internet
• All in one light weight pocket size device — phone, GPS, browsing, connectivity, Mobile TV
• View and edit spreadsheets, documents, movies, maps, etc.
• Stay “connected” to social networks, IM, video and chat
• Integrated camera and video

Content and Location Services
• Built in GPS provides “personalized” location-based content
• Allows viewing of streaming and locally stored high definition (HD) content Target Market
• Consumer—Mature & young adults, tech savvy

This video is unedited, so my apologies for the inclusion of any unwanted extra footage, but I wanted to get it up ASAP.

I just sat in on a Yahoo! press conference here at CTIA and learned a little more about the company’s plans to integrate its “oneSearch 2.0″ features into mobile phones. The three key elements that Yahoo! is emphasizing are an open development platform, easier ways to search, including voice queries, and idle screen search integration.

Sounds like a thrill-ride, yes? Buckle up and let’s get things underway.

Open Development

Like everyone else in the civilized wireless word, Yahoo! is keen on the whole “open” thing. Developers will be able to use the Yahoo! API to tap into search algorithms designed to return more relevant results. For example, if you were to search for Italian restaurants in a certain area, you’d get a list of nearby joints but you might also get data from online reservation websites that are hooked up to those restaurants so you could quickly make reservations.

There will also be a monetization system in place for developers so that their hard work doesn’t go unrewarded.

Easier Ways to Search

The big feature here will be voice-enabled queries powered by a company called vlingo. Yahoo! is now a major investor in the company and has exclusive rights to its voice technology. There’s a preview for BlackBerry users available here. It looks pretty straightforward; you hold down the call key and tell it what you’re looking for. Sounds easy enough. Apparently vlingo is able to intelligently work with natural speech so that, for instance, saying “N-C-double-A” will result in NCAA items.

There’s also a predictive text feature, should you choose to go the old fashioned route and type things in by hand, along with contextual recommendations — like if you were to search for Apple, it’d try to pare down your results by recommending iPhone search results, Apple stock results, or Apple computer results. Stuff like that.

Yahoo! executive vice president of Connected Life, Marco Boerries mentioned that proximity-based search results are in the pipeline as well. It’ll be a manually-configured feature that’ll allow you to use GPS, cell tower triangulation, or nearby ISP routing to hone in on your location.

Idle Screen Search

Idle screen searching basically entails a Yahoo! Search box being placed on the Windows Mobile Home Screen, for instance. The idea is to be able to launch a search without first opening a web browser.

It’s a pretty simple idea in theory but Yahoo! has had to do a lot of work to get device manufacturers and mobile operating system developers to include its search bar in the idle areas of their products or at least develop versions that end-users can install that are compatible with the myriad of mobile devices currently on the market.

It’s expected to roll out soon — Q2 of this year.

I hadn’t anticipated this becoming a live blog so you’ll have to excuse the unruly nature in which this post has turned into.

Invest more than 18 billion to expansion over past 3 years. made acquisitions to expand footprint including Dobson and edge

Technology roadmap
28 megabits per second over LTE and HSPA R7

Over 10k wifi hotspots up to 17k with starbucks by end of 2008

PGA Masters: live feed to your phones. u-verse on-demand content for tv, blue room online

MediaFLO
two exclusive channels: cnn and sony pictures
more devices coming

pro-rate earlier termination fee
$175 early termination fee goes down $5 a month for new customers and customers who are renewing contracts as of May 25th

AT&T to integrate Android into devices with their own applications

MediaFLO will be $15/month

The LG Vu will cost $299

The Samsung Access will be $199

Microsoft Surface rolls out April 17th (video of the demo coming soon)

All AT&T devices to be 3G in the coming months

3G iPhone is imminent (duh)

AT&T doesn’t want to compete with Sprint over pricing plans. Verizon is more important.

12 Surface units in each city on April 17th

You can remove all content from your previous device and swap to your new device from the Surface (this won’t be available at launch, but it’s a feature that’s coming soon)

AT&T not worried about WiMAX.

7.2 download speeds by end of year, early 2009

In case anyone is wondering what the exact difference between the older u740 from Verizon and the new Alias is I decided to snap some photos of the two versions. Like I said before, the keyboard buttons are just different colors, but I really dig the new silver finish.

The USB dongle from Sierra that was announced last month is surprisingly sturdy contrary to the opinion of one CG reader. It was being demoed on the MacBook Air and it was really, really tiny. We now know it will be available with Sprint. Price and launch are still up in the air.

The latest incarnation of the enV is quite nice. The enV2‘s exterior number pad is rather funky, but functional. The QWERTY keyboard is standard and basically a shrunk down version of the Voyager. It’s a cute phone that will most likely appeal to the ladies.

Yesterday we weren’t able to provide you with video of the Instinct’s Web browser due to an older model without a data plan, but we found one that did and here it is for your viewing pleasure.

Hey you guys. I have a bold statement. One that may shock and amaze the entire technology subculture made of blog readers, blog writers, and kids that surf our site looking for references to Miley Cyrus. And here it is.

This WiMAX thing might just catch on.

Yes, I said it. Can you believe it? It also might be “big” and whatever other buzzwords (like “big”) that the major media conglomerates want to slather across its deliciously fat techno-belly. But I digress. Take a look at the above video for more.

I won’t lie. I’m not all that impressed with the LG Vu. It’s about as craptacular as the LG Voyager. It’s a little more refined and cleaned up than the Voyager. It’s lightweight, but feels sort of chincy. The haptic touchscreen is nice, though. Maybe I’ll change my mind when we get one in for review. After all, four minutes isn’t enough time to see what the phone can really do, but MediaFLO is rockin’.

Hmm…Maybe he’s guarding this!

It’s a special edition Iron Man version of the Shine with real gold plating. It’s priced at $1,300, but you won’t be able to purchase one as they’re extremely limited and only available via giveaways.