Current #4 handset manufacturer Motorola revealed its first environmentally-friendly phone, the W233 Renew. Thanks to the magic of recycled plastic water bottles, the phone casing is 100% recyclable, and included in the retail package is a bonus: a postage-paid envelope so you can send it back to Motorola should it go out of style like the RAZR. Link

Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless decided that it wants a piece of the action - e-book action, that is. The phone carrier is apparently ready to provide the wireless network for some upcoming e-book reading devices competing with Amazon’s Kindle, but won’t reveal its partners. Reuters

Palm’s got a new device coming out. No, it’s not the Foleo II, it’s actually a usable device: a touch-screen smartphone. Problem is, it’s a little late. According to TechCrunch, the phone will feature a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and touch-screen. Quote by random analyst: “They have to come out with a new OS to make themselves relevant again. Their old OS is a geriatric case.” mocoNews

Sales of phones under Nokia’s Comes With Music service, and arguably the whole service itself, can be summed up in one quote: “OK, but not earth shattering.” This is according to an unknown source who also goes on to say that consumers aren’t exactly jumping on the pay-more-for-all-you-can-eat music downloading bandwagon since there’s a little something called…the Internet. Yahoo!

That’s it for this round. Come back next week for another week in review.

The attack requires a (email) message sent that contains an email address with a length greater than 32 characters, followed by a space. Depending on the target’s S60 version, one of two things will happen:

1) S60 2.6 and 3.0 (mostly oldschool Nseries phones, N80, N91, N92, N93/N93i, E65, E70, etc) will not be able to receive SMS or MMS messages until a factory reset.

2) S60 2.8 and 3.1 (N95, N95 8GB, E66, E71, 5700 XpressMusic, N81, etc) require 11 emails to be sent in this fashion. Then the target will still receive parts of SMS messages, but only if it’s one long message broken up into small pieces. Power cycling will barely help in this case - it’ll allow one more part to be received before the phone goes nuts. A factory reset will solve the problem.

Right now, there’s no user fix for the vulnerability. Network operators can defeat the attack by just ignoring messages with email addresses > 32 characters, but that doesn’t seem very likely.

The discovery of the attack was made by Tobias Engel, and he’s provided a nice list of phones affected. It’s quite large:

S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 (S60 3.1):
Nokia E90 Communicator
Nokia E71
Nokia E66
Nokia E51
Nokia N95 8GB
Nokia N95
Nokia N82
Nokia N81 8GB
Nokia N81
Nokia N76
Nokia 6290
Nokia 6124 classic
Nokia 6121 classic
Nokia 6120 classic
Nokia 6110 Navigator
Nokia 5700 XpressMusic

S60 3rd Edition, initial release (S60 3.0):
Nokia E70
Nokia E65
Nokia E62
Nokia E61i
Nokia E61
Nokia E60
Nokia E50
Nokia N93i
Nokia N93
Nokia N92
Nokia N91 8GB
Nokia N91
Nokia N80
Nokia N77
Nokia N73
Nokia N71
Nokia 5500
Nokia 3250

S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 3 (S60 2.8):
Nokia N90
Nokia N72
Nokia N70

S60 2nd Edition, Feature Pack 2 (S60 2.6):
Nokia 6682
Nokia 6681
Nokia 6680
Nokia 6630

Check out his page for the whole scoop, including an in-depth look at the vulnerability: Curse of Silence Advisory

A refurbished Plantronics 640E for $14.99. Deal?

So this Plantronics Discovery 630E Bluetooth headset used to be a cool $119.95. Now it’s refurbished and marked down to $14.99. Deal?

Even though it’s pretty cheap (even for a refurb), it’s got some decent features: 15 hours of talk time, a carrying case that can also charge the headset with an included AAA battery (also comes with an AC charger), and a weight of 9 grams. You also get a case and some extra ear tips. Not too shabby.

The Plantronics Discovery 610 is also available for the same price, and looks nearly identical to the 630E. Unfortunately the battery on the 610 is noticeably crappier (up to 6 hours only) and you don’t get the carrying case charger thingie. Waste of time!

Plantronics 640E Bluetooth Headset Refurbed for $14.99

Plantronics 610 Headset

Nokia 6208c: Stylus Smartphone.

In what is starting to become a yearly tradition, Nokia recently announced its latest stylus-driven smartphone, the 6208c. Heading to, you guessed it - China. Read the whole preview for a look at the 6208c’s fun features like a 3.2 megapixel camera and bamboo slip detachable stylus.

The 6208c continues the trend started by the Nokia 6708 and 6108 (no preview for the 6108, only a funky Chinese commercial, sorry) phones. The 6708 was the original Chi-lus phone and looked like this:

The 6708. A time-honored classic. Or not.

So let’s just say these handsets have come a long way from ye stylus phones of olde.

The design of the 6208c is supposed to have been inspired by Chinese ink stones. I don’t see it. I do, however, see something that looks just like the Nokia 6300, albeit a little squattier. Another surprise: the stylus, inspired by “bamboo slips,” looks like no stylus I’ve ever seen before:

The 6208c Stylus.

Also doubles as a bookmark. Actually, the cool part of the stylus’ design is that you can easily attach and detach it from the back of the phone.

Moving along, the 6208c does have some pretty standard Nokia camera features - 3.2 megapixels, dual-LED flash, 4x digital zoom (heh), expandable memory up to 8 GB.

Expect the Nokia 6208c to grace the Chinese market sometime in the first half of 2009.

The LG GD910: Watch + Touch-Screen Phone

Watch phones are just one of those cool, futuristic ideas that usually end up being completely unpractical in the real world. So of course I drooled all over LG’s latest creation, the GD910.

LG has done away with the old-school “calculator watch” button style in favor of just one small (1.43 inch) touch-screen with three buttons on the side. That’s good and bad. On one hand, the entire watch is fairly svelte (13.99 mm thin), so it doesn’t feel like you’re strapping a brick to your wrist. But now you have to deal with a tiny touch-screen, which could be a serious problem.

The GD910’s full set of features is pretty limited (as is getting any hard specs on it), but it’s definitely got the necessities: voice dialing, speech recognition, text-to-speech, Bluetooth, camera, and music player. And 7.2mbps HSDPA, apparently.

More details to come at CES 2009.

LG-GD910 wristwatch phone to debut at CES 2009 - UnwiredView

Nokia 8800 Gold Arte: 18 Carats of Pure Bling

Following in the footsteps of the Sapphire Arte and Carbon Arte, the Gold Arte brings 18 carats of the stuff along with “premium quality leather.” No pleather here!

Unfortunately, everything else - OLED screen, 3G, “tap for time”, 3.2 megapixel camera - is exactly the same as the previous iterations, and continues Nokia’s philosophy of “less is more” for the 8800 series.

It looks like Nokia also decided that the 8800 Gold Arte was above a mere press release, and dropped the phone onto Nokia web sites to be discovered by Random Bloggers. So price and availability are pretty much nonexistent. But keep in mind that the Carbon Arte retailed for 1100 Euro/$1623 USD and the Sapphire Arte went for 1150 Euro.

Nokia 6650: Not your average flip phone.

I recently received a Nokia 6650 as part of Nokia 6650 Chronicles, a cool little project documenting the daily lives of twenty bloggers, yours truly included.

The 6650 is what I’d call an enigma. It looks like your typical S40 AT&T budget phone, but in reality it’s a Symbian OS-powered, quad-band/3G connected smartphone with an integrated GPS.

As usual, a big thank you to WOMWorld for inviting me to the project and sending over the 6650. Thanks guys!

At first glance, the Nokia 6650 is a very unassuming flip phone. Personally I think the look is just a tad bit on the bland side and I don’t see it winning any style contests. But there’s a nice, weighty heft to the phone thanks to metallic covers on the front and back. It doesn’t feel cheap. It’s slightly smaller and thicker than the E66.

As I mentioned earlier, the 6650 runs Symbian 9.3, which initially was a surprise to me (I honestly expected another S40 phone), and menu navigation is pretty consistent with other S60 phones. The default theme has a nice background featuring a map of the USA, but it’s a bit too colorful for my taste.

The best part of the 6550, however, is the outer display. The phone allows you to run certain applications (camera, timer, stopwatch, and calendar, among others) on the front screen, controllable via three touch-sensitive buttons and volume keys which double as scroll up/down buttons. There’s a certain level of polish in the outer display’s menus that you don’t normally see in a Nokia flip, and it’s very easy to get used to.

Speaking of displays, the main one is a 2.2″ 240×320 pixel screen. Coming from a long line of Eseries and Nseries devices, it’s definitely on the small side.

Another nuance that I noticed after a quick run-through: the 6650 uses the damned 2.5mm stereo jack, so it loses a couple points there.

Finally, at $69.99 with a two-year agreement, the 6650 qualifies as a recession-ready budget phone. From what I’ve been able to glean after using the phone for a couple days, it’s far better than any other budget phone currently selling for that price.

1. Apple iPhone 3G
2. LG Incite
3. Nokia E71
4. Blackberry Storm
5. Blackberry Pearl Flip

Yep, the iPhone led the pack, as it does in most top five lists. The Nokia E71 got props for battery life (thanks in part to a 1500 mAh battery), as well as its “high-tech feel” and very usable keyboard. While I could see the Storm being in the top five despite its numerous initial bugs, the inclusion of the Incite and Pearl Flip in the list was quite a surprise.

Meanwhile, the Nokia N96 took an honorable mention award, as did the T-mobile G1. Er…huh?

MOST READ: Top 5 Cell Phones of 2008

DC-9 and DC-10: Now Retractable

Car chargers aren’t anything to write home about, but the latest Nokia DC-9 and DC-10 car chargers have at least one new ooh-aah feature: retractable cables. They also don’t look as boring as your typical 1990s-era Nokia car charger or as strange as some “other” car accessories (HF-35W Inner Tube).

The only difference between the two chargers are the end-plugs: the DC-9 carries the standard Nokia 2mm jack, while the DC-10 has a microUSB plug at the end. Unfortunately, while microUSB-charging might sound like a fun prospect, in reality there’s only a couple phones that support the feature:

Nokia 6500 Classic
Nokia 7900 Crystal Prism
Nokia 7900 Prism
Nokia 8600 Prism
Nokia 8800 Arte
Nokia 8800 Carbon Arte
Nokia 8800 Sapphire Arte
Nokia N85

Pricing for the DC-9 and DC-10s is standard Nokia “buck-wild” pricing. Each one will set you back 35 GBP, or $51 USD. Or, you could always opt for the low-tech non-retractable edition which should cost you somewhere in the $5 range now (estimated cost).

Phones that feature a built-in mobile TV receiver would be taxed a whopping 14%, while devices with integrated GPS chips would be hit with a cool 3.7% tax.

It’s not really hard to see that the tax would be a Bad Idea, at a time when consumers are spending less and mobile phone manufacturers are hurting. Granted, the number of phones with mobile TV are fairly limited, but the 14% tax will also definitely force the phone makers to raise prices everywhere to compensate. No winners here.

So who’s to blame for this debacle? Technically it’s Germany and the Netherlands, two member states that were planning on implementing similar measures in their home countries. Unfortunately for the other 25 nations in the EU, the European Commission decided that it was a great idea to spread the holiday cheer.

The good news is that the law is still in its early stages. The proposal was sent to the EU’s member states, which means at least six months of formal discussions before any real progress can be made.

EU mulls cellphone duty plan, industry irate