Michelle Maisto

iPhone and BlackBerry users now have a new, inexpensive option for placing international calls.Voice-over IP (VOIP) phone company Vonage has introduced Vonage Mobile, a free smartphone application for placing calls over cellular or Wi-Fi networks. The service is said to offer savings of more than 50 percent on calls to dozens of countries, compared with […]

Though not revealing pricing or an exact date, T-Mobile announced Oct. 5 that it will launch the Samsung Behold II in time for the holiday rush. The phone will be T-Mobile’s fourth to feature Android, Google’s popular open-source operating system.The announcement comes even before the arrival of T-Mobile’s No. 3 Android phone, the Motorola Cliq, […]

The Dell Latitude Z600, which went on sale Sept. 29, offers a feature sure to please users, and that may get it talked about, but that overall isn’t a game-changer, asserts an Oct. 1 report from researcher iSuppli.The Z600 features Latitude-On, which offers quick access to Web-based e-mail, contacts, calendars and other Internet content and […]

Never have mobile operating systems so roused the appetite. Google announced Sept. 15 that the SDK for Android 1.6, the newest version of its open-source mobile operating system, known as “Donut,” is now available for download.(Version 1.5 was known as “Cupcake,” and future versions are reportedly code-named ??½clair and Flan.) While many of the details […]

AdMob, which measures handset use rather than sales, by analyzing data from ad requests, impressions and clicks, served up its August smartphone OS data in a Sept. 30 report that points out both expected and noteworthy findings.The Apple iPhone OS’ share of the smartphone operating system worldwide market grew from 33 percent in February to […]

Don’t shed any tears for Windows Mobile, is the message of an Oct. 1 study from iSuppli. Though Palm recently announced it would discontinue using the Windows Mobile operating system on its smartphones, in favor of focusing on its own OS, webOS, and Motorola has been less of a help, with the “company’s shipments and […]

Lenovo’s Lost & Found service might more accurately be thought of as “return or find.” The free service, announced Oct. 1 and available later this month, is a complement to Lenovo’s paid, subscription-based service, both of which are focused on retrieving lost or stolen devices. Lost & Found is for the Good Samaritans among us […]

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the economic impact of a BlackBerry solution-that is, BlackBerry smartphones paired with BlackBerry Enterprise Server-within an enterprise. The results, published in September as “Economic Impact of a BlackBerry Solution in North American Enterprises,” are particularly good news for enterprises with employees in sales, field services […]

Customer satisfaction with smartphones and with the mobile carriers that support them are very separate sentiments, concludes a Sept. 30 study from CFI Group. Nowhere was the discrepancy found to be greater than between the iPhone and its exclusive operator, AT&T. In ranking customer satisfaction, CFI-like J.D. Power and Associates-found the iPhone to rate higher […]

TerreStar Networks, a company currently developing a satellite terrestrial mobile broadband network, announced Sept. 30 that it has entered into an agreement with AT&T “to bring to market the first fully integrated satellite cellular smartphone.”Called the TerreStar Genus, the dual-mode smartphone, which resembles a BlackBerry Curve, will run on the Windows Mobile operating system and […]