Verizon has unilaterally updated user Storm 2 BlackBerries and other smartphones so that their browser search boxes can only be used with Microsoft Bing.

The move is part of the five-year search and advertising deal Verizon signed with Microsoft in January for a rumored $500m.

The search boxes previously allowed searches via Google and on other websites like Dictionary.com. Yes, affected users can still visit the actual sites and search from there—going to Google.com on their mobile browsers for instance—but they’re rightfully pissed.

Ah well, I guess that five-year deal was too good to pass up, though The Register did report on Google trying to reach a similar agreement with Verizon.

And, in other news, Anticitizen on Flickr brought his new Droid (bought for $200) back to the shop for repairs. The battery was loose, so what did the Verizon rep do? Plaster a Verizon-branded tape on the back to secure the battery:

Now you’ve given iPhone users—with their non-removable batteries—more reason to turn their noses up and start harrumphing. Thanks a lot Verizon!

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As you can see, the N900 benefits from its powerful ARM processor, handling multiple apps with ease. I just wonder though what took Nokia so long to integrate threaded SMS functionality into one of its phones. At least they went all they way with implementation, using a slick and smoothly animated interface to help users navigate between various message threads, and other active applications.

My only concern, after around half an hour of use, is that the N900 is simply too big as a phone. I encountered a little difficulty typing, worried that the relatively lumpy unit would slip from my hand and crash to the ground. In any case, the N900 designed to be used exclusively in landscape mode, and definitely isn’t made for the phone-only market. Pictures of the gadget from various angles follow:

Are you planning to get an N900? Personally I find it a bit too big for my taste, but based on my sneak peek, this is a very powerful gadget with immense potential.

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Here’s the price: $199 unlocked in stores. $100 rebate online if you have an active and old Google account. That $100 rebate is either to buy it $99 online from Google’s online phone store, for using on Android Marketplace or for using on any Google Checkout stores. Can also be used for T-Mobile or AT&T pre-paid Data SIM card service at $29 per month, no contracts required.

From Reuters:

The phone, manufactured by HTC, has a number of code names such as HTC Passion, Dream or Nexus One and could be available directly though the Google website as early as January 5, according to the source.

Nothing’s definite yet. Until we actually see an official announcement from an official Google rep, I won’t bother adding to the rumor pool. What’s clear though is that this development will potentially leave other manufacturers and operators who’ve jumped on the Android OS bandwagon out in the cold. If the $199 unlocked price tag is true, why would you bother locking yourself to a two-year contract then?

I just hope that Google plans to make the Nexus One available worldwide. If they’re really pushing a mobile free from the restrictions of traditional service provider plans or lock-ins, I’d like to see the geography barrier fall as well.

What do you think? Do the rumors above hold any truth? I’m pretty loaded gadget-wise, and won’t spend in that regard for Christmas anyway, so it’s a wait-and-see game for me.

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Unfortunately, the N97 mini’s battery is simply too weak for a high-end phone. It’s nowhere near the hilariously short battery lifespan of the original N95, but the 1200mAh BL-4D simply doesn’t provide enough juice to use the phone for an appreciable amount of time. The N97 mini will require daily recharging, especially for power users. 1200mAh is plenty to be sure, but it seems like the phone is less frugal with power.

This drawback is glaring enough that I’d actually like Nokia to come out with the N97 mini 2 as soon as possible, the top priority of this desired project figuring out how to cram the N97’s 1500mAh BP-4L battery into the mini’s handier form factor—while still keeping the complete feature set that made the N97 a winner in my book, and the slight tweaks that makes the N97 mini better than the original.

As for new N97 mini owners, keep your fingers crossed. Let’s hope this phone reaches critical mass, enough for third-party suppliers or Nokia itself to come out with an extended battery kit, complete with a bulging backplate necessary to cover such a power pack’s necessarily increased thickness.

In any case, the Nokia N97 mini is available from Buy.com and NewEgg.com:

From Buy.Com ($500)

NewEgg.com ($480)

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Hi All,

Sharing with you an article below… always good to get a little reminder!

Everyone take care and God bless…

As some of you may know, we had a pretty scary incident recently. Attached are pictures of what remains of our 2007 Suburban. We are all okay but I wanted to warn everyone not to make the same mistake I did.

This fire resulted from leaving an Iphone charger/docking station plugged into the car outlet. It overheated and started a fire, while parked in the garage. PLEASE unplug anything you have in your car outlet once you turn off your car!

We were VERY fortunate that we accidentally found the fire, at 11.00 pm, before going to bed and before it spread to the house. None of our garage heat detectors or house fire alarms went off.

Feel free to pass this along to anyone you want. Better safe than sorry.

Here are the attached pictures below:

Have you received this email? Personally, I don’t really think that kind of damage was caused by a faulty charger. From the fire damage it looks like a battery combusting. Or did the faulty charger cause the battery to explode? Do recent cases of exploding iPhone batteries even have something to do with this? To the electronics engineers out there, feel free to share your knowledge and comment below.

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Just email branden -at- cellphones.ca (replace “-at-” with “@”) for more information. Here are some things the site requires:

Regular Contributor: 1-2 articles / how-to’s a week (ie. “10 Hottest Phones Under $10″, “A Look At The Richest Men in Mobile”, “The Complete Roundup of iPhone Clones”, “How to beat roaming charges while traveling abroad.”

Columnist: A weekly or monthly opinion column covering a mobile topic of your particular interests or expertise.

Phone Writeups: We need some help with short writeups for each phone that we add to our database. Those should be 1-3 paragraphs, not a review, rather a general overview of the device, who its designed for, etc. Think a Coles Notes version of wikipedia entries. Unbiased, concise but more consumer friendly.

What about compensation? More from Branden:

Payouts will depend on the length of the piece of course. Shorter blog posts and commentary will run between $5-10 per post. Longer length articles / features will run $15-$50. All will depend on the piece, the quality of writing and how big of role the individual takes on with our new site.

This opening looks intriguing enough; if my schedule wasn’t so full, I would’ve started pimping my articles on cellphones.ca on The Gadget Blog by now!

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What do you think of the ad? Verizon Wireless seems pretty confident about their wireless broadband network, so they’d better live up its claim of mobile net superiority! The Droid “Pretty” ad feels like a kick-ass answer to Apple’s “there’s an app for that” campaign, featuring witty and pithy messaging the Mac maker is known for. While personally appealing, I’m not really sure how the target market (geeks?) would react.

In any case, now I’m mindlessly trying my best to mimic the robotic “drrrooooidd” sound bite. Thanks Verizon!

(image from Wikipedia)

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“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” Palm CEO Ed Colligan, commenting on then-rumored Apple iPhone, 16 Nov 2006

“Apple is slated to come out with a new phone… And it will largely fail.” Michael Kanellos, CNET, 7 December 2006

“The only question remaining is if, when the iPod phone fails, it will take the iPod with it.” Bill Ray, The Register, 26 December 2006

“Apple will likely have a tough time convincing application vendors to build specialized clients for the iPhone until the volumes are there, and the volumes could be limited by the lack of third-party applications – a Catch 22.” Jack Gold, J. Gold Associates, 10 January 2007

“The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks.” Matthew Lynn, Bloomberg, 15 January 2007

“Five hundred dollars? Fully subsidized, with a plan? It is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard which makes it not a very good email machine… So, I, I kinda look at that and I say, well, I like our strategy. I like it a lot.” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 17 January 2007

I am not sure how it will stand against Sprint’s Wimax (when it successfully launches) and its phones, which I am looking forward much more than over-hyped Apple iPhone.” Bhaskar Chitraju, Indews Broadcast, 18 January 2007

“iPhone may well become Apple’s next Newton.” David Haskin, Computerworld, 26 February 2007

“Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone… What Apple risks here is its reputation as a hot company that can do no wrong. If it’s smart it will call the iPhone a ‘reference design’ and pass it to some suckers to build with someone else’s marketing budget. Then it can wash its hands of any marketplace failures… Otherwise I’d advise people to cover their eyes. You are not going to like what you’ll see.” John C. Dvorak, 28 March 2007

Let’s take a break, and a trip down memory lane, back to January 9, 2007:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.” Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, 30 April 2007

“How do they deal with us?” Ed Zander, Motorola CEO/Chairman 10 May 2007

“Apple begins selling its revolutionary iPhone this summer and it will mark the end of the string of hits for the company.” Todd Sullivan, Seeking Alpha, 15 May 2007

“What does the iPhone offer that other cell phones do not already offer, or will offer soon? The answer is not very much… Apple’s stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008 seems ambitious.” Laura Goldman, LSG Capital, 21 May 2007

“We Predict the iPhone will bomb. Which means that when the iPhone comes, Digg will likely be full of horror stories from the poor saps who camped out at their local AT&T store, only to find their purchase was buggier than a camp cabin.” Seth Porges, The Futurist, 7 June 2007

“The forthcoming (June 29) release of the Apple iPhone is going to be a bigger marketing flop than Ishtar and Waterworld combined. Because its designers forgot Platt’s First, Last, and Only Law of User Experience Design (“Know Thy User, for He Is Not Thee”), that product is going to crash in flames. Sell your Apple stock now, while the hype’s still hot. You heard it here first.” David S. Platt, Suckbusters!, 21 June 2007

“God himself could not design a device that could live up to all the hype that the iPhone has gotten.” Harvard computer science professor David Platt, 25 June 2007

I guess it pays to make professional-sounding predictions. Those prophesies embellished with colorful metaphors made me cringe even more. Again, to be fair, this is all about hindsight, and the smugness it confers. Also, I can’t imagine Steve Ballmer cheering Apple on anyway—nor Palm actively trying to make the Pre work with Apple’s iTunes.

See Also: The iPod Dealt With a Lot of Hate During It’s Debut

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First, Verizon redesigns the phone’s interfaces to make it easier for users to accidentally access the operator’s data services:

Here’s how it works. They configure the phones to have multiple easily hit keystrokes to launch ‘Get it now’ or ‘Mobile Web’—usually a single key like an arrow key. Often we have no idea what key we hit, but up pops one of these screens. The instant you call the function, they charge you the data fee. We cancel these unintended requests as fast as we can hit the End key, but it doesn’t matter; they’ve told me that ANY data–even one kilobyte–is billed as 1MB. The damage is done.

And yes, as you’ve read, the operator data billing units are 1MB. So even if you download a measly byte, you end up with a $1.99 on your bill. Even worse, a Verizon employee reveals that the so-called “blocking” solution will not prevent from getting charged for data:

Now, you can ask to have this feature blocked. But even then, if you one of those buttons by accident, your phone transmits data; you get a message that you cannot use the service because it’s blocked–BUT you just used 0.06 kilobytes of data to get that message, so you are now charged $1.99 again!

The employee goes on to claim that this approach entirely legal, but definitely not ethical. I definitely agree: who doubles a 2-year contract pre-termination charge (from $175 to $350) anyway?

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Your phones have always looked good LG, and that’s why you’ve managed to overtake Motorola in worldwide phone shipments a couple of years ago. Now that you have the beachhead, it’s time to start appealing beyond the superficial tastes of the consumer.

Anyways, here we go!

Tell us about the experience of creating the LG GD900 Crystal. How did you come up with an idea of transparent phone?

We started toying with the idea in 2005 and later the concept won the Presidential Design Award at the Korea Industrial Design Exhibition in 2006. At the lab, we are always examining new designs and always on the lookout for something that would stand out from the rest. Ironically, we created a ”stand-out” phone by making it transparent!

Transparency is one motif that many designers around the world have experimented with at one time or another. It’s like invisibility – the holy grail for designers because we’re essentially working with something that’s almost invisible. But the challenge is also a reward because we’re not constrained by the barrier of a shell or covering. Once the opaque skin is stripped away, the interior is exposed, creating a kind of emotional connection.

There are a few transparent concept products from other manufacturers. What is it that distinguishes the LG GD900 Crystal that your team has developed?

Everything else we’ve seen are prototypes at the conceptual stage whereas this handset is now just a few weeks from being in the hands of an end-user. Other transparent products have never made it this far and usually have ended up as experimental design concepts that end up in a museum or design studio.

The real challenge of creating the LG GD900 wasn’t that the transparent design had to be attractive but that the handset itself had to function no differently than any other premium mobile phone. Consumer insights, which play a big role in how we approach handset design, have shown time after time that design and style are important but unlikely to be accepted by the masses unless the functionality is all there. Even fashion-conscious customers want a good lens on their camera for those important photos and clear sound even when they’re on the subway.

Did you have any difficulty developing the design of the LG GD900 Crystal?

One challenge we had to overcome is that consumers want big screens but they don’t want big handsets. So on the GD900 Crystal we expanded the touch screen functionalities to the touchpad itself. We adopted an inner slide system utilizing a gapless rail support mechanism to achieve the simple look. The final challenge was making the electric circuitry invisible which was achieved with the help of a layer of touch-sensitive film. We achieved all these breakthroughs and still managed to keep the thickness to a slim 13.5 millimetres.

Advances in design are often driven by the development of new materials. What new materials were used in the creation of the LG GD900 Crystal?

We’ve used many kinds of materials on other models that have turned out to be successful and popular with consumers who want a different look. This is easier said than done, as the right materials also have to have the right look and feel. For LG Shine, we used a full metallic body, first ever used on a mobile phone; and for LG Secret, the initial concept was a “style that lasts” and we used premium materials of tempered glass and carbon fibre. For GD900 Crystal, it’s made of a highly durable tempered glass and is framed and reinforced by a band of Liquidmetal, a relatively new material that designers are looking into that is very strong and quite shock-absorbent.

Tell us your outlook for transparent consumer products.

Transparency is another form of invisibility. It’s something that everyone fantasizes about but until now, that’s all it’s been. The fact that we can now make devices for daily use that are, for the lack of a better word — “invisible” — is significant because we are no longer constrained by a solid “barrier” in design. It’s like a window that is also an input device — it’s revolutionary. We’re excited about what the future holds in the next generation of “design transparency”.

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