Best Buy announced they are partnering with U.K. retailer Carphone Warehouse to test mobile phone-only stores at nine locations in Manhattan. The stores to be called "Best Buy Mobile" will carry over 80 cell phones from manufacturers like Motorola Inc., Sony Ericsson and Samsung.

Shoppers also have the option to choose from seven mobile phone service carriers, which includes Cingular, Verizon, Sprint, Amp'd Mobile and pay-as-you-go plans from Virgin Mobile, Boost Mobile, Verizon InPulse and Cingular GoPhone.

Several months ago cell phone manufactures, Nokia, and Motorola have opened cell phone stores. Nokia opened its 2nd cell phone store in New York and its 1st store in Shanghai China last July. Motorola opened a cell phone store in Shanghai China. 

Sprint today announced it is improving mobile messaging for its customers with the launch of Sprint Mobile Email, a new downloadable email client powered by SEVEN.

The application provides easy access to multiple email accounts in one place. Users can access their accounts from well-known providers like AOL, Windows Live and Yahoo! all by using Sprint Mobile Email. Customers can also add other POP and IMAP email accounts to access through the service.

Sprint Mobile Email is available now for download at no additional charge to Sprint data subscribers on select Sprint and Nextel phones. Sprint expects to make the service available on additional phones in the future. With the service, Sprint customers can view each email account they have set up on a separate tab at the top of the screen.

By clicking each tab, the customer can view his or her inbox from that particular provider, as well as open, delete, reply to, forward and send emails.

The new BlackBerry® Pearl™ from Research In Motion will arrive on the shelves of select Cingular Wireless stores beginning tomorrow - just in time for the holiday shopping season - with an exclusive look and new features, including Cingular-exclusive Push to Talk (PTT) capabilities and a GPS-based wireless navigation service.  (Note: The Pearl is already available at T-Mobile.)

Customers can now enjoy the benefits of these new features for the BlackBerry Pearl together with easy-to-use phone, email, organizer and browser applications - all in an incredibly small, light and stylish handset.

The BlackBerry Pearl from Cingular operates on the nation's largest digital voice network - with the fewest dropped calls of any national wireless carrier - and Cingular's nationwideEDGE network, the largest national high-speed wireless data network in the U.S.

The BlackBerry Pearl is the first BlackBerry handset to come with a digital camera, multi-media capabilities and an expandable memory slot, while continuing to provide the full BlackBerry experience that is widely popular throughout the world. 

• VGA camera with flash
• Small lightweight camera flip phone
• Multimedia messaging - send photos, text & sound
• Customizable MP3 and Music Tone ringtones
• Changeable color face covers - blue included
• Instant messaging - AOL®, Yahoo!® & ICQ®
• Picture and ringtone caller ID
• Mobile email capable

Following YouTube's lead, Revver, Inc., (www.revver.com) the first marketplace for viral videos, today announced it will provide its user-generated and copyright-friendly video content directly to the mobile phones of Verizon Wireless V CAST subscribers. As part of the agreement, beginning in early December, Revver videos will be available to Verizon Wireless’ customers with V CAST-enabled handsets, including the Chocolate  and MOTOKRZR K1m.

The agreement marks a key milestone in Revver’s ongoing expansion and leadership in the viral video arena. Revver users can now generate revenue from their creative endeavors via broadband, broadcast and mobile distribution, an industry first.

Revenue sharing, the cornerstone of Revver’s business model, has been in place since 2005 when Revver became the first online video service to compensate users for sharing content online by splitting net revenue 50/50.

Comcast Corp. has become the first U.S. cable operator to take on telecommunications providers in the cell phone market, having begun marketing the service to consumers in Boston.  Comcast launched the service in Boston and Portland, Oregon, earlier this month after a year-long trial, but is only promoting its "mobile access" service with television commercials and direct-mail drops in the Boston metropolitan area.

Time Warner Inc.'s cable unit, the No. 2 U.S. cable operator, said it has made wireless services available to customers who request it in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Austin, Texas, and would start marketing in the cities in the first quarter of 2007 and to all of its other markets through the year.

Today, Opera Software introduces Opera Mini 3.0, the latest version of the award-winning mobile browser already used by eight million people worldwide. The upgrade available today introduces new features that enhance mobile social networking abilities on all community sites: photo sharing, RSS feed reader and secure connections.

Opera Mini is not tied to any single service, so it offers a personal Web experience that can be used to easily browse and upload pictures to all online community sites, including MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Facebook and My Opera, as well as securely using popular webmail such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
Featuring secure connections, Opera Mini makes all Web transactions safe, including banking or shopping on eBay or Amazon.
Opera Mini is globally available free of charge and enables Web browsing on almost any mobile phone. Only an Internet data plan through your carrier/operator is needed to access the Internet.

Like the Internet before it, it looks like mobile's content explosion could be set off by porn.

Adult content on mobile devices will be worth $3.3 billion by 2011, up from $1.4 billion this year, according to industry analysts JupiterResearch.

Europe is the biggest spender on porn, due to both its appetite for smut and the relatively high-priced nature of adult content. The Asia-Pacific region follows in second place.

The development of the adult content market will also evolve in parallel with mobile telephony technology, Jupiter predicted. Currently, most adult content is text-based. As 3G wireless, which provides more capacity for multimedia services, reaches maturity, porn will switch to video delivery, Jupiter said. More than 70 percent of revenue will be derived from that medium by 2011, according to the report.

At Nokia's annual Capital Market Days taking place in Amsterdam today, Nokia announced four new mobile phones including three mid-range models , the Nokia 6300, Nokia 6290 and the Nokia 6086 as well as the Nokia 2626 targeted to consumers in entry markets.  All four models are expected to begin shipping in the first quarter of 2007.

The Nokia 2626 is a colorful mobile phone designed for style-conscious consumers in emerging markets. The Nokia 2626 will be available in a range of bold colors, such as Fiery Red and Spatial Blue, and includes an FM radio for music on the go.

Kai Oistamo, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Mobile Phones for Nokia unveiled the new models along with the company's vision for the next year. "These new products underscore our commitment to offer a range of mobile phones that give consumers a choice in selecting the right balance of technology and design to meet their lifestyle and budget."

At Nokia's annual Capital Market Days taking place in Amsterdam today, Nokia showcased the Nokia 6300, a mid-range model that represents an evolution of the modern monoblock design. Weighing a mere 91 grams and measuring less than 13.1mm thin, the Nokia 6300 is constructed of quality materials and offers a modern suite of features for today's consumer. Featuring a great screen, ergonomic keymat and easy-to-use menu, the Nokia 6300 is expected to begin shipping during the first quarter of 2007.

Features include:

• 2 megapixel camera, 8x digital zoom
• 2-inch QVGA screen
• USB/PC Synchronization
• In-box memory of 135MB, with support for up to 2GB microSD cards
• Voice dialing, voice commands and voice recording
• MP3 player, FM radio
• Integrated hands-free speaker
• 3.5 hours talk-timea and up to14 days standby time  

At Nokia's annual Capital Market Days taking place in Amsterdam today, Nokia unveiled its latest multimode UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) handset, the Nokia 6086, allowing consumers to stay in touch - in any environment.  Designed for consumers who strive for simplicity and value for money, the quad-band GSM and UMA-enabled cameraphone hides its sophisticated circuitry within a classic design with a large keypad and intuitive user menu. The Nokia 6086 is expected to begin shipping during the first quarter of 2007.
 
Features include:

• Camcorder and video player
• Wire-free enhancement use and synchronization via Bluetooth
• VGA camera with 4X digital zoom
• 6MB free user memory and microSD slot to enable storage of your favorite music
• Up to 5 hours of talk time, 10 days of standby 

At Nokia's annual Capital Market Days taking place in Amsterdam today, Nokia unveiled the Nokia 6290, a versatile 3G smartphone based on the world's leading smartphone software S60 on Symbian OS.

The Nokia 6290 is a modern smartphone with a classic, ergonomic design at an accessible price point. The Nokia 6290 is expected to begin shipping in Q1 2007.

Features includes:

• 2 megapixel camera with 4X digital zoom
• 2.2" QVGA 16M colour internal screen
• Rich email functionality which supports attachments such as PPT, PDF, Word and Excel.
• MP3 music player with excellent stereo surround sound
• Two way video calling

Motorola, Inc. today announced the global debut of the highly anticipated MOTOFONE at an event held in New Delhi, India. MOTOFONE is set to redefine the mobile phone market place and strengthen Motorola’s drive to connect the next billion mobile phone users. The Indian launch will be followed by a rapid international rollout.

Based on Motorola’s evolutionary new SCPL design platform, MOTOFONE is the first of a new breed of handsets designed to disrupt today’s communications landscape by cutting across price tiers, product segments and international markets.

In both GSM and CDMA, MOTOFONE re-establishes expectations over how a value-priced handset looks and feels and what it delivers. Offering an intuitive new interface built with icons and voice versus text, as well as voice prompts specifically tailored to local markets, the handset makes it easier and friendlier for first-time users to navigate, place a call, and retrieve messages. Its large, high contrast screen, powered by a revolutionary ClearVision™ display makes it easier to use the phone outdoors.

Chad Hurley, YouTube chief executive and co-founder announced early this month that YouTube was planning to launch mobile phone services soon. Well today it became a reality.  YouTube announced that, in early December, its leading video entertainment service will be available to people on mobile devices. In its first strategic mobile distribution agreement, YouTube will enable Verizon Wireless V CAST consumers to access a selection of YouTube videos from their mobile phones exclusively for a limited time.

In this landmark arrangement, YouTube will deliver a sampling of the most popular videos to Verizon Wireless’ V CAST subscribers in the United States. With the largest community for online video entertainment, YouTube’s move into the mobile space will enable a new audience of mobile users to enjoy entertaining videos virtually whenever and now wherever they want.

Great news! Cell phone owners can now unlock (How To Unlock Your Cell Phone?) the software on their phones, thanks to a new copyright rule approved by the Library of Congress.

Cell phone owners will have the ability to take their phone with them from wireless carrier to wireless carrier.  Thank goodness! Under the new copyright rules, cell phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers.

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books. In granting the exemption for cell phone users, the Copyright Office determined that consumers aren't able to enjoy full legal use of their handsets because of software locks that wireless providers have been placing to control access to phones' underlying programs.

Sprint has launched the M610 by Samsung, a handset that Measures less than half an inch in thickness. The M610 is the thinnest clamshell wireless phone in the United States.

This sleek handset features a 2.0 megapixel camera, a large, crisp QVGA internal display, stereo Bluetooth® technology, speakerphone, advanced voice recognition and an external Micro SD memory card slot.

Features

• 2-megapixel camera
• Video Camcorder
• microSD card slot
• EV-DO data (PowerVision)
• QVGA display
• Bluetooth
• Speakerphone