June 23 - 10:00am EDT   AT&T today jumped at Motorola's messaging phone lines with the addition of the Karma QA1. Like the Hint, it has an unusual, squat design with a QWERTY keyboard that slides out vertically instead of horizontally; the form factor is supported by front-end links to Facebook and MySpace as well as IM chat on multiple networks. In an unusual turn for this class of phone, the Karma also has a native 3.5mm headset jack and microSDHC for music listening. [full story]

June 22 - 1:45pm EDT   Wireless provider Sprint on Monday has announced it has added the LG LX370 and Samsung Exclaim handsets to its lineup. The former is an entry-level vertical slider while the Exclaim is a dual-slider that open horizontally to reveal a QWERTY keyboard or vertically to offer a numeric keypad. Either connects to Sprint's 3G network to access many online features and services, including social networking sites through customizable shortcuts. A 2-megapixel camera and Bluetooth are also shared by the two handsets. [full story]

May 8 - 8:15am EDT   Sprint's rumored dual slider messaging phone, the Samsung Lucello, has received a more concrete name and launch date courtesy of a leak. The device is now identified by SprintGurus as the M550 Exclaim and, as promised, has a user interface focused heavily on social networking: the front menu has quick access to the web and Google searches but also Facebook and MySpace. It should also come in blue and pink models and ship on June 7th, roughly and unusually at the same time as the Palm Pre. [full story]

April 29 - 5:05pm EDT   Samsung will soon begin shipping its Tocco Lite touchscreen handset in the UK. With an emphasis on lowering the price of entry, the Lite utilizes the company's TouchWiz user interface and has GPRS/EDGE data network support. There are newfound social media features, including touchscreen shortcuts to Facebook, MySpace and YouTube from the 3-inch screen. Uploading photos taken by the Lite's 3.2-megapixel smile- and face-detecting camera to said social networking is also made simple, and users can tag photos of their contacts. [full story]

April 17 - 7:20am EDT   T-Mobile this morning finally confirmed the existence of its 2009 update to the Sidekick LX. The new model is the first ever to support 3G and draws on HSPA to allow both faster web browsing as well as to enable video streaming directly through the browser as well as Internet radio and video uploading. GPS is also new and exploits Danger's connection to Microsoft to let users search for nearby locations (including fuel and movies) using Live Search. [full story]

March 30 - 9:10am EDT   Motorola today ended speculation by launching the QA4 Evoke, one of its very few full-touchscreen phones not originally designed for the Asian market and its closest current rival to the iPhone. Pitched as a social networking device, the phone's 2.8-inch display is used as a large view for a full HTML browser, RSS feeds and shortcuts to MySpace and YouTube but becomes a landscape QWERTY keyboard when the phone is tilted on its side. A slide-out number pad streamlines calling. [full story]

March 17 - 11:10am EDT   Music from iTunes and other download stores now makes up exactly one third of all music sold in the US, according to NPD Group findings. The jump comes after the number of buyers climbed from 28 million in 2007 to 36 million in 2008 and these new shoppers bought more tracks. By contrast, CD sales have continued to plummet and saw about 17 million Americans stop buying CDs altogether in 2008, resulting in a drop for CD sales of about 19 percent. [full story]

February 12 - 9:55am EST   Nokia today bolstered the Symbian Foundation with the addition of multiple key new members. HP, MySpace and SanDisk lead the new sign-ons and each have their own different reasons for joining the open-source mobile OS project. HP hopes to improve its support for managing Symbian; MySpace hopes to further refine its MySpace app for the phone throuhg the open code; SanDisk hopes to improve the use of storage for multimedia apps. None of the three has given clues as to how soon products will appear that take advantage of Foundation membership. [full story]

February 6 - 4:15pm EST   There is no universal policy in place against Facebook access in Apple Stores, investigation is said to show. Reports began to circulate on Friday that Apple was imposing a complete ban on Facebook, as a means of deterring people from loitering for the sole purpose of Internet access. Although bans on Facebook (as well as MySpace) have been put into place in Richmond and Los Angeles stores, Palo Alto and Washington DC locations continue to allow social networking sites. [full story]

January 28 - 4:30pm EST   Danger and its hardware partners may be preparing a major update to the Sidekick LX that turns it into an advanced media and social networking device, a survey given to a Hiptop3 reader suggests. When asked about smartphones, the reader says she was reportedly presented with an image that shows an Sidekick LX 2009 that centers on an unusually sharp, 854x480 3.2-inch display. It would also have other hardware firsts for Sidekicks, including 3G data, GPS with turn-by-turn navigation and a 3.2-megapixel camera with both flash and video capture. [full story]

November 12 - 12:00am EST   Pure Digital today launched its response to a recent wave of ultra-simple HD camcorders from newer rivals with the launch of the Flip Mino HD. The camera matches the 720p widescreen, fixed zoom capture of most of its opponents but opts for a built-in 4GB of flash memory rather than the SD cards of others. This gives it an hour of storage for HD out of the box in the Mino HD's native MPEG-4 format, which also makes most videos relatively portable both to web video and to video editing tools, including iMovie. Pure estimates about two hours of battery life with the extra demand from the improved footage. [full story]

November 7 - 9:05am EST   MySpace is considering the possibility of producing its own portable media device to match its Music service, the social network's co-founder Chris DeWolfe has noted at the Web 2.0 conference. While non-committal, DeWolfe says hardware from MySpace is "possible" and that the company's focus "right now" is on its just-launched commercial music format, which is available either as a free, ad-subsidized stream through the web or through paid MP3 downloads. [full story]

October 23 - 10:35am EDT   A previously hinted-at Facebook music service could be true after all, a claim made by VentureBeat suggests. Previously discredited, a now supported rumor asserts that the social network is allegedly planning to team up with a partner such as iLike, imeem, Lala or RealNetworks' Rhapsody to offer a way of at least streaming full songs over artist pages or those friends who bring up songs in the regular Facebook news feed. The service would potentially let users buy downloads, though whether this would involve the partner or simply linking to a third party such as Amazon or iTunes is unknown. [full story]

October 15 - 10:10am EDT   The developers of Flock have announced v2.0 of the browser, which is launching today across multiple platforms. Flock is oriented towards social networking sites, and thus has built-in functions for sites such as Digg, Flickr and Twitter. The second edition adds support for MySpace through the MySpace Data Availability platform, which lets users track contacts via the People Sidebar, and browse or share photos, links and videos. [full story]

September 25 - 12:00am EDT   MySpace tonight kicked off the formal appearance of MySpace Music, its first commercial music service. The feature takes advantage of existing hooks for streaming music to offer on-demand, ad-subsidized playback of full tracks from the website but also lets members purchase unprotected MP3s of songs through an Amazon MP3-supported system with similar prices; the normal MySpace Flash player now includes links to buy songs or add them to a playlist. [full story]