Sprint and Verizon have been enjoying their CDMA femtocells stateside for a while now, but Vodafone becomes the first to do the honors in Europe today by launching the continent's first commercial 3G femtocell, christened the Vodafone Access Gateway. The device -- seemingly sourced from Alcatel-Lucent -- requires an in-home broadband internet connection with a minimum speed of 1Mbps. It's rumored to be capable of full HSPA, enough horsepower to feed even high-end Voda handsets with WiFi-free broadband in places around the home where reception's normally a little dicey (or absent altogether), and it'll drive up to four authorized phones with it at the same time. Anyone on a £30 monthly contract or higher can get it at no charge, but otherwise, you can expect to pay £160 (about $263) for the pleasure of building out Voda's network on its behalf. So, AT&T, what's going on over there, guys?

[Via Slashdot and eWeekEurope]

Want to run a Miley Cyrus fansite over a data card? We might recommend you emigrate to Australia, where Telstra has just upgraded its already-impressive HSPA+ network to a whopping 5.8Mbps on the uplink, which it estimates means that customers could see speeds as high as 3Mbps in real-world use. In conjunction with the upgrade, the carrier's also letting customers know that its Turbo 21 USB modem can be updated to take advantage of the higher data rate, which refreshingly means you won't have to plunk down for any new hardware. Cheers to that.

As HTC's already eager to demonstrate with the Touch Diamond2 and Touch Pro2 and Toshiba with the TG01, Windows Mobile 6.5 should bring with it a pretty wide range of interesting compatible hardware -- and we'll admit that we're a little intrigued by this alleged device from Mio codenamed "Amber." All we've got here is a render, but it's certainly within the realm of plausibility -- it looks quite a bit like the company's G50, after all, and we'd certainly expect them to be releasing new WinMo devices in conjunction with 6.5. Anyhow, we're told that we can expect a 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7200 series (we would've preferred Snapdragon-class silicon, of course), a whopping 3.61-inch WVGA display, 256MB of RAM paired with 512MB of ROM, a 5 megapixel AF primary cam, full HSPA, and an integrated FM transmitter. If it's real, it looks like this one has the Touch Diamond2 squarely in its sights.

[Thanks, msav]

Better late than never, right? Some sixteen excruciating months after its announcement, Sony Ericsson's WinMo superphone -- the mighty XPERIA X1 -- has finally come to Rogers as expected. Considering that the X1 is still very much one of the world's premier smartphones (on paper, anyhow), the on-contract promotional price of CAD $249.99 after discounts seems reasonable enough -- of course, whether you feel the same way after three years of mobile marriage is another story altogether. Staying within the Sony Ericsson realm, the C510 has also launched, an attractive candybar with 7.2Mbps / 2Mbps HSPA and a 3.2 megapixel cam; it's all yours for CAD $79.99 on contract.

[Via Howard Chui]

Read - X1
Read - C510

If you're in... say, Spain, we can understand how you might perceive Japan as being a bit far to go just to put your hands on Toshiba's T-01A Snapdragon powerhouse. Then again, it is the first Snapdragon handset to hit the market -- and it's an absolutely stunning-looking phone -- so we certainly wouldn't blame you for packing your belongings, children, and pets into wooden crates, shipping them via freighter, and hopping the next flight to Tokyo. The good news, though, is that you won't have to: Movistar has now launched the phone locally in its global TG01 flavor, offering 7.2Mbps down, 2Mbps up, a flippin' 4.1-inch wide VGA display, and very likely the snappiest Windows Mobile experience you've ever had. The best part is that you can get it for free depending on your contract and plan pricing, so seriously, what's holding you (other than the fact that you might not be in Spain)?

We're unfortunately light on details here, but The Unwired is reporting that HTC's Hero has been approved by the Global Certification Forum, listed here as "HERO100," with support for quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE and dualband UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA at 1800/2100 MHz. With the company's touted London event just around the corner -- this Wednesday, to be exact -- we wouldn't be surprised to see the phone and its oft-rumored "Rosie" Android UI take center stage, in possibly two variations. Other than frequency bands and the associative name, the GCF isn't giving us anything else to work with, so for now just sit back and hope this uncertainty is cleared up sooner rather than later.

As Windows Mobile devices go, it's virtually impossible for an entrant in the game not to be compared to HTC, and Acer's M900 is a prime example -- the specs look great on paper, but it's pretty much got to stand toe-to-toe with the Touch Pro2 to get any time in the limelight. Pocketnow did the honors with the landscape QWERTY slider, finding that the screen's great -- what's not to love about a 3.8-inch WVGA display, after all -- and the Samsung processor blazes, but the firmware load is buggy (not to mention downright crappy-looking compared to TouchFLO), free RAM's hard to come by, and virtually everything about the hardware feels cheap. At over $600 unlocked, it's a tough pill to swallow, particularly in the US where you've got to find an importer you know, trust, love, and play canasta with on Thursday evenings.

There's been talk the last couple days about the fact that there really isn't anywhere in the States to take advantage of the blazing 7.2Mbps downlink connection supported by the iPhone 3G S -- except for one great hope, one diamond in the rough that could become a shining destination for 3G S owners the world over. That destination would be Chicago, where AT&T fired up 7.2Mbps trials late last year, and the hope was that they might be letting lay folk (like us) in on the action in time for the 3G S release. Well, we've been running side-by-side tests today, and the short answer is that we're clearly not accessing 7.2 -- granted, the 3G S is getting marginally faster speeds both up and down, but we figure this can easily be attributed to the new model's faster processor because a doubling of the downlink pipe simply doesn't account for a 100kbps bump in speed (latency was all over the map on both phones, for the record). If you're holding out on upgrading from a 3G to a 3G S, go ahead and crack a smile -- because for now, anyway, this is one spec bump that means precisely zilch in the real world.

It'd originally been available to a random, totally select group of elite individuals, but availability of the HTC Touch Pro2 on Vodafone UK has now opened up to pretty much anyone who wants it. As is virtually always the case with European carriers, you can get this monster for as little as absolutely nothing depending on the contract and plan that you choose, so dive in and sign your life away for a couple years, won't you?

[Via CoolSmartPhone]

The promise of global data is finally becoming a reality for modem users on Verizon today with the release of its Novatel-sourced USB1000, a USB stick (hence the "USB" in the name, we're willing to bet) that features EV-DO Rev. A for domestic use plus triband HSPA when you're roaming around the globe. The stick itself runs $149.99 on contract after a $50 rebate, while monthly global data plans run from $129.99 for 100MB of data in 31 countries to $219.99 for 200MB; both plans include 5GB for use in the US and Canada. It'll be available online starting tomorrow.

[Via Phone Scoop]

By and large, LG's announcements at CommunicAsia in Singapore this week have been straight-up rehashes of announcements from earlier in the year -- the GD900, for example -- but there was one diamond in the rough that should get a few people excited. The GW550 is the latest fruit of LG's strategic alliance with Microsoft to produce Windows Mobile phones, offering a 2.4-inch QVGA display, full HSPA with 7.2Mbps on the downlink, a 3 megapixel primary cam with a VGA sensor up front for video calling, and stereo speakers on board; the front cam immediately tells us that we can't expect this phone to drop as-is on AT&T, but we bet LG would just love to put something very similar up against the Jack. Any takers?

[Via PhoneArena and Tech2]

Although not exactly the best kept secret (we first caught wind last week), Samsung's Verizon-bound Omnia II / I8000 is now one hundred percent official, along with even more official US confirmations for the Omnia Pro B760 (Louvre) slider, Omnia Pro B7320 candybar, and the Omnia Lite B7300. Specs for the Omnia II are just a little different than what we previously heard: 3.7-inch AMOLED resistive touchscreen with WVGA (480 x 800) resolution, 7.2Mbps HSPA (or EV-DO Rev. A for Verizon's version), 5 megapixel camera, 720 x 480 at 30fps video recording, 2GB to 16GB internal storage with microSD expansion slot, Bluetooth 2.0, WiFi, AGPS, and TouchWiz 2.0 UI. As for the Lite, we're looking at HSDPA, WiFi, 3 megapixel camera, AGPS, and just as the name suggests, a good likelihood it'll be overshadowed by its more feature-rich brother.

Update: We can't say it's unexpected, but just to be clear, Omnia II buyers shouldn't worry about living in the past. Yahoo! Tech reports its WinMo 6.1 underbelly will be later upgradeable to 6.5.

"Regular" customers still have a bit of a wait yet, but it seems that Vodafone has gone ahead and pulled the trigger on shipments of HTC's Touch Pro2 to business customers -- assuming a post on the carrier's forums is legit. The phone's not due to be released until July 12 for any old chap who wants to fork over the dough for one, though it's not unusual at all for a carrier to offer hot new handsets to its prized B2B channel a little bit early. Windows Mobile 6.1 is still a bummer at this point, but you've got to give an enormous amount of love to the hardware -- and the promise of an official upgrade to 6.5 in the not-too-distant future.

[Via CoolSmartPhone]

Most of the specs printed on this leaked sheet provided to MobileSyrup about the upcoming BlackBerry Tour were either known or could've been easily deduced, but a couple line items in here stand out: EV-DO plus HSPA 2100, 256MB of onboard storage, 3.2 megapixel AF camera, and an 480 x 360 display are all confirmed one more time as this thing trudges toward release. If we had our druthers, this would already be available on Verizon by now -- but current rumors have it pegged for a mid-summer release, which would line it up with where MobileSyrup says the 9630 will launch on Bell in the middle of July. In the meantime, those dang 8830s certainly aren't getting any younger.

We're not sure how we missed this, but it seems the Nokia N900 (aka "Rover") was not only mentioned, but visually detailed in some candor during an Nseries presentation way back in October of last year. If you fast forward to about the three-minute mark in this video, Nokia's next-gen, Maemo 5-powered internet tablet is seen doing its thing, and it differs in a few key details from the last leak -- most noticeably, it's got a big d-pad on the left just like its predecessor and there's no sign of an earpiece for making calls over the rumored 3G radio. In fact, it really just looks like a whited-out N810, which makes us wonder whether this isn't purely conceptual, especially considering the age of the video. Either way, the N810's aging rapidly and the territory's rapidly being encroached on by MIDs of all shapes and sizes, so we imagine we'll see this get launched soon enough -- maybe on T-Mobile USA of all carriers, if the rumors pan out. Follow the break for the full video.

[Thanks, CanisMinor]

Update: We're being told that this was little more than a student-led art project -- and it's one hell of an art project, considering that it looks every bit as slick as Nokia's official marketing. Thanks, Ryan A.!