This ain't your grandpappy's My Circle. Well, actually, it pretty much is, with one small change: customers signing up for a My Circle messaging plan of $7.99 or higher on Alltel will now get unlimited messaging within their Circle, while the non-Circle bucket starts at 400 per month. The $19.99 "All Access Pass" is still available too, which rocks unlimited messaging to everyone regardless of whether they're cool enough to be in your Circle -- and it includes mobile web access, to boot. The new plans are available immediately.

Unless you've been camped out under a Rhode Island-sized boulder for the past few weeks, chances are you know that Verizon has announced its intentions to acquire Alltel. During a recent interview with CEO Scott Ford, Talk Business host Roby Brock was able to get quite a few talking points out of the exec that didn't involve the most recent transaction. More specifically, Mr. Ford noted that prior to Alltel becoming a private company, it had "tried to buy Sprint three times, tried to buy AT&T Wireless [and] tried to buy T-Mobile." He continued by saying that "some of those times it went with partners, [while] some of those times it didn't." Essentially, Alltel was "doing everything it could to get to a national platform." Believe it or not, those quotes really are just the tip of the iceberg, but the full spill is entirely too detailed for this space. If you're curious to know what might have been, break out the reading glasses and hit the link below.

[Via mocoNews]

With LTE a few years out yet, Alltel needs something to get it over the 3.5G hump -- and seeing how it's presently a CDMA carrier, you can pretty much guess where this is going. Sure enough, Verizon's newest partner in crime has announced that the rollout of its EV-DO Rev. A upgrade is now underway, promising a bump in downlink speeds from 400-700kbps on the existing Rev. 0 network to somewhere between 600kbps and 1.4Mbps. Uplink speeds are where Rev. A really shines, though, blazing as much as ten times faster than it did before -- 800kbps on a good day with bursts of up to 1.8Mbps. Two data cards are being offered to take advantage of the service -- one from Huawei and one from UTStarcom -- while compatible handsets currently include the HTC PPC6800 and Touch. The rollout is targeted for "select markets" right now -- Charlotte, New Orleans, Phoenix and Tampa among a total of 18 -- with overall EV-DO coverage continuing to expand as well; Alltel's targeting 82 percent of its footprint to be upgraded by year's end.

From the moment Verizon Wireless made its intentions to purchase Alltel official, subscribers of the latter began wondering what the fate of My Circle would be. As it stands, there's still no definitive answer on that topic, but VZW is introducing a new feature for its Business users that bears a striking resemblance to Alltel's current merry-go-round. The plan, which is only available to customers of the Verizon Freedom for Business unlimited long-distance service, enables users to have unlimited conversations with five chosen numbers for $4.99 per month. Sadly, we haven't a clue whether the carrier is planning to roll a similar option out to its non-enterprise users, but the timing here is certainly curious, wouldn't you agree?

[Via InformationWeek]

Have a Palm Treo 755p on Alltel? Check it: your lil' buddy's just received an official update from the mothership. Little is known about what greatness lies within this new 1.03 version of the binary; all Palm's saying on the matter is that it resolves a "reset issue" under "specific and rare conditions." So if you found that your phone was spontaneously rebooting every time you sat in on a crawfish eating competition while wearing sandals, you may have stumbled upon those specific and rare conditions, in which case hearty congratulations are in order. Whatever, just download the update, will ya?

[Via Palm Infocenter]

Just a quick bit of math and you can see that today's news doesn't bode well for AT&T, which has been enjoying its position at the top of the heap in major US cellphone carriers for quite some time now. While AT&T has a solid 71m subscribers under their belt, number two Verizon has 67m and number five Alltel has 13m -- which means this merger could potentially put 80m customers under the same roof. Clearly being able to claim the "most reliable" AND most widely used network in the US makes it a tantalizing deal for VZW, but the ~$2,100 they'll be paying per subscriber isn't lightyears away from the notoriously overinflated amount Sprint paid in their heyday for Nextel. That merger cost $36 billion, which turned out to be ~$2,350 per sub at around 15 million Nextel customers -- and we all know how well that deal turned out for Sprint. But we're sure they're thinking this will go more along the lines of AT&T's merger with Cingular, which worked out pretty damned well so far. So what's this thing named, anyway? Verizon Alltel? Veritel? Allizon? We think just Verizon, thanks.

Verizon has certainly courted Alltel before, but this time, the two could finally be rounding third base. According to a breaking report at CNBC, Verizon is "in deep in talks to acquire Alltel," which of course is America's fifth largest wireless carrier. It's no secret that Alltel has been riding fairly high of late, and unless your memory is totally shot, you'll likely recall that it was just recently "taken private by TPG and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners in a $27.5 billion deal." Not surprisingly, officials at both outfits refused to comment on the rumblings, but if this does indeed go down, analysts are expecting Verizon to pay around 8x Alltel's current EBITDA, whereas TPG / Goldman Sachs paid 9.2x. We'll keep you posted on any developments.

Update: The talks have been confirmed by Vodafone which owns a 45% stake in VZW.

The Touch has always seemed like a device that deserves a whole rainbow to itself, but for whatever reason, its many colors have been hard to find in one place. Alltel's breaking out of the mold, though, becoming just the first carrier in the US to offer multiple Touch shades in its lineup by adding burgundy to the original gray. It runs $129.99 after rebate on contract -- the same price as gray, thankfully, so go ahead and throw away those worries about paying a color premium.

[Thanks, Matt S.]

Last year, Rural Cellular bought a handful of Minnesota markets from Alltel. No big deal, right? A little money changes hands, a few subscribers move from one carrier to another. As part of the sale, Alltel agreed to continue to service the customers until they could be fully migrated to Rural's systems -- problem is, they may have "serviced" them a little too hard, if you catch our drift. A lawsuit brought on by Rural claims that, among other things, Alltel hustled the affected customers really hard during the transition period to get them to switch back to Alltel and offered them "slipshod" service on Rural's transitional network to help make that decision a little easier. By the time all was said and done, subscriber churn in the markets was a sky-high 13 percent, certainly suggesting that there was some buffoonery going on. The suit seeks millions in damages on the $48 million deal -- and with Verizon's acquisition of Rural currently going through the regulatory process, it certainly seems like the outcome could have an effect.

[Thanks, Droo]

Well, what do you know? This week's How Would You Change question hits home in the Mobile world, so we figured we'd give you all a fair shot at chiming in. For those who've coughed up the requisite coin to procure a BlackBerry Curve 8330 on one of our nation's CDMA carriers, how on Earth is it treating you? Found any annoyances you'd like to see changed? If so, head on over to Engadget Classic and drop your comments there.

We've all had situations where our printed receipts have been just a little too wordy for comfort, disclosing details about our address or credit card (or worse, both) that a nefarious individual would kill to score. The 2003 Fair Credit Reporting Act was supposed to put a serious cork in that business by threatening offenders with a $1,000-per incident fine for willfully printing out secret stuff beyond December 2006; Verizon and Alltel are being accused of ignoring that little clause of the FCRA, though, with class action suits du jour recently filed in Pennsylvania and Georgia respectively. For its part, Alltel says it's in the clear because it hasn't been printing both the credit card number and the expiration date on its receipts, and furthermore, the plaintiffs haven't proven that they've had their identities stolen as a result of its practices. Verizon has responded with a shorter, snippier comment, simply saying that it "did not commit any wrongful act" against the accusers. Seriously though, what's so hard about just not printing that stuff?

Make us proud, Alltel! The number five carrier's really been going all-out as of late, doing an impressive job of keeping its offerings in line with the big boys -- and in some cases, outdoing 'em with hot exclusives like the Glimmer. Once again, they've gotten the jump on their larger, heavier competition by becoming the first carrier to release a firmware upgrade for the Vogue (the Alltel Touch, in this case) that ups the radio to EV-DO Rev. A speeds. Speedy uploads aside, the upgrade includes some Bluetooth fixes and adds the ability to receive video messages. Sprint, Verizon -- your move.

[Via phoneArena]

Not to be outdone by Verizon and Sprint (and pretty much everyone else with a CDMA network), Alltel's gone ahead and tacked the Curve 8330 onto its roadmap as well. Can you get it now? No, not quite, but it'll hit on May 1 in "titanium" for $229.99 after the full host of discounts and rebates has been applied on contract. Yeah, it sucks that you have to wait a few more days to pick it up, but you can feel free to place your pre-order now if you like over on Alltel's site.