There's hardly anything more embarrassing that admitting that your company still uses Lotus Notes, but for the millions upon millions (140 million, in fact) of licensed users who'd love the opportunity to check in via their S60-based handset, this one's for you. Starting next month, Lotus Notes support will be granted for Symbian S60 3rd Edition, meaning that anyone with a fresh S60 device can soon tap into Lotus Notes Traveler and access real-time email, calendar, address book, journal and to-do list data. On second thought, maybe you shouldn't be so enthusiastic -- leaving work at work is a blessing too many take for granted.

Those crazy new Samsungs and LGs (well, LG singular) reppin' Sprint's fall lineup have dropped into stores dressed and ready for retail, and text fanatics are definitely the ones making out like bandits here. Starting out on the low end, the Samsung Rant drops by for $49.99 on contract in your choice of red or black, giving the LG Rumor some solid competition and upping the ante with EV-DO. The Highnote, also a fruit of Samsung's powerful loins, rocks the music angle with an integrated loudspeaker that functions as the second slide of a dual-sliding mechanism -- it runs $99.99 on contract in red or blue. Finally, the Lotus from LG takes the whole clamshell concept and flattens it out a bit, making room for a full QWERTY keyboard underneath along with a landscape display. It's available in purple (and not just any purple -- fancy purple) or black for $149.99 on contract.

Read - Samsung Rant
Read - Samsung Highnote
Read - LG Lotus

Okay, okay, we admit it: we went a little harsh on the Lotus before we had a chance to cradle it in our own palm. It turns out that LG's latest texting machine for Sprint is actually quite a looker in a bizarre, quirky way, with the black version taking on a well-constructed, businesslike aura and the purple doing a reasonably good job repping the high-fashion set. Don't get us wrong, it still looks downright weird when closed -- mainly because we're just not used to a square flip, we suppose -- but when it's open, it looks as decent as any featurephone on the market. We didn't have a great opportunity to put the keyboard through it's paces (stay tuned for that), but that new One Click UI paradigm looks like a winner at a quick glance -- so even if you're too fat-fingered to enjoy top SMS speeds, at least you'll enjoy watching your mistakes materialize on the screen in glorious detail.

Sure enough, there wasn't anything squished about the image we saw of the LG LX600 a while back -- it was just loosening the belt a couple notches to make room for a full QWERTY keyboard running across its naughty bits. Oh, and it's no longer the LX600; turns out Sprint is releasing it as the Lotus, one of four all-new dumbphones for the autumn months to complement today's announcement of the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro. It'll be available next month for $149.99 on contract. Others in the mix include the Samsung Highnote -- a music-focused dual slider that dedicates one slide direction to a hefty little loudspeaker -- and the curiously-named Rant, which apes the LG Rumor's form factor to give text addicts another affordable option. Like the Lotus, the Highnote and Rant will both hit in October for $99.99 and $49.99, respectively. Meanwhile, iDEN freaks (and we use that term in the most loving way possible) will be happy to see that they're getting their grubby, calloused hands on another rugged option, the Motorola i576 flip. It'll start getting beaten senseless at retail come October 19 for $69.99.

Sprint's also using those three new consumer sets (sorry, i576) to premiere "One Click," a new UI paradigm for its non-smartphone devices that allows folks to drop all sorts of commonly-used features with information-rich icons right on the home screen for... well, one-click access, hence the name. New Katana Eclipse colors coming later this fall will feature the new software, too.

BREW Ninja, who readily (and oddly for a ninja) enough admits that he's a mobile QA engineer over at Yahoo! Mobile, just scooped 3x phones in this quickie 4 and half minute video. The HTC Coke -- a variant of the HTC Touch Pro -- and tiny LG Lotus (AKA, LX600) with full QWERTY for Sprint are both interesting, but it's the hands-on video of RIM's touchscreen Thunder that blows our doors. At about 2:50 in, he reveals the BlackBerry Thunder for Verizon saying, "I don't like it, it's, it's an ok phone." His biggest concern seems to be the touchscreen (something we've heard before) which acts like a button -- you have to actual push the screen, hard, unlike most capacitive touchpanel devices. See for yourself after the break.

[Via Crackberry]

It may not be the most fascinating development to hit RIM's platform, but hey, considering that BlackBerrys are still the device of choice for a great many of the world's businesses, every little bit of work-oriented software helps, we suppose. Alongside RIM's platform enhancement announcement came news that the company would be tying up with Lotus to bring its Connections business social networking platform (an oxymoron? you decide) to BlackBerry devices later this year. The suite will let users collaborate on work-related stuff, get in touch with contacts across the company, and hopefully, promote their garage bands. No word just yet on what models will support the new goods.

It's not the first product to tout enterprise email integration for the iPhone, but Visto Mobile has announced a solution of its own, promising secure access to Exchange and Domino servers without any software install on the iPhone -- a good thing, we'd say, considering that most IT departments frown on having to hack their fleet of mobile devices to set them up. Unlike Synchronica's solution which games Exchange's Outlook Web Access feature to avoid having to expose POP or IMAP servers to the world, Visto Mobile actually does require that admins open up a secure IMAP port and publishes the corporate directory to a Safari-friendly web page. Many IT departments frown on all that, too, so if you're planning on pitching this lil' solution to your own IT peeps, know full well that you may be turned away brokenhearted. Individual users can get in on the action for a one-time fee of $39 plus $10 per month, while companies are looking at $799 plus $199 per year plus $10 per month per user. Whew, patent suits must not be cheap, huh?

Update: Turns out Visto uses port 443 -- typically used for secure HTTP -- to do its IMAP thing, so your IT department should calm down a bit when they find out they don't need to open special holes in the firewall just for your iPhone-totin' behind.