We had always heard that Telus' BlackBerry Storm would be made available in time for the holiday season, but according to the estimated ship date on Future Shop's website, it'll be pushing it. The touchscreen handset can be pre-ordered right now by interested Canadians, though the $649.99 sticker may give you pause. Better not hold up your plans too long though -- wouldn't want that December 18th delivery date to slip.

[Via mobilesyrup]

Well, now isn't this something? Best Buy has its fancy little iPhone 3G, but it'll be Wally World offering up the G1 outside of official T-Mobile outlets. As we'd heard yesterday, 550 Walmart stores across the country will begin selling the Android-powered handset beginning tomorrow, and folks who opt to pick one up here versus a traditional T-Mob store will save $31.11. Yep -- according to company spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien, the new / upgrade-eligible customer price for a Walmart-sourced G1 will be just $148.88 with a 2-year agreement. Wait, what? You already purchased your G1 at the full price? They always said the early bird pays the premium... or something along those lines.

If you're a non-T-Mobile customer jonesing for a G1 and you don't mind the prospect of waiting in a line of epic, new video game console proportions, head on out to San Francisco today where T-Mob's corporate location at 3rd and Market will become the first store anywhere to offer the G1 to the general public starting at 6PM. That's a full fourteen hours earlier than the rest of the country; the remainder of T-Mobile's stores in 3G markets will start pushing Android out the door at 8AM Wednesday morning. So, how crazy are you? Book those flights, people -- time's running out!

That sale of virtually all of Sprint's tower infrastructure announced back in July has now been finalized, giving buyer TowerCo a whole boatload of CDMA, iDEN, and WiMAX footprint it didn't have just a few hours ago. Sprint looks at the $670 million sale as a way to buy itself some "additional liquidity" and "focus more closely on our core business of providing communications services to our customers" (but let's be honest, it's really just about the additional liquidity); TowerCo, meanwhile, sounds like it's anticipating that it'll be able to lease out space on the towers to other carriers as they expand down the road. For its part, Sprint wasted no time signing up for a long-term lease on the very towers it just sold, but here's our doozy of a question: dare we say they're now a TowerCo MVNO?

[Thanks, moochy989]

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has all but confirmed in an investors' conference this week the longstanding rumor that his company is looking for someone to buy its iDEN network, the main asset brought on in its 2004 acquisition of Nextel. With its EV-DO Rev. A-based Direct Connect system rapidly coming online, iDEN seems to make less and less sense for Sprint in the long term -- but the real question is whether anyone's going to be willing to pay enough to make it worth Sprint's while to part with Nextel's legacy. Hesse basically says that they could go either way; if they see a deal they like, they'll take it, but if they don't, they're cool hanging onto it because it's "a valuable asset." Besides, where else are you going to find beauts like the i365?

[Via Phone Scoop]

Still committed to iDEN, eh? After another relatively brutal quarter of lost cash, lost subscribers, and lost opportunities, word on the street is that Sprint might be rethinking its approach to its legacy push-to-talk network -- the obsolescence-bound spectrum it acquired via its purchase of Nextel a few years back for the questionable price of $35 billion. Given Sprint's current financial state, a liquidity crunch means that the carrier is looking to offload any salable piece; Nextel's not exactly the most attractive piece of that puzzle with a declining subscriber base, limited bandwidth, and a limited range of Moto hardware to back it up, but even at its current estimated value of $5 billion, analysts are suggesting that Sprint could be willing to bite at a deal. NII Holdings, which operates iDEN networks under the Nextel brand in Brazil, Mexico, and a handful of other Latin American countries, is being tossed around as a potential suitor, as are private equity firms looking to make a quick buck. How one goes about making a quick buck on a network as old and quirky as iDEN in the year 2008, though, remains to be seen.

[Via Phone Scoop]

If, for whatever reason, you found yourself recently craving a Motorola U9 in gunmetal grey, today would be your lucky day -- assuming you live in the US and don't mind handing your credit card information over to the company's humorously labeled MOTOSTORE. The diminutive mobile, which includes 25MB of on board memory, a microSD expansion slot, 2-megapixel camera, integrated media player, stereo Bluetooth and a fanciful external display, is now available in an unlocked GSM flavor for $275.99. Oh, and if you're really after a different hue, expect pink and purple to show up shortly.

Just as July began, we heard that Sprint would finally begin shipping its Airave signal booster nationwide before the month ended. It cut things close, but we can't deny that the rumor proved true. Starting right now, Sprint users with horrendous service in their own homes can begrudgingly cough up $99.99 to have the base station sent directly to you. From there, you'll have to throw down $4.99 per month for extending your coverage but still using your plan minutes, $10 per month if you're looking to make unlimited calls (through the Airave) with a single Sprint phone or $20 per month for unlimited calling for multiple lines. Critics have already harshed on the $50 increase in price from when it launched in Denver and Indy last year, not to mention the relatively high monthly fees, but we suppose you can take it or leave it depending on how regularly you drop calls from your couch. Oh, and don't even think of using this overseas -- the required GPS module makes sure you're in the US before enabling calls.

[Via PhoneScoop]

Update: Sprint pinged us to say the official "on sale date" is August 17, 2008.

Details are scarce right now, but you can make of it what you will. Sprint hasn't been in the best of situations since it acquired Nextel in 2005, and while this move may not be seen by everyone as definitively negative, it certainly is worth noting. The flagging carrier sold off "nearly all" (around 3,300) of its wireless communication towers to TowerCo for some $670 million in cash. According to Sprint Nextel's Bob Azzi, the move to lease rather than own these network facilities will enable it to "better focus on its core business of providing communications services to consumers, businesses and government customers." He continued by noting that the transaction "provides Sprint Nextel with additional liquidity [for] greater flexibility in managing the company." Whatever you say, sir.

[Via InformationWeek]

We could tell by looking that RIM wouldn't think of charging too many hundies for its still unannounced BlackBerry KickStart, but $49.99? CrackBerry has it that said flip phone will be selling at T-Mobile for a penny under $50 on a two-year contract, which certainly seems smart given the competition. 'Course, we've nothing to substantiate this with just yet, but take one more look at that chubby side and tell us this thing deserves a triple digit price tag. That's right, you can't.

Though it's recently cracked the tough outer shell of the rough-and-tumble US wireless market, Huawei's got a long way to go before it can stand toe-to-toe with the Samsungs and LGs of the world. The economy's seen better days, the market is nearly saturated, and it already seems like there might be a couple players too many for profit, so what's an up-and-coming Chinese firm to do? Invite foreign investment, naturally. Huawei has retained Morgan Stanley to help it line up investors that can bulk it up enough to wage a broadsided offense against the low-end American market, leaving the mid and high-range lineups to the well-established companies that are already making a splash up there. It's pretty rare for a Chinese corporation of Huawei's size and clout to open itself up to cash from outside Chinese borders, so the deal's expected to attract a lot of interest -- theoretically setting the scene for plenty more of its wares on US carriers' shelves. We're all for healthy competition, and if Huawei can shake things up a bit, we're all for it.

[Via Phone Scoop]

No surprises here -- particularly since LG's Vu has been on sale through a number of AT&T retail outlets since late last month (whoops!). Today, however, the carrier is officially listing LG's latest for sale, and the Mobile TV-supporting handset is going for a stiff $549.99 sans contract, or $299.99 after giving away your cellular soul for two years and waiting anxiously for a $100 mail-in rebate to arrive. Check out our hands-on gallery to see if you're really ready to make this kind of commitment.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

In a move that could be described as "totally unsurprising," Palm shareholders have approved the much-discussed partial sale of the company to a private equity firm called Elevation Partners (of which Bono is a member), and also a change in the board of director's makeup. The plan, if you'll recall, is for Mr. MacPhisto and co. to pay $325 million for a 25-percent stake in the company, while Palm itself will pay out a $9 per-share distribution of cash to current shareholders for a reduction in ownership. There will also be a new executive board chair, namely, Johnathan Rubenstein, an Apple alumni who ran the iPod devision from 2004-2006. Fred Anderson (another former Apple officer), and Roger McNamee (a Silicon Valley investor) will also join the board. Our man Ed Colligan said of the switch, "There are a lot of moving parts here, but the goal is to bring in a transformation and change the dynamics of the company," er... okay. Apparently, Palm has hopes that Mr. Rubenstein will help create "innovative products" and "bring them to market quickly." In our dreams guys, in our dreams.

You knew this beauty was coming, and you've even had ample time to stare it down and get acquainted, but now you can get that mousing finger ready as the HTC Advantage X7501 has snuck onto CompUSA's website. Currently listed as "Coming Soon," the sale page doesn't lend any hints as to when it'll actually be available to purchase, but we are assured that it'll run $899.99 whenever that time does come. As expected, it'll come pre-loaded with Windows Mobile 6 Standard, a 624MHz CPU, built-in 8GB hard drive, miniSD expansion slot, integrated GPS, Bluetooth / WiFi, a three-megapixel camera, TV / VGA outputs, and just about everything else you'd need in a UMPC / cellphone hybrid. Hold tight folks, it's almost here.

[Thanks, Naval]

Good news for those of you in Taiwan (and America, too) who can't wait to get acquainted with HTC's Touch, as its creator has reportedly announced that it will be deployed shortly in its "home base," with an American launch to go down before the dawn of 2008. Peter Chou, chief executive officer at HTC, has purportedly stated that it would "only be fitting if the first country in Asia to sell the Touch was Taiwan," and also noted that Chunghwa Telecom would be its "exclusive partner in distributing and retailing the handset" in that country. On the home front, all we know is that the Touch should indeed be found on American shelves before the year's end, but here's to hoping it's closer to today than December 31st.

Read - HTC launch in Taiwan
Read - HTC launch in USA