Following a new round of partnership announcements back in February, LiMo Foundation today added 8 new members, bringing the grand total to 40 -- and perhaps most notably, Verizon Wireless becomes the first American carrier to team up with the group and the Foundation's final board member (in other words, they seem to be taking this initiative pretty seriously). Other new players include South Korea's SK Telecom, France's SFR, Sagem, chipmaker Infineon, and Mozilla, suggesting that there'll be plenty of mobile Firefox support for LiMo's nascent platform. LiMo represents the largest Linux-based threat to Android's plans for world domination, having announced its initiative some time before Google while collecting a veritable who's-who of world players from NTT DoCoMo to manufacturers like LG and Motorola -- and with the depth of Verizon's commitment to this, evident by its nabbing of an actual board seat, we wouldn't be surprised to see LiMo-based products actually go beyond its Any Apps, Any Device initiative and get real on the carrier's official lineup.

France's SFR has announced that it'll be launching a Modelabs-sourced handset that appeals to the younguns (and the young at heart) later this month. What feature of the so-called "MTV3.3" slider gives away the target demo, exactly? A plethora of MTV branding, naturally -- the second such device to launch on SFR, following the MTV3.0 touchscreen candybar -- with logos on the phone's shell and packaging, themes, media, bundled MTV Cribs game, and direct access to the hip network's video content. It takes some horsepower to effectively stream video, of course, and the MTV3.3 delivers thanks to a 3G radio -- which we can only assume is at least a little bit faster thanks to all that red. The most attractive part of this whole deal might be the pricing: €49 (about $77) at the April 23 launch. And no, sorry, if you're not in France, you're not cool enough to find one in your local store.

[Via mocoNews]

The first step to deploying fancy, shmancy Europe-wide mobile TV solution is a successful trial, of course, and Alcatel Lucent and SFR are happy to oblige on that end. The infrastructure firm tied up with the French carrier last year to demonstrate that DVB-SH was a viable solution -- despite the fact that SFR is really big on using 3G data for mobile TV, go figure -- by setting up a trial network in southwestern France. How do you fake a satellite-assisted network, you ask? Good question -- turns out it involves letting a helicopter chill way up there with a transmitter and pair it with a handful of repeaters strapped onto some of SFR's existing 3G towers. Basically, the companies found that DVB-SH worked like a champ with repeaters added to "only portions" of SFR's towers, making the setup a cost-effective alternative to DVB-H for wide-scale rollouts. It's still unclear whether SFR's actually interested in getting involved with a production network or whether it's sticking to its data-only guns, but regardless, other carriers are sure to benefit from the findings.

[Via mocoNews]

There's not a whole lot to go on here, but according to France's Challenges magazine, Archos is set to further expand its linup-up of players next year with some new SIM card-equipped models. While there's no indication that the devices will actually double as a phone, you will apparently be able to at least get in some 3G-enhanced web browsing, which would certainly be more convenient (albeit pricier) than tracking down WiFi hotspots each time you're out and about. Also according to Challenges, it seems that both France's SFR and Neuf-Cegetel are "starting to look very closely" at Archos' gear, although that's obviously still as up in the air as the rumored device itself.

[Via Archos Lounge, thanks JohnBe]

We're not really down with the surfer crowd around here, but there's apparently a market for a surfing-themed cellphone -- or at least that's what Oxbow would have us believe. The French purveyor of surf gear has teamed up with Sagem (bringer of a couple uninspiring clamshells to the European marketplace in recent memory) to offer the "My Oxbow by Sagem," a -- you guessed it -- Oxbow-themed phone for the surfer dude / dudette in all of us. Details are slim for the picking, but the squarish candybar is apparently based on the my400, so we don't expect any blockbuster features to be packed underneath its bright blue skin. If nothing brightens your day like a trip to the beach, look for the My Oxbow now on France's SFR network.

[Via Shiny Shiny]

Here in the US of A, we like to do things the old fashioned way. Case in point: when we're looking for a way to track availability of parking spaces in real time, we turn to satellite radio for the answer (okay, fine... bad example). In France, Carriers Orange and SFR have teamed up with NavX, V-Traffic, and a number of other firms to take an arguably simpler approach to the problem. A new feature on Orange's portal (and we're guessing SFR's as well) enables users to search for nearby parking garages with available spots; cell triangulation can estimate the phone's position, or the user can enter a location manually. Of course, only garages explicitly participating in the system will be listed, but seeing how everyone has a phone, we could imagine the holdouts losing business at a brisk pace.

[Via The Wireless Report]