Apple is getting ready to launch a portable gaming device this year. Many of you already own it. It's called the iPhone.

The Register is running a rumor piece that posits that the iPhone 3G will be announced before WWDC, opening up space in the keynote for Jobs to introduce an entirely new device. This theory is based mostly on reports that inventory of current model iPhones is low. Surely this means that Apple will be announcing the iPhone 3G soon? Think of all the lost sales!

Apple has thought of the lost sales, I'm sure — sales they'll quickly make up next month if they have ample iPhone 3G stock on the shelves waiting to be slurped by shoppers. No one is going to not buy an iPhone today who wouldn't also buy a better model in a month from now (or at least not enough people to matter). Remember, WWDC is less than a month away.

The next part of the rumor follows: What would Apple announce at WWDC that would supplant the announcement of the iPhone 3G? Why a handheld gaming device, of course, since it's an entertainment market in which Apple has only dabbled. Plus, they registered some gaming trademarks in February, so surely...

Gaming is a big part of Apple's future. I said as much right after the SDK launch, as did both game and Mac developers. But there's no way Apple — just getting ready to complete its first year with its most important new product line — is going to cleave the platform in two just for to add a couple of extra buttons and a directional-pad. Anyone who thinks so has missed the sea change happening in gaming over the last few years, as casual games with simplified interfaces have become the dominant form of videogame play for many consumers.

Apple isn't going to try to fight Nintendo. They don't have to, just like Nintendo no longer has to fight Sony or Microsoft in the home console market. Instead, Apple has several million iPhone and iPod Touch customers already, each of whom will be able to download games over the air to their devices. Apple doesn't need to compete with Sony or Nintendo to grab market from them. Apple just needs to sell games to their customers. And I'm sure they're going to sell a ton, if only because it seems like every indie Mac developer out there is working on a game for the iPhone. The first Peggle on the iPhone is going to net its developer a lot of money.*

We're going to hear a lot more about Apple and gaming over the next couple of years, but it'll be the sort of backdoor success that happens when quality games are released on a device with a clever way to purchase them, not some bastard offshoot that's part iPhone, part PSP. Unless your conception of a gaming platform is something other than "a standardized handheld machine which can play games," the iPhone is a more-than-capable gaming device all by itself.

* Or, you know, actual Peggle from PopCap, which is coming.

In a single, perfectly-shaped act, AT&T proves that cell phone contracts are treated by operators simply as debts to collect. After the initial point of sale, you're just a delinquent lendee that owes them $2,000 or so over 24 months. From the Consumerist:

"Reader Dan writes in to tell us about an AT&T store that wouldn't sell him a phone because he was already an AT&T customer. ... it's strange that the store would be under impression that current customers have to pay more for a product. Isn't that a little counterintuitive?"

They've already got him under a contract. The purpose of pre-paid phones is to get people into contracts later on—a proposition that would explain the credit checks when you buy them. This is why existing customers always pay more for the goodies than do customers yet to be. They calculate that we won't choose the inconvenience of leaving, and that they can therefore squeeze us and drink all our brandy.

AT&T Customer? No Go Phone For You! [Consumerist]

The Internet is so successful as a pornography distribution system that even the once venerable Playboy must expand its brand to include lingerie, t-shirts, plastic training potties and, now, cell phones.

Alcatel's OT-V770A is a shoddy little device, branded with the ubiquitous silhouetted bunny. The specs are appalling: a 1.3 megapixel camera and 10MB of onboard memory, expandable by microSD. But features aren't what Alcatel are banking on to sell this thing: it's the pre-loaded images of Playboy playmates included on the device.

There probably is a cell phone market for obsessive-compulsive masturbators and pornography enthusiasts. Certainly, the iPhone allows you instant access to the Internet's Borges-esque library of infinitely sub-fetishistic pornography, no matter where you are. But even that committed pervert would probably balk at surfing his porn on a 200 pixel screen. The clitoral pink color scheme probably doesn't help any either. But at least any young girls who pick this phone up will have a library of appropriate body-image role models to choose as wallpapers from the get-go!

Is That A Playboy Mobile In Your Pocket? [Pocket Picks]

Crackberry bought an unreleased BlackBerry 9000 from eBay, making them one of the first to try out RIM's latest and greatest. It certainly looks like they addressed my primary gripe about BlackBerry devices: from the interface to the iPhone-influenced case design, the phone looks modern and clean inside and out. [via He Who Grübs]

Many people want their Bluetooth headsets to be as subtle as possible. I am not one of them. In Berlin, there are only two sorts of people who stand in the middle of the streets, loudly talking to themselves, and the sort with whom I would avoid being mistakenly associated tends to wildly jactitate with the DTs when not complaining about the invisible insects crawling all over them. That vibrant, colorful Bluetooth headset, nuzzled in my ear canal? Irrefutable proof that I am not a lunatic. Or at least not by dint of loudly talking to no one.

So I approve of Bluetrek's limited edition Bizz and UFO Bluetooth headsets. Each one is decorated by artist Manuel Angot, and they come in all sorts of lurid patterns and colorful, chromatic swirlings. True, they aren't suitable for any professionals short of the most flamboyant of businessmen, but for the sort of hipsters who like colorful glasses and tech, these are pretty neat. At £79 a pop, though, I think I'll stick with my glitter, feathers and sparkles.

Bluetrek Bluetooth Earpieces [Techdigest]

You already know everything this does, saving the neat edge-to-edge touchscreen. Accept this post's lack of obvious specifications as a kind of half-assed minimalist reflection on this gadget blogger's bafflement at a single, simple fact—it's took the industry more than a year to start cranking the lookalikes out.

Meizu seems suddenly to have been radically agile. Coming soon: something which does what the iPhone does without looking like something from an alternative universe where Apple hired high-school kids with pirated copies of 3D Studio Max instead of Jonathan Ive.

Philips full touchscreen mobile phone [Justamp via Unwired via Engadget]

There's often a certain ambivalence in the message behind iPhone-like handsets, as if the creators aren't sure how to pitch them without admitting they've become market-followers. Sprint and Samsung, however, with their new iPhone vs. Instinct spots, understand that comparisons are necessary. It's what we do, it's what you do, and the only way they can influence it is to do it themselves, loading the matchup with its own bias.

There'll be 5 videos in all, with this GPS ad being the first. The rest are coming on Thursday.

iPhone vs Instinct: GPS [Nowisgood.com]

I'm an apologetic fan of wrist watches that double as cell phones. largely because of a boyhood fascination with Dick Tracy that had my grade school teachers puzzled by the flabby boy with the wild mop of hair and crazed eyes in the back of their classroom, loudly calling APBs into his "radio watch"... which was, in actuality, a He-Man swatch. Leave aside that it makes more sense to use your cell phone as a time piece than it does to use a watch as a cell phone: there's something about shouting, "Hello! John Brownlee here!" at my wrist that appeals to me, even if it is functionally both inconvenient and absurd.

The EP2502 cell phone watch seems a cut above its competitors, though. It's still every lick as ridiculous as you'd expect, but it's actually fairly attractive, featuring an OLED touch screen, a 2 megapixel camera, tri-band support, Bluetooth and even waterproofing. It's being released in just a few days for $250, which seems respectable.

Of course, where these cell phone watches really fall apart is privacy: it's not practical taking your watch off every time you need to answer your phone, which means you'll need to hold your wrist up to your ear like for swathes of time or loudly shout at your wrist in the street while passers-by shoot you alarmed looks. I suspect no one's really going to get into these until they simply function as wearable video conferencing devices. Then we'll all feel like Dick Tracy.

EP2502 OLED WaterProof TriBand Watch Phone [Surprising Gift via Gizmodo]

HTC unveiled in London today its new entry in their Touch line-up of phones, the Touch Diamond: a wonderful phenomenon of iPhone me-tooism that apes all the features of Apple's phone and throws 3G into the mix. That's tentatively exciting until you realize that, by all accounts, the iPhone will have 3G by the time HTC's Touch Diamond gets released. Since HT will be unveiling the Touch Diamond in Europe in June, whether or not the Touch Diamond is the only 3G iPhone-like solution for continentals will have a lot to do with whether or not Apple rolls out iPhone 2 globally all at once.

It's certainly not a shabby looking phone though. It's running Windows Mobile 6.1 with what appears to be an iPhone-ified skin, and features all the rest of the iPhone staples: VGA touch screen, an accelerometer for rotating the screen, and a full-featured web browser (provided by Opera this time; HTC swears that IE6 is also coming, which I'm sure is a prospect that will give us all a big rubbery one). HTC says that YouTube will be supported by an app... I'm assuming that's just YouTube Mobile crap. And, of course, Quad-band HSDPA 7.2.

There's no pricing details yet, but HT is promising it in June as an Orange exclusive. America will get it sometime later, but there's no telling which network it'll be on when it hits the States, though money's certainly against AT&T.

Image: Gizmodo

HTC unveils new HTC Touch Diamond, "not too big, not too small" [Engadget]

Without any ability to pop out one battery and slam in another, the iPhone certainly requires a few on-the-go battery charging solutions. No surprise that your local Apple store is stocked up the wazoo with them, and Kensington's latest offerings are just two more clowns crammed wokka-wokka-style into the telephone booth.

The larger of Kensington's battery packs will give you an extra 100 hours of music and 6 hours of talk time for $70, but the obvious disadvantage is lugging around a battery pack almost the size of the iPhone itself. I have to say, I see little reason to upgrade past Kensington's lither, integrated model: for $50, it gives an extra 30 hours of music and 3 hours of talk time, which should be enough to get you over the hump of the most bladder-bursting of airport tarmac delays.

Kensington unveils Battery pack and Charger for iPhone / iPod [Kensington via Engadget]

Outside of the dramatic gravitas of flipping one open with a burning fire of steely command in my eyes, I'm not a big fan of clamshells. Sadly, RIM's new clamshell Blackberry, the Kickstart, isn't doing anything to change my mind.

There are scant details right now, except it uses a SureType keyboard, has a trackball for navigation and has a design aesthetic inspired by the bubble-gum dispensing clamshells you buy for your four year old daughter at the dollar store. It's hard to tell from the picture but it looks cheap. No price

Let me ask you a question, clamshell enthusiasts. Why do you like flip phones? My M.O. for phones is essentially for them to be as small and light when pocketed as possible: all other considerations are secondary. Do you appreciate clamshells because it allows for bigger keys?

Blackberry launching clamshell model this year [Boy Genius Report]

Some 460 drivers are fined a day in Britain for talking on their cell phones at the wheel. This compares to where I used to live in New Mexico, where 460 state and local representatives are nicked every day for being too plastered to stay in lane.

Using mobiles while driving is so commonplace in the UK that police routinely order checks of call records to see if one was underway at the time of an accident.

The figures were released today by the UK Justice Department, according to The Telegraph, and show that despite the fact it's been illegal to use a mobile phone while driving without a hands-free kit since 2003, it's taking a long time for drivers to get used to the idea.

Tory Party spokesman for roads Robert Goodwill told The Telegraph: "This is a damning indictment of Labour's failure to clamp down on drivers who repeatedly flout the law... Labour's heavy reliance on speed cameras as a cash cow instead of actually properly policing the roads is being exposed."

Being a Brit in America, I'm somewhat used to in-car cellphone use being either perfectly legal or completely unenforced. To me, it seems no more distracting than talking to the passenger, watching the in-dash DVD player or reading the newspaper on I-279. Damn the nanny state!

Police nick 460 a day for using mobiles while driving [The Register]

Fortune's Techland blog is reporting that a source close to Apple is claiming that the upcoming 3G iPhone will be sold at a $200 discount by AT&T... if you sign up for a two-year contract. In other words, standard rugby for cell phone companies... sell the phones cheap or give them away for free, then make your money back from a subscription.

Interestingly, the source claims that you won't be able to get this deal from an Apple store, but only from AT&T directly. Also, it'll be locked so you can't take it to another carrier... or will be for about five minutes before the Internet figures out the newest way to hack it.

All the other usual rumors are confirmed by the source: early June, 3G and GPS. They will still apparently come in only 8GB and 16GB flavors, although that seems a bit hard to believe to me, given the iPod Touch comes with up to 32GB. Finally, in keeping with Apple's design philosophy, if you can't figure out a way to improve its looks, make it thinner: the 3G iPhone will allegedly be 2.5 mm thinner than the original.

Take with the usual grain of salt, but it all parses.

AT&T to cut the price of Apple's New iPhone [Techland]

Canada will get its iPhone soon, writes The Star's Chris Sorensen, with a deal being struck between Apple and the only local GSM network, Rogers Communications.

“We're thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year,” said Ted Rogers, the cable giant’s CEO, in a short statement. "We can't tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.”

I guess those trademark disputes with the owner of the iPhone trademark in Canada are all wrapped up, then. Right? Right!

Apple's popular iPhone coming to Canada [The Star via TUAW]

Vertu makes expensive cellphones. Veptu it it's cheap Chinese clone.

If nothing else, it's a more flattering celebration of 10 years in business than yet another tasteless slab of bling.

Vertu gets cloned in China, christened Veptu! [Born Rich]

What does it say when something is advertised as "beautiful to use?" Spooling out the standard cynical thread would be to assume that Nokia's new 6600 and 3600 are simply hideous, its makers so dry-mouthed with panic that reverse psychology must be deployed to sell them.

But they are not ugly, even if they do offer specifications that could be produced by a Select Committee on Determining the Specifications for the World's Most Banal Cellphone. (Lord McSnorry's report: 3G, 2mp camera, 2.1" display, slider keypads with a clamshell options, made of plastic, swooping curved proportions, offered in an odd color but available in black.)

In what possible manner could something like a phone be beautiful other than in its design or use-functionality? Is it beautiful to animals? Beautiful to skip on scenic lakes? Beautiful to devour with Worcestershire sauce?

Press Release [Nokia]

LG's new phone, the Secret, gives the double deuce to single mega-pixel cellphone cameras with a five megapixel sensor. Yeah, yeah. But more interesting is the promised ability to record DivX movies at up to 120 frames per second using the phone. Of course, you won't be able to save much to its slim 100MB drive, but you can expand the Secret's capacity with an SD card. Even cooler: it's apparently possible to edit the video on the phone's screen.

I suspect that last feature won't be a lot of fun to use, but I think it is a great idea. The Secret is obviously trying to appeal to vidcasters and the like. The next iPhone should take this approach: a decent video cam and the ability to edit videos with a portable version of iMovie, then upload your completed video over 3G to YouTube Mobile.

As for LG's Secret, I for one welcome the coming age of high-resolution cellphone porn movies. No pricing available yet.

LG Secret [Official Site]

Vertu's latest issue proves again that the rarefied world of luxury gadgets is impervious to good taste. It's been selling cellphones aimed at lottery winners for ten years now, and offers the "Rococo Constellation" in celebration of this achievement.

Offered in blandly loud colors and featuring designs modeled on the dessicated ropes of snot left when a slugtrail dries in the morning sun, these new models aim to conjour the elaborate whimsy of a late 18th-century French masterpiece.

Vertu Constellation Rococo Collection[Sybarites via Crave]

If you're looking for a new phone and not adverse to jumping cellular motherships, Amazon is having a deal today only: every single one of their phones only costs a penny, today only.

The caveat: when they say every single phone, they don't mean the iPhone. Other caveat: you will, of course, have to sign up for a two-year AT&T contract. But there's plenty of new phones — including some Blackberries and SmartPhones. And if you play your rebates right, you can even make $150.00 by the time you get your phone. Hey, every little bit helps to counter the contract hell that is the state of the American cell phone market.

All AT&T Phones--One Penny [Amazon]

As my poor relationship with Sprint continues—I just tried to activate a new line with an old phone we already own, a Sprint Katana, but it was 'unable' to do so—The Consumerist has a doozy on America's third-largest cellular carrier. Allegedly, anonymous-sourcedly, Sprint's reps are under instructions not to write quotations from customers in notes. This is because such notes can be used by customers in lawsuits as evidence.

If true, it's probably best seen not as some new act of raving evil, but simply as a subtle reminder of how Sprint views its relationship with its customers.

Sprint Reps No Longer Allowed To Quote Customer In Quotes In Case Of Subpoena? [The Consumerist]

Disappointed with the predictability of the victors in the recent spectrum auction, which saw AT&T and Verizon walking away with 70% of the up-for-grabs airwaves, Representative Anna G. Eshoo (Gesundheit! Wokka wokka!) wants the FCC to auction off the 2155-2175Mhz band. The catch?

The winner would have to use the spectrum to create a nationwide wireless Internet service that is available to the public at no cost, automatically blocks access to pornographic content, and is fully open to third-party device manufacturers.

"Automatic blocking of pornographic content?" Pass the magic jaybone, lady. Even eliminating the technical impossibility of automatic porn blocking, if our recent Rule 34 Challenge proved anything, it is that there is nothing under the sun that isn't porn for someone.

Lawmaker calls for no-cost, porn-free, wireless 'Net access [Ars Technica]

Skype has just introduced an unlimited international calling plan which will allow users to make as many calls as they like to the 34 countries most likely to be vaporized in the first nuclear strike of World War 3. The deal seems pretty good at a paltry $10. But is it really?

As I've mentioned before, I'm an American living abroad. Most of my friends, family and colleagues are overseas. This means I make a lot of phone calls to America, from calling up my buddies to poll them on how I should have reacted when a new German girlfriend forged a Pollock on my chest during coitus, to ringing up Mommy before bed time for my evening lullabye, I spend hundreds of minutes on the phone to America every month. So this deal would, at first blush, seem to be made for me.

But Skype's price per minute between Germany and the US is 2 cents. In fact, it seems to be about 2 cents per minute to all the countries supported by the subscription plan, which means you need to do spend more than 500 minutes a month on the phone with another country to benefit from this deal. Those looking for a more affordable way to call up Diego Garcia ($1.86 a minute!) will be out of luck.

Skype to sell unlimited international calls for $9.95/month [Yahoo]

My last mobile was a Motorola Razr, and shortly after I bought it, I called up Joel, bragging about my new purchase. "Aren't you a precious and unique snowflake?" he responded, his voice dripping with contempt. I have since had the opportunity to parrot that back to him as his Herculean resolve not to buy an "inferior EDGE iPhone" and "wait for Rev 2" lasted all of a single day.

But I digress. It didn't take me long to begin to notice the problems with my Razr, prompting me to carve A.M.'s infamous hate monologue into the back of the phone with a tiny jeweler's screwdriver. What a piece of shit: all style, no substance, with a UI design that hearkens back to the moon man logic of a Roberta Williams adventure game. ^*

Over at Gizmodo, another disillusioned Razr owner, Addy Dugdale, has written a marvelous little essay about her sadomasochistic relationship with her phone over the last three years (three years? God bless her. I barely topped out at one.)

This part, in particular, made me nod with grim understanding:

I can't even lose it, like older more beloved phones. I left the RAZR in a club a couple of months ago, and I'd made it halfway down the block when some guy came running up behind me. "You left this on the bar," he wheezed. (Everyone in Spain smokes, and I'm a fast walker.) As he palmed the RAZR back into my hand, I could swear there was a look of pity on his face.

It really is the Monkey's Paw of cellular phones.

Alas, Poor Razr, I Knew Ye Well [Gizmodo]

^* — It has been a while, so I may not have the exact details right, but as I recall, when you sent a text message on the Razr, it had two screens: message entry and then a confirmation screen. On the message entry screen, the right upper-most button was assigned to "OK." On the confirmation screen, this same button was assigned to "Cancel," which would quit you to the main menu, your message unsaved. This made it easy to accidentally delete text messages. "OK TO SEND?" OK. "REALLY OK?" OK! "MESSAGE DELETED." Fuck you, Motorola.

Think you have it bad as a residential customer? Businesses get it much worse.

I posted a while back about getting WiFi from my home to my office. It's not going well, even with a directional antenna from MacWireless.com to replace my homebrewed cruft. So I decided to call Verizon and get DSL hooked up in the small, 350 square ft. office unit. Verizon, however, doesn't really want my business, describing a host of setup fees, contingency fees and high prices that could result in a $470 bill, plus taxes and fees, in my first month.

Read on for the breakdown, as explained to me by an otherwise very helpful and friendly CSR.

Samsung has announced that they have developed a new kind of cell phone battery powered by water and a hydrogen cartridge. Crave explains:

Here's how it works: When the handset is switched on, reaction between metal and water in the phone produce hydrogen gas. This is then channeled to the fuel cell, where it reacts with oxygen in the air to generate power.

Samsung says the new battery could last for up to 10 hours. Based on four hours of use daily on average, the hydrogen cartridge would have to be replaced about every five days.

Sounds good, but wake me up when I can simply pull out the little plastic tab and recharge my cell phone by putting it under the faucet, like a cheap squirt gun.

Samsung: Water-powered cell phones by 2010 [Crave]

Although the iPhone handles just wonderfully without a stylus, there is a small but vocal contingent of people who want one.

Perhaps these people do a lot of text entry on their iPhones and require an instrument of heightened dexterity. Maybe they are old Palm Pilot or Pocket PC users who just miss the feel of a stylus in their hands. Or maybe they are people who regularly need to hand their iPhones over to friends who cover the sleek touchscreen with their foul drippings... the sort of friends who don't wash their hands or wipe properly, yet are always touching your stuff, covering your pretty things in their fecal encrustations, until you just can't STAND it anymore and you just want to put your hands around their gobbling thoraxes and squeeze, squeeze, SQUEEZE until their faces go purple and their protruded eyeballs flop around their bloated cheeks and you NEVER have to worry about them touching your stuff EVER again.... for ever and ever and ever FOREVER.

For people like that, enter the iPhone Soft-Touch Stylus. It's an aluminum stylus with a soft rubber tip guaranteed not to scratch or damage your iPhone. I like the picture of it in action: it looks delightfully smooshy to use. $12.99 will get you one, although without a little stylus holster drilled into the iPhone itself, you're just going to lose it.

Soft-Touch Stylus [Daydeal.com]

MagicJack, a cheapie $20-a-year internet phone service, comes with a shriveled and shaking devil EULA.

"You also understand and agree that use of the magicJack device and Software will include advertisements and that these advertisements are necessary for the magicJack device to work ... Our computers may analyze the phone numbers you call in order to improve the relevance of the ads"

...

Any claims, legal proceeding or litigation arising in connection with the magicJack device or Software will be resolved by binding arbitration ... in Palm Beach, Florida."

Oh God, not Palm Beach!

In short, it not only has one agree to ads with its paid-for system, but claims that the ads are necessary for it to work. It will also snoop on your calls to target ads more accurately, and has you sign away your legal right to take it to court if it defrauds or otherwise harms you. Delightful.

Neither the EULA itself, nor any other privacy or legal information, can be easily found at its homepage. It's not even provided at the point of sale, where one enters credit card info, email and street addresses as such, so as to gain access to the service and have your MagicJack dongle delivered. I found the EULA's URL through Google.

It gets sexier. When you access MajicJack's instant web help pag