FCC Fridays

Phones
Read - Samsung SGH-i908E
Read - Huawei U1005
Read - Ezze Mobile M3EQ
Peripherals
Read - Motorola H780


Apparently looking to concentrate its efforts on its network infrastructure businesses, UTStarcom has sold off its Personal Communications Division -- the guys pushing the corporate wares to Virgin Mobile, Verizon, and others in North America -- for $240-plus million to a group of private investors. The new company, creatively named Personal Communications Devices, LLC, will keep on doing the same thing with the very same team in place as before, so this looks to be little more than an exchange of some cash and it's back to business as usual. Phones will still be sourced from the UTStarcom mothership, and if that means we can expect some of the more creative stuff we've been seeing lately like the TXT8010, then it's all good by us.
What's the first network to claim a true, full HSPA across all of the United Kingdom? Vodafone? Orange? 3? Nope -- try T-Mobile, which has just flipped the switch on its HSUPA upgrades nationwide to bring upload speeds to a blazing 1.4Mbps (theoretically, anyway). The figured they'd commemorate the occasion by giving download speeds a little boost, too, so those are now up to 7.2Mbps, making Great Britain an absolutely fabulous place to do a little mobile computing right now. Oh, and hey, T-Mobile USA, you could seriously learn a lesson or two from your counterparts across the Atlantic here.
So we heard from a very reliable source that mobile user interface guru Matias Duarte -- who you may know as the man behind the Sidekick and Helio UI / user experiences -- actually left Helio late last year to join up with Palm. Although no announcement was made, we hear he and his gang of designers jumped ship (well before Helio completely flooded) to take on the monumental task of designing the UI for Palm's next-gen mobile OS (aka "Palm OS 2.0 or II"). His resume online now lists him as "Senior Director, Human Interface and User Experience" doing "Something new..." since September 2007; we got in touch with Palm, who confirmed that he's now under the company's employ.






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