All of your friends have jumped onto the musicphone bandwagon, but you're not quite prepared to abandon your trusty iPod in favor of another device with poorer audio quality and smaller storage capacity. Hookup by Lenntek provides a wireless connection between your Apple player and your Bluetooth-enabled cell phone, automatically toggling between streaming music and accepting mobile calls.The wireless Hookup remote gives you all the standard iPod controls you need -- play, pause, volume, forward and reverse -- but it adds the ability to swtich to an incoming call when you need to. The biggest selling feature, though, is the "cool blue slow pulsing LED."
Hookup retails for $130 and is available now.
The next-generation musical offering from Motorola is the E690 -- known as the ROKR E6 in some circles -- and this Linux-powered smartphone with a touchscreen interface has just received the all important stamp of approval from the FCC. We reported on this nifty (and presumably skinny) phone early last month, and it doesn't seem like all that much has changed in the meantime. 
Considering that the current Sony PlayStation Portable has been on the market since September 2004, it only makes sense that electronics giant give this handheld multimedia machine a bit of a boost. According to Kotaku, Sony will be revitalizing the PSP brand with two new models this coming Spring, with one boasting 8GB of on-board flash memory, while the other will rock a hard drive of undetermined capacity.
That's the latest rumor coming out of Think Secret. We're not only going to be treated to a regular musicphone; word is that a full QWERTY'd-out business tool is in the works as well, complete (naturally) with iTunes integration. This new smartphone will make it easy for you to enjoy Apple's new iTunes Movie Store offerings, but you can still take care of your day-to-day work-related tasks as well. There is also a distinct possibility that this new handset will rock WiFi capabilities as well. The Zune can share tunes, but the iSmartphone can make calls. That is, if it's for real. We'll probably find out at January's MacWorld. 
Satellite radio just keeps getting better and better, and the receivers keep getting smaller and smaller.
The battle for mobile operating system supremacy continues. Some enjoy the familiarity Windows Mobile 5, others love the open source-ness of Linux. Symbian fanatics will soon have another option, because Samsung has just introduced the SGH-i520 smartphone, running on Symbian OS 9.2, Series 60 v3.1. This isn't the first Symbian-powered Samsung for Europe, it's the fourth.
There's no denying what the main purpose of this handset is. The circular keypad on the Smart S100 is immediately reminiscent of the iPod's click wheel, but the telephony part isn't exactly an afterthought. It's pretty darn skinny at just 7.7 millimeters, but they've managed to shove in a fair smattering of features including a 2 megapixel camera, 160 x 128 OLED display, and USB (2.0?) connectivity. It is a shame, though, that this GSM candybar is just a dual-bander and it's the wrong two frequencies for us poor saps in North America (it runs on 900MHz and 1800Mhz). No word on price.
Huge seven-inch displays in your car are nothing new, but this is the first time that I've heard of a head unit quite like this. Pioneer has five new "HDD Raku Navi" models, all of which come loaded with a 30GB hard drive that will keep your head bobbing for hours on end, while ensuring that you are staying on the right path to the ski chalet.
Sony is looking to steal a little of Apple's thunder by designing a video-capable Walkman. The bigwigs at Sony aren't talking all that much; they're just throwing up trial balloons.
If all goes well for Microsoft, the Zune will be just as much a hit as the rival iPod, and a big part of that success will the proliferation of random accessories and speaker docks. The Zune has not yet hit the market, but it seems like the flood gates are already opening, starting with a standard issue speaker dock from the folks at Altec Lansing. Some people may call PhotoShop, but I wouldn't doubt that something like this -- if not exactly identical -- is in works. No more details have been revealed at this point.
This new iPod accessory is yet another hookup for your home entertainment system. The fun here is that you can control the whole thing, including volume, from the iPod.
The skinny smartphone market is getting awfully crowded these days, even if we all realize that being slim doesn't provide enough marketing muscle in and of itself. Samsung is trying to make a big splash in the segment with the announcement of the SGH-i760 smartphone, powered by Windows Mobile 5 and rocking a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. In this way, you get a huge PDA-esque color touchscreen, while keeping text entry a breeze.
RCA Thomson is expanding their Lyra line again, this time with the X3030, an apparent upgrade to the previously announced X3000. This pocket-sized personal media player boasts a full 30 gigs of on-board storage, giving you enough space to store "dozens of movies, hundreds of hours of music, and thousands of photos, all in the palm of your hand."
Do you know what you're looking at? It sure looks like an iPod pillow, something you'd lay your head on and dream of being lullabied to sleep. Or maybe, it's a comfy way to celebrate your love of music.
Samsung is all fired up about its 10-megapixel multimedia camera phone. The SCH-B600 has a lot of functionality and a price tag to match.
The Samsung X838 is, yes, a mobile phone with all kinds of regular-issue phone functionality. It hides that function-driving keypad behind the LCD and click-wheel interface, which can swivel out of the way to make room for mundane things like taking and making calls. (That swivel, in fact, goes all the way around the circle, so you could approximate a double-length candy bar if you wanted to.)
Motorola is testing out their innovative new operating system in the ROKR e2, but how does this menu setup stack up against the competition? Is this JavaLinux system an improvement over the old interface? PhoneScoop got their dirty little hands on an e2 to fiddle with, and in the end, they conclude that it is "still basically the same OS", despite being slightly more user friendly and having a couple of extra features. As far as the rest of the specs are concerned, the ROKR e2 rocks a 1.3 megapixel cam, FM tuner, expansion slot, USB 2.0, and Bluetooth. 
TDK is keeping busy these days with developing optical media, and it's obvious which side of the next-gen battle they have decided to align themselves with. First, we heard the announcement of a mini BD-R capable of storing 16.5 GB of data, and now we see the manufacturer hit up the other end with the unveiling of a one-sided, six-layered Blu-ray disc that'll stash an incredible 200 gigabytes. That's bigger than my hard drive. Interestingly, this six-layered wonder is only four times the capacity of a regular BD-R. Either way, this is a far cry from the 4.7GB we're used to with single-layer DVD+/-Rs.
I love touchscreen interfaces. They're just so nifty (and so versatile). The Synaptics Mobile concept phone -- dubbed the Onyx in some circles -- is one high-tech device, packing in touch-sensitive capacitors and, of course, that wonderful touchscreen. Add gesture recognition to that package and you've surely got a winner, right?
Hitachi is really packing things in—to storage discs, that is. 
I'm sorry. Fingerprint sensors just aren't as sexy as they were a few months ago. They're not exactly commonplace yet, but they're not really enough to set yourself apart from the competition either. That said, biometric protection is still a lovely feature to have, and it appears to be the primary selling point for the Mercury Data ES-SBD2 Bio Disk. There's no actual storage here -- you'll have to supply your own 2.5-inch hard disk drive -- but it does come with a fingerprint reader "to encrypt and protect your data." The styling cues, well, they're basically non-apparent. Let's just hope it comes cheap.
The whole point of wearing headphones is to be able to hear what's coming through the 'phones or 'buds. If you hear too much from outside, you might as well be listening to exterior speakers.
A phone that's the size of a Flash drive. That's the Vonage V-Phone.
Nokia has gone back to the well and come out with an even more sports-friendly model, the 5500 Sport Music Edition. This one has a voice.
I know. Everyone loves slim, even when it comes to some hot and heavy smartphone action. You will soon have a reasonable alternative to the Motorola Q, because the almighty paper signers at the FCC have given their stamp of approval to the Samsung SGH-i607. We're expecting this QWERTY'd-out wonder to hit Cingular's line-up sometime in Q3, complete with its Windows Mobile 5 operating system, 1.3 megapixel camera, 320 x 240 color display, Bluetooth, microSD expansion, HSDPA, and maybe even some Wi-Fi for good measure. No pricing has been announced yet, though.
Sharp is expected to release a high tech portable translator by the end of the year. The small handheld device can translate spoken English into spoken Japanese and vice versa (presumably it will be capable of other languages as well). The device runs IBM speech recognition software that normally runs on PCs. It is similar to a devise called the Pharselator which the U.S. military has been using since 2003. The unnamed device is expected to cost about $500 when it is released.
Accton has unveiled its first certified Wi-Fi phone for Skype, the VM1185T. The official Skype certification means that Skype has determined that it works well with their software and is easy to use.
They're still prototypes at this point, so don't expect an official roll-out anytime soon, but these two handsets from NTT DoCoMo are pretty darn hot, considering that they support digital radio in glorious 5.1 surround sound. After all, cell phones aren't just communication devices anymore; they are just as important for their picture-taking, music-jamming, and video-playing capabilities. The first prototype appears to have a double fold-out design with some rather colorful accents, whereas the other takes on a RAZR-esque slim profile paired with a silky smooth keypad. Both phones are on display at the CEATAC Japan trade show.
