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| Virgin Mobile Shuttle |
Specs » Gallery » |
 Unfortunately, the Virgin Mobile Shuttle we saw was a pre-release unit, so we didn't get a chance to test the Helio apps that have made their way to Virgin Mobile's pre-paid lineup, but we have to say that seeing the Shuttle in person, it kind of made us sad about how this whole Helio deal has gone down. We use Helio phones personally, outside of work, and we'd come to like the high-end feel of the interface and the tight build of the recent Samsung sliders Helio had been selling. The Virgin Mobile Shuttle is a nice phone for Virgin Mobile's lineup, and even though it lacks the polish of a Helio device, the features that it borrows will make more sense for the pre-paid crowd, especially the social networking fans out there who will like the MySpace and Facebook apps and the Buddy Beacon location-based service.
In our hands-on tests, the feature that made the strongest impression was the haptic feedback. There are a slew of touch-sensitive buttons on the front, and if you come close to pressing these you'll get a strong buzz from the Shuttle. Even when we were pressing the few hardware buttons on the front, we got the buzz. The slide didn't feel as tight as the mechanism on Samsung's sliders for Helio, so we're curious to do more hands-on testing to see just where this phone fits in the high-low ends of the market. Release: September 2008. Price: $80.
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| Motorola i576 |
Specs » Gallery » |
 The Motorola i576 is as much about Sprint's continuing commitment to their aging Nextel iDen network as it is about being a rugged, walkie-talkie clamshell phone. It doesn't get the water-proofing of Verizon's G'zOne Boulder, which is too bad, because it's really built like a brick all around. Actually, it's a fairly small phone, so maybe brick is too large for the metaphor, perhaps its more like a small, dense rock. It's about as attractive as a rock, too, with a very large base and a thinner upper half. In person, it's clear this phone could survive a drop from a moving pickup truck, as long as it doesn't fall into a pond on the way down. Release: November 2008. Price: $130.
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| Motorola ROKR EM30 |
Specs » Gallery » |
 The Motorola ROKR EM30 is a baby cousin for the Motorola ROKR E8, and the family resemblance is easy to see. The mode-shifting keypad is there, which shifts from a cool blue set of numeric keys for dialing to a bright red set of music keys for media playback. From there, the ROKR EM30 eschews some of the gimmicks we didn't love on the ROKR E8. The touch sensitive scroll wheel is gone, replaced by a standard 4-way button, and the haptic feedback has been replaced by real buttons, which is an improvement in our books. Otherwise, in person the ROKR EM30 looks and feels very much like the ROKR E8. It's a fairly thick slab phone, about the thickness of Motorola's Q9 devices, if not more thick. We would have liked to see some more improvements in the interface design, especially considering this phone hasn't yet been tied down to any carriers with restrictive requirements, but instead the EM30 gets a fairly plain-looking interface, with a basic media player. Pricing and availability have yet to be announced, but we suspect this won't make its way to our shores anytime soon, unless T-Mobile really loved the original enough to offer a bargain model. Release: September 2008. Price: $250.
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| LG Invision |
Specs » Gallery » |
 LG and Samsung seem to be trading design ideas these days. While Samsung has borrowed the design for LG's Rumor QWERTY phone, the LG Invision keeps things boxy and simple on AT&T's MediaFLO TV service, just like the Samsung Access. It is the smallest MediaFLO phone on the market, but it still requires some extra bulk for the TV hardware, so it isn't a tiny or super-slim phone. Unfortunately, we saw the phone in San Francisco, where AT&T doesn't have broadcast service available, which probably says something about the state of mobile TV in the U.S. In any case, the phone keeps it simple, with a basic AT&T interface and a large, dominating d-pad style navigation button. Release: October 2008. Price: $150.
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