If you are an avid reader of this website then you are no doubt aware of the gaming potential behind the iPhone/iPod Touch. Somewhat ironically, it isn’t necessarily the touch screen that gives the handheld wonder its gaming edge, but the built-in accelerometer that adds that extra dimension of interaction. Indeed, in the gaming days dominated by the Wii, movement tracking is becoming almost a necessity (a notion further expounded by the rampant rumour circulating that both Sony and Microsoft are hard at work on Wii-mote like devices for their respected consoles). So what’s a company to do if they want to release a gaming cell phone? Why, add motion tacking of course. Sony announced this week the launching of a brand new line of cell phones called the F-series, starting with the F305.

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The Instinct is Samsung's attempt to usurp the dominance of Apple's iPhone. At least, that's what most folks are believing. On the surface, it looks like if you wish you could get an iPhone but prefer to stick with Sprint (why that would be is anyone's guess) you can set yourself up with an Instinct and get many of the same features of the iPhone--along with a few more that the Almighty Fruit Phone doesn't have. Of course, no phone is perfect, so make sure to stay tuned for the caveat.

Samsung has set up the official site for the SI over at SamsungInstinct.com. It's complete with a flashy Flash interface and all the deets.

To begin with, it's a bit obvious that their design was inspired by everyone's favorite divine telecommunications device (aka the Jesus Phone, aka the iPhone). But how fair can any criticism along those lines be? After all, any device with a touchscreen that foregoes more than one old-fashioned button on its face is going to end up resembling the Almighty iPhone. Of course, it is possible to to get a little more creative with the more minor design details.

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If you're a casual gadget addict, it's possible you've never heard of femtocells and have never heard of any other way for a cell phone to use an Internet connection for calls other than the phone, itself, having the ability to connect to a wifi router. A good portion of the mobile phone industry is comfortable with the idea that cell phones are moving in the direction of WiFi compatibility. However, there is also a movement that supports Femtocells.

Have you ever found your non-wifi-enabled cell phone without any reception at all while at home or the office? Perhaps you work deep in a big cube farm or maybe your boss makes you do your job from inside a Faraday Cage. Or you could have your home office in a particular corner of the world that doesn't have a nearby cell tower with your particular carrier's signal carried on it. Femtocells can fill in that gap.

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OK, laugh a little. The Readius from Polymer Vision is the latest offering in the e-book reader genre of handheld devices and just by looking at it one wonders just how it works. The best known e-book reader available these days is Amazon's Kindle, but to some people, the Kindle is just too big to be practical. The Readius comes in at much smaller. in fact, it's so small, its makers have added mobile phone functionality. However, that's not really the neat thing about this gizmo. The neat thing is that the display screen actually folds away, making the screen larger than the device, itself, when it's not in use.Now, don't get too excited--the display is grayscale and just 5 inches. It's not a touchscreen, so ignore tat urge to compare it to the iPhone. The device is controlled by tapping five physical buttons that correspond to icons on the screen. While it does function as a phone, its lack of a physical keypad, or the aforementioned touchscreen, seems to suggest that you need to dump your contacts onto the the Readius before you can make any calls with it. Perusing the official Readius website betrays no information on how to dial numbers you don't already have loaded.

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Up until recently, using a Bluetooth headset meant looking just a little dorky. To speak wirelessly on your cell phone can still mean sticking something in your ear that looks like a prop from an old Star Trek episode. Listening to stereo music wirelessly means wearing two old Star Trek props. However, Jabra has changed all that. In the past they've produced devices that would free you from using ugly wads of plastic to talk and listen on, like their BT320s. This device resembles a standard Bluetooth headset, only it's clipped to your shirt or jacket, as opposed to your ear. Sporting a built-in microphone, you could then plug in your own headphones and connect the BT320s wirelessly to your phone or Bluetooth-enabled media player.

However, Jabra has done one better than their BT320s by replacing the dorky wad of plastic with something much more cool. Jabra's BT3030 is modeled after a military-style dog tag and as a result is about a thousand times more impressive looking. It does everything a Bluetooth headset should--it connects to a media player and/or your phone and automatically pauses your music when you get a call. Like the BT320s before it, the 3030 has a built-in microphone in the "tag" and allows you to use your own headphones. Sure it sounds perfectly adequate, but sadly, it's not adequately perfect. What's wrong with it? Read on...

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If you are in the US and use Verizon for your mobile phone carrier, it's possible that you're already using Qualcomm's MediaFLO services to stream media to your cell phone via Verizon's VCAST TV service. This would mean that you already had the ability to watch programming from CBS, NBC, Comedy Central, MTV, ESPN, or Nickelodeon. However, even if you are watching streaming media on your Verizon phone, you may be wondering just what the heck MediaFLO really is.

Well, it's actually fairly simple--it's a way of delivering video and audio to cell phones and PDAs using a combination of wireless technologies, most notably the UHF spectrum, which used to be reserved for old-fashioned broadcast television.With the industry-wide move toward digital TV, UHF has been, at least partially, re-purposed for use by technologies other than TVs. Does this mean that your cell phone will eventually function like a tiny TV set? That's kind of the idea. The "FLO" in "MediaFLO" stands for "Forward Link Only" which is just a fancy way of describing the way TV has always worked--one signal, one direction--from the cell tower to your phone (or, as in olden-times, from the TV station's transmitter to your TV). But what would stop just any TV or similarly equipped cell phone from displaying the UHF signal? Don't carriers want to make money off of this service?Of course they do.

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Compact, sleek, elegant; just a few words describing the Joby Zivio, a Bluetooth headset that sports a nifty new design feature. Though the market may seem saturated with choices, Joby hopes to gain an advantage by introducing the first headset with a telescopic microphone, allowing the wearer to precisely place where they want their voice to be picked up. The idea here is to reduce the background noise that accompanies traditional headsets by placing the pick-ip right next ot the source (sounds simple enough). The design itself is quite slim, with the microphone placed on the tip of a collapsible boom. Built into the Zivio is an auto-adjusting system that accounts for microphone gain as the boom is extended or retracted, ensuring that once you have the right position, you also have the right settings.

In terms of the receiving end, the Zivio comes with sets of interchangeable earpieces and soft gel caps that are mounted onto a ball-and-socket joint, offering a diversity of positions to suit your individual needs. Matching the excellent functionality, the Zivio also has great visual appeal; with its compact, slender design and array of colour options, it becomes more of an accessory, than merely a headset.

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The Sony Ericsson K800i is no ordinary cellphone. First off, it’s the first phone to be branded with Sony’s veritable ‘Cyber-shot’ label, meaning superb picture quality, coupled with outstanding features. We’re talking a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and a Xenon flash for realistic photographic light. It also boasts a nifty new feature called BestPic, which allows you to take 9 successive pictures of a subject from which you can select the best one.

One of the cooler features of the K800i is the ability to post pictures directly to your blog from your phone. This is a perfect feature for those traveling or on vacation because you can publish your pics to your blog from anywhere in just seconds. Imagine snapping a picture of yourself beneath the Eiffel Tower, only to share it with family and friends moments later. Speaking of traveling, the K800i supports GSM, meaning global cellular usability.

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