There's no telling what sort of crazy behind-the-scenes negotiations had to take place in order for our good friend Boy Genius to get his hands on the very first retail T-Mobile-branded BlackBerry 8220 we've seen in the wild -- and let's be honest, the whole unboxing takes on a sexier tone when there's an element of intrigue to it, doesn't it? Mr. Genius flatly pans the thing for having a pair of awful screens and a prototype feel (despite the fact that he's got a final production unit), so odds are the Bold owners out there aren't going to be throwing fits of jealousy any time soon. To top it off, the contents of the box are about as exciting as flannel underwear (we guess it's cool that RIM saw fit to throw in a pair of headphones), so don't expect too much. At least it'll be available in a few colors, right?

Welcome to Incrudo country, gentlemen. Out here, we grow chest hair as bushy as the tumbleweed, and we like our phones built thick. We're not talkin' no ordinary thick, either, no sir -- give us 2 to 3mm of solid titanium casing here. We like our phones heavy, too; a half pound sounds about right. We didn't get these burly muscles wrasslin' cattle just to tote around a Samsung X820, if you know what we're saying. Make it look like a brick, because it's built like a brick. Just like us, because we're men. Incrudo men.

[Via Unwired View]

We've been holding off on running this until we got confirmation from Samsung on just what was going on, and now we have it; it's official, folks -- the Instinct's latest firmware update is all about the browser. To quote Sammy, "most of the traits of this upgrade focus on improving the Web browser experience," and the word on the street seems to be in line with that with faster page loading and generally fewer crashes being reported across the board. As best we can tell, it doesn't solve every last issue in the book, but it's awesome to see that Sprint and Samsung seem to be staying on top of this stuff. Have an Instinct? Sound off on comments with your update experiences.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Yeah, the wait for October 22 (or after) is absolutely excruciating; trust us, we know. We'll take every scrap of information and imagery we can to hold us over until G1s start showing up on doorsteps in a few weeks, but T-Mobile's really gone above and beyond the call of duty here by setting up a surprisingly functional and feature-complete emulator to satisfy our urges to touch icons and click buttons. Obviously, you're not going to get a GPS lock, so don't get your hopes up that you're going to be playing around with Street View or anything wild like that -- in fact, most apps lead you to a "this screen is not fully functional" message -- but it's got more goodies than the Android SDK's emulator, and it's just enough to get you acquainted with the phone's personality by the time it's actually in your paws.

[Via Cell Phone Signal]

Now that Sony Ericsson's mighty X1 has earned the FCC's love and affection, you won't be an outlaw for using one in the States -- but unfortunately, you won't be a speed demon everywhere, either. The version that just nabbed approval here is the X1i, and anyone familiar with Sony Ericsson's naming scheme can tell you that an "i" means a phone's not really meant for North American consumption; in this case, we're lucky to squeak by with UMTS Band II support, which means we'll theoretically be able to pick up some of AT&T's 1900MHz signal. On 850, though, you'll be stuck with EDGE. Of course, a true global launch has been in the cards for the X1 from day one, and we're not worried that we won't see a more 3G-rife model getting torn down by the feds -- this just ain't it.

So much for Amazon's attempts to quell Kindle 2 rumors, eh? Talk of a replacement (or a pair of replacements) for Amazon's popular -- but very oddly-styled -- e-reader has been in the mix seemingly since the first model started shipping, and Boy Genius Report has scored shots of something that certainly looks like it could be in the legitimate pipeline. The revised device appears to address complaints over the original's look head-on, rounding the corners and ditching the oddball angles; the scroll wheel has been replaced with a joystick, the SD slot is gone (don't worry, there's at least a gig and a half on-board), and around back, we have grills that seem to suggest integrated stereo speakers. The display is basically the same size -- no color here yet, sorry -- so unless the sharp edges on your first-gen piece are driving you batty, it looks like this could be safely skipped by current owners while roping in new buyers who wouldn't have considered it before. Thing is, was ditching the scroll wheel and that trick mirrored bar in favor of a joystick really the right way to go?

So the good news is that T-Mobile has decided to keep right on taking pre-orders for the G1 through October 21, just one day before the handset's official launch. The bad news, though, is that it doesn't mean you'll be getting your Android on come October 22. Turns out that the initial allotment of G1s set aside for pre-orders is now sold out completely, and any names taken between now and launch will be allotted phones being shipped "at a later date." It's not clear if a "later date" means a week, a month, or a decade after the 22nd, but for the sake of everyone involved, we hope its the former.

Update: T-Mobile's site says that pre-orders taken from here on out will be delivered "as early as November 10," so it looks like you early birds are going to have a nice little period of exclusivity. Thanks, everyone!

It's a beautiful autumn day, and you're out in the wooded path beyond the railroad tracks just taking it all in and killing some time. Hey, what's that? Why, it's the cutest bunny rabbit you've ever seen! Time to pull out that 8-megapixel C905 and... oh, this sucks, you actually have to press a button to zoom in and out! Screw this noise -- you're a visionary photographer, not a manual laborer. Happily, Sony Ericsson feels your pain, and a new patent application reveals that they're hard at work on a system to control your cameraphone's zoom level simply by moving it back and forth. Just get the phone closer to the subject, and boom, welcome to telephoto city, population one. We're still totally cool with the old-fashioned way of capturing Pulitzer-winning shots, but we're happy that someone's thinking of this type of stuff so we don't have to -- that'd be work.

[Via Unwired View]

Every so often, Nokia will pop out a brick-like beast of a clamshell smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard -- a black sheep in Espoo's lineup in every sense of the word. These so-called Communicators even had their own custom Symbian-based operating system, Series 80, until the E90 came around and brought 'em in line with the rest of the S60 crowd. Of course, S60 just took a big leap to the world of touch today, and that means the E90's starting to fall a bit behind -- so what's next? Nokia dropped a little teaser during its webcast today in the form of a stylized touch-based concept bearing strong family ties to the E90 and its ancestors, suggesting S60 5th Edition won't spell doom for the form factor. If it materializes, history suggests it won't be a mainstream device -- but if the real thing can look as good as this render, who knows?

In what can only be described as the fastest and most exhilarating one minute, twenty-two seconds of our lives, RIM and Vodafone have thrown together a promotional video for the upcoming Storm that touches on most of the handset's high points: mobile music, GPS, desktop-grade browsing, streaming video, expandable memory, and -- get this -- voice and data ("it can do two things at once," we're triumphantly told). Now, bear in mind this is a Vodafone video, not Verizon, so that "two things at once" claim probably isn't going to hold water when you're hooked up to Big Red's EV-DO Rev. A -- but the remainder of the factoids in the flashy, seizure-inducing commercial should apply. Follow the break for the covertly-shot material, if your sensitive eyes can take the kind of sensory punishment that only this much primary color and enterprise compatibility can deliver.

[Via CrackBerry]

For those of you who firmly believe that Verizon plus Motorola plus touchscreen equals pure, unadulterated bliss, heads up: we have a bit of information that might be of interest to you. phoneArena has scored a screen shot of what appears to be some promotional material for Moto's upcoming MING-esque doohickey, the Krave ZN4 -- and it looks like we'll be shelling out about $150 on a two-year contract for the honor of carrying one in our knockoff Louis Vuitton backpacks. Not a bad price for a phone clearly designed to rest toward the upper end of Verizon's non-smartphone lineup, we suppose, and we'll admit that it's looking better in this dolled-up promo shot than it was last time we saw it. Separately, they've landed pricing for the Moto VU204, a basic flip that's probably not going to turn as many heads as the Krave; that one is going to go out the door for $29, and you'll get three free with the purchase of the first for the ultimate four-pack of mediocrity. We don't have a solid line on when these are coming to market, but the Krave's still a possibility for this month.

The 5800 XpressMusic is stealing the lion's share of the spotlight today, but the first S60 5th Edition handset out there actually isn't the first to get hooked up with Nokia's all-you-can-eat Comes With Music service. That honor will instead go to the lowly 5310 XpressMusic candybar, which will get access to about 2 million track downloads when it hits Carphone Warehouse in the UK in prepaid form for £130 (about $228) on October 16, a day earlier than rumored. Other models will have to wait, though Comes With Music versions of the N95 8GB and 5800 are both planned.

While it may not be Nokia's first touchscreen phone (anyone out there remember the 7710?), the 5800 XpressMusic is certainly the first to come out of Finland with a mainstream appeal. What we've alternately known as the "Tube" throughout much of its development cycle is the first production device to run S60 5th Edition -- the fourth major overhaul of Nokia's ubiquitous smartphone platform since 2002 and the first to support fingers, styli, and high-res displays. Speaking of high-res displays, the 5800 comes equipped with an impressive 3.2-inch 640 x 360 resistive touchscreen to go along with its 3.2-megapixel autofocus cam, Carl Zeiss optics, dual LED flash, GPS, WiFi, 3.5mm jack, and a microSD slot with support for 16GB cards. It'll be available in three versions -- European HSDPA, North American HSDPA, and GSM only -- and ships this quarter in black, red, and blue for €279 (about $392) unlocked with an 8GB card thrown in for good measure. Music fans with voracious appetites for new tunes might want to hold out, though, for the Comes With Music-equipped version that follows on "early next year" at a to-be-announced price.

It goes without saying that any company hooked up with Android's patron saint -- the Open Handset Alliance -- has at least a passing interest in actually doing something with Android, and in Motorola's case, we're going to go out on a limb here and say that, you know, in all likelihood, they were fixin' to drop an Android build onto a phone or two at some point down the road. Indeed, BetaNews has received a brief, largely unhelpful statement from Moto saying that it "look[s] forward to delivering great products in partnership with Google and the Open Handset Alliance community," which -- in light of the recent Android hiring frenzy alleged on Moto's campus -- is about the minimum amount of disclosure a company could make shy of saying nothing at all. While it probably stings from their perspective to see HTC get all the glory for the first Google-ified phone out of the gate, let's hope (for their sake, if nothing else) that this stealth-mode, take-our-time philosophy leads to some killer material out of Schaumburg down the road.

[Via Talk Android]

Let's be straight: nothing says "I'm a successful businessperson" quite like a dock for your smartphone. You know, smack in the middle of that solid oak desk of yours -- the one in the corner office. What, you say your fancy new BlackBerry Bold doesn't have connections for a proper dock? Well, hell, you've got hair plugs, spray-on tan, and a house in the Hamptons you can't afford, so why not take the charade to the next level? USB Fever's fabulously generic $20 cradle for the Bold will at least charge the thing, but if you want to get all crazy and sync up with your PC, you've got to suffer the indignance of a USB cable (coiled for your convenience) flopping off the side. Should look real professional next to the red Swingline and that stupid "Teamwork" perpetual motion rowing thing of yours, sport. You know what we're talking about.

[Via Gear Diary]