It's not clear if its recently acquired group messaging firm, Beluga, had anything to do with it or not, but Facebook has branched out further into the increasingly crowded messaging space today with the announcement of a separate Facebook Messenger app. Available for iPhone and Android, the app lets you send messages directly to individual friends or groups, which they'll of course receive instantly (a la BBM, Huddle for Google+, ... Read More

The Motorola PHOTON 4G is a high-end Android phone for Sprint customers. For those who don't have an upgrade to spare, or just cannot afford to make a switch, Motorola might be able to bail you out. A new contest that the manufacturer is calling the Lightning Hour, will run from now through August 31st and gives players one hour to enter every day. At least one handset will be given ... Read More

Want the Samsung Galaxy S II so badly that you can't wait for it to be offered by your carrier? Well, if you are an AT&T or T-Mobile customer and don't mind spending the money, an unlocked version of the phone offered right now by Newegg will let you use the pipelines belonging to the two GSM mobile operators (although AT&T users will have 3G only). The unit, available from ... Read More

Three torches, two form factors, one goal: silence the critics. Research In Motion on Wednesday unveiled three new additions to the popular Torch family, the Torch 9810, the Torch 9850 and the Torch 9860. The latter two handsets are GSM and CDMA variants of the same device, a full touchscreen smartphone that hopes to pick up where the Storm series left off. Launching later this month with AT&T, the Torch ... Read More

The sleek, slender smartphone pictured above is absolutely not Apple’s next-generation iPhone. It is entirely possible, however, that the iPhone 5 could feature the same design. Images of a fake iPhone 5 were published this past weekend by gizchina.com, and they show a strikingly thin 7mm-thick handset that has all the makings of an Apple design. The device itself is certainly not built of the same high-quality materials or components ... Read More

Albino Nexus S, meet your better specced, bleached out, dual-core nemesis -- the mythical white Samsung Galaxy S II. The leaked snap is certainly timely, coming in only one day after a UK retailer promised the colorless beast would go on sale August 15th. We can't vouch for that, but we do know US peeps can now sign-up for "more info" on Sammy's website, so stateside GSII fans should be ... Read More

Pricing for the LG Thrill 4G popped up on Radio Shack's corporate systems a few days ago, at $80 with a two-year contract. AT&T just shared its official Thrill pricing, however, with the glasses-free 3D smartphone commanding a healthy $99 at the company's retails stores when it ships "in the coming weeks. " That timeframe meshes nicely with the August 7th launch date that a pair of Radio Shack insiders shared ... Read More

T-Mobile on Thursday announced the imminent launch of its latest Android smartphone, the HTC Wildfire S. While the Wildfire brand is much better known outside the U.S., this tiny smartphone definitely packs a punch compared to other affordable Android options. Specifications include a 3.2-inch touchscreen display, a 5-megapixel camera, a 600MHz Qualcomm processor, Android 2.3 Gingerbread and HTC’s Sense UI — all in a 3.99 x 2.34 x 0.49-inch package that ... Read More

Samsung will launch its wildly successful Galaxy S II handset in the United States in next month, Yonhap News reported on Wednesday. “We expect to release the Galaxy S2 in the U.S. market sometime in August,” Shin Jong-kyun, Samsung’s president of mobile business and digital imaging recently told media. The original Galaxy S launched on each of the four major carriers in the United States, as well as on some of ... Read More

Apple released iOS 4.3.4 on Friday in an effort to fix a security vulnerability that was present on both the iPhone and the iPad. The fix was supposed to prevent hackers from using a PDF security hole to jailbreak both devices. That didn’t quite work. The next day iPhone Dev Team was able to route around the security fix and issued a jailbreak tool for iOS 4.3.4. iPhone Dev Team has ... Read More