AT&T landed another Nokia S60 device today, and some of its hardware reminds me of the old Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. The Nokia Surge is being touted as a “socially supercharged smartphone” probably due to the full, slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard and the squarish directional pad seem borrowed and matured from the N800 line to me. But don’t mistake this for an Internet tablet alone. It’s a full smartphone that’s 3G-capable as well. At only $79.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate, it’s not going to compete with Nokia’s E71x or other high-end smartphones, but it looks capable enough for someone stepping up from a feature-phone:

• Quad band GSM, dual-band WCMDA/HSDPA
• Symbian S60 platform, v3.2
• 128MB internal memory, 8GB expansion via microSD slot
• 2.4″ QVGA display with auto screen rotation
• Integrated GPS, Bluetooth 2.0 +EDR, with AD2P support
• 2 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom
• Full HTML browser with Flash support
• Email support with Mail for Exchange 2.9
• Support for AT&T services: Navigator, Mobile Music, VideoShare
• JuiceCaster is pre-loaded to share vids and pics from the phone to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr

For folks finding their feature phone not quite up to snuff for social networking, mail and browsing, the Surge looks like a nice entry point into the smartphone market for under $100. I don’t like the 2.5mm headphone jack, but I do appreciate the dedicated buttons on the front of the unit.

We’ve long felt that Wi-Fi is a must for smartphones, and while some of you disagree, Sprint’s on board. Fierce Wireless is reporting that the carrier will require Wi-Fi in their “PDA equipment,” which sounds like smartphones to me. Sprint is introducing RIM’s BlackBerry Tour this weekend, and like Verizon’s edition, it isn’t equipped with Wi-Fi. That will change next year as Sprint is reportedly planning a version of the Tour that includes a Wi-Fi radio.

Some dissenters in the past felt that their 3G radio is more than enough signal. Not to harp on a hot topic again today, but it’s in areas where carriers have those pesky bandwidth caps that Wi-Fi can be a huge lifesaver. Aside from gaining faster throughput, you’re not hitting your data cap when using a Wi-Fi network for voice, data, or media. Verizon hasn’t yet made the commitment to include Wi-Fi on every handset, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them to follow suit at some point.

This may be another one of those U.S. challenges, so if any readers outside of our country can share the Wi-Fi handset landscape with us, please do.

Toshiba’s TG01 is the first Snapdragon phone, and even though it is based on Windows Mobile, the Japanese giant has put a nice, striped interface on the phone. Arne Hess of the::unwired shot a video that shows the entire interface in action. Toshiba has done a pretty decent job at hiding the stodgy Windows Mobile interface, although it does sneak through from time to time. Check out Arne’s video for a good look at a new interface. I found the TG01 to look a bit big in the video.

We’ve debated HTC’s headphone solution in the past, and while some don’t mind the mini-USB adapter often found on these handsets, it’s all about to change. MobileCrunch recently got this comment from an HTC representative:

“The vast majority of devices we launch after Hero will have a 3.5mm jack. Devices that we have already announced but that still come out after Hero will not necessarily be a part of this change.”

That news is music to many ears. I’d expect that the HTC mini-USB port won’t be going away on new devices, as it’s used for charging and moving data to a computer. But the inclusion of a standard headset jack means you won’t need that little mini-USB adapter to plug in your headphones. It’s not that the adapters are expensive, since we’ve seen them for as little as $5 in the past. HTC sometimes includes them as well. But adapters are just one more thing to carry or lose. And the current solution forces your headphones to be plugged into the bottom of the device. For some, that doesn’t matter, but I personally prefer a 3.5mm jack at the top of my device.

Nokia’s affair with Symbian has been a long one, spanning the company’s reach from feature phone to smartphone. The phone platform had different variants, with S60 becoming the one garnering most of the innovation and advances as Nokia entered the smartphone market. Nokia spun Symbian off into its own entity awhile back and made the platform open source, no doubt to get developers onboard. Now it appears that Nokia and the Symbian Foundation have quietly closed the books on S60 as recent blog posts indicate.

The web site at S60.com has been shuttered as the box above indicates, as Nokia moves to get the platform more clearly identified. The “new” platform will be known as Symbian ^2 (the ^ is silent) and Symbian ^3, according to packets given to developers. The Symbian system will be updated twice annually going forward, and all development will be concentrated on the new Symbian system. This is no doubt due to the reputation that S60 had garnered as an outdated smartphone platform when compared with WebOS and Android.

T-Mobile had their myTouch 3G press event this morning, at which it confirmed the launch of the next-generation Android phone in the U.S. The myTouch 3G is also known as the HTC Magic and is the successor to the original Android phone, the T-Mobile G1. T-Mobile is making the myTouch available for pre-order already for existing customers only with a guaranteed delivery date of August 5. The phone will cost $199 with signing of a 2-year contract.

HTC is producing some cool accessories for the myTouch, including a battery extender that plugs onto the bottom of the phone. There will also be a dock available for easy charging of the myTouch.

Image courtesy Gizmodo

The main surprise coming out of the press event was the T-Mobile statement that the very exciting HTC Hero Android phone with the HTC Sense interface will not be coming to the carrier. This phone is the first with HTC’s innovative new interface but it is not a “Google-branded” phone, which leads me to wonder if that’s why T-Mobile is not going to bring it to the U.S.

We often debate the whole tether your 3G phone vs. using a 3G adapter or device like the MiFi. Today I’ll throw a bone to the tethering crowd — to BlackBerry owners in particular. TetherBerry isn’t a brand new tethering application, but UneasySilence heard of a new beta version that adds some speed and more flexibility to the current version:

We are working hard at TetherBerry to make our product better and better. Some of our latest updates are [sic] our Mac Beta is much faster; this week we will begin offering seven-day trials of TetherBerry for the PC and will begin testing the BlueTooth version.

Our latest Mac beta blows our previous Mac beta out of the water. It is noticeably faster, but we want your feedback! Our interface is dead simple and is compatiable [sic] with all BlackBerrys. No more hassle finding scripts for mac tethering, just one solution: TetherBerry.

The application is free while in beta status, but the currently available pay version is a whopping $49.95. Faster throughput and the additional support of Bluetooth tethering is definitely desirable, but that price-point is too high for my budget. Luckily, I don’t have a BlackBerry, so I won’t be agonizing over a purchase decision for the software.

How much is too much for this functionality? On one hand, the $49.95 is a one-time fee. That beats the pants off monthly tethering plans from a carrier which can tack on $20, $30 or more every 30 days. On the other hand, I remember paying around $25 to tether using PdaNet. In fact, it offers a BlackBerry version today for $29.95. That version already supports wireless tethering over Bluetooth, so is there a compelling reason to use TetherBerry?

While we start a new debate over tethering software prices, BlackBerry owners can download TetherBerry directly to their device at http://tetherberry.com/d/tetherberry.jad. Unless you’re on a truly unlimited 3G plan, I’d watch your usage with any tethering software. You won’t pay the developer if you go over a bandwidth cap, but your carrier might come knocking.

One of the benefits of working for the GigaOM Network is gaining exposure to a lot of great resources. The recently launched GigaOM Pro is a major source of information that touches on a lot of what we do. GigaOM Pro has published a technical report (subscription required) that delves into the impact that speech technology can have for mobile uses such as those performed on a phone. I have long been an advocate of speech recognition, and I believe it can play a part in creating a natural interface for working with computers. Speaking your mind takes on a special meaning when it’s done in order to interact with a computer. That interaction can benefit when applied to the mobile phone, perhaps even more so than with speech-enabled computers.

The mobile phone is a personal device that has become ingrained in most everything we do in our lives. It is a device that is designed from the ground up to work with speech, and it makes great sense that a proper interface revolving around speech technology could be a huge benefit.

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Microsoft has Exchange 2010 in a beta form but I haven’t played with it yet. I probably won’t either, since I use Gmail. However, when I had a personal hosted Exchange account, it was a blissful experience with Windows Mobile handsets. Might it get even better with Exchange 2010 and Windows Mobile 6.x? It looks like it, based on this video demonstration video by Adam Glick, Sr. Technical Product Manager of Microsoft’s Unified Messaging team. If you can’t view the video above, here’s an MP4 version. Some highlights:

• Conversation views hit the handheld. In the email preview, a number will appear in parenthesis, indicating how many messages are in the threaded conversation.
• Moving a message to a folder can be turned into a server-side rule. For example, if you move a message thread to a particular folder, any new messages in that thread can automatically be moved to the same folder.
• Voicemails can appear in your Inbox, complete with a transcription and built-in audio player to hear the message.
• View free/busy information for your peers right on their Contact card in Outlook Mobile. Just click the Get Free/Busy button on a contact.

Mobility Site says that SMS messages can also be synchronized with the server, so you’ll have a central place to store and search through short text bursts as well. I see some upcoming features here that I currently enjoy in Google’s Voice and Gmail products.

These days I’m not using a Windows Mobile handset nor an Exchange account, so I may not get to play with the new bits on the WinMo side. Even though over 20 companies license Microsoft Exchange Active Sync, I suspect the nicer mobile features won’t appear on non-Windows Mobile handsets. While there is Exchange support on other mobile platforms, not all of the features are always supported. Tasks come to mind as those not always being supported by EAS licensees, although you can generally count on email, contacts and calendar events.

Palm officially announced European availability of the Pre handset today, with a delivery time frame of “by the holidays.” As expected, O2 will carry the device exclusively in the UK, Ireland and Germany. Spain will see the Pre on Movistar’s network. Looking through the official specifications, I don’t see any major changes. That’s to be expected, although there are some regional differences. The slide-out keyboard on the German edition will be a QWERTZ layout, not a QWERTY like we have in the U.S. The handset won’t use CDMA technology, either. Instead, the radios will support HSDPA/UMTS with EDGE/GSM. Palm hasn’t stated what the 3G throughput will be for the EU model, but I know the networks in Europe currently can be much faster than what we have here.

Interested customers can hit up their regional Palm web site and sign up for notification on the new device. My question now is: Have we Americans scared off European purchasers or are folks across the pond still excited by the prospect of the Pre?

Another musing: How will the introduction of a new handset and platform shake up the European market share numbers? Specifically, will Nokia’s tumbling share continue at a faster pace? Others might suffer as well, but Nokia has a large handset presence in the EU area. The year end market share numbers for the past two years shows an alarming trend for the Finnish device maker. At the end of 2007, Nokia held 50.9 percent of the worldwide smartphone market. That same number a year later for Nokia? It was 40.8 percent, as Research in Motion and Apple roughly doubled their market share while Samsung gobbled up even more of the market.

You never want to fight a war on multiple fronts, but Nokia simply has no choice. Newcomers like Apple and Google Android are making it difficult, while RIM has successfully transitioned from the enterprise market to the consumer space. Does Nokia have what it takes to fight the Palm Pre army that’s marching towards the holiday time while facing the other combatants? Or will Palm not even make a dent in Nokia’s armor? I’d love to hear from our readers in Europe on this one.