Phone Junkie

This isn't a Nexus One celebrating Gay Pride month—it's CNET Crave UK's broken Google phone. According to HTC's technical support, "they don't go in pockets," lest the screen gets cracked.

Only thing is, Crave UK swears up and down the Nexus One suffered the damages while charging on a desk—with no tampering by vicious iPhone users recorded. After being recommended by Google to speak to HTC's technical support, Crave was told that "putting a phone in a tight pair of jeans and sitting down would usually cause the kind of damage," and that "people sometimes forget that they don't go in pockets." Say what?

Here's the second stinging lash—the cracked screen will cost £180 to fix. That's $270, or $100 more than the whole phone's parts cost, according to iSuppli. Yeouch. [Crave UK]

Waking up to fresh photos of an unofficial phone is always welcome, but I do wish all these spyshots of the HTC Incredible would be accompanied with a bit of meat. Some bacon for my breakfast, you could say.

It's already shown up in Verizon Wireless' inventory system, and we've heard a few details on the inner workings of the handset—but as to when it's expected to go on sale, why don't you tell me, eh punk? [DevDroid via AndroidCentral]

These are the first photos of Microsoft's Project Pink phones, snatched from deep within the bowels of the Microsoft/Verizon industrio-complex —not the Turtle, but the larger, Sidekick-like Pure. This doesn't look like Windows Phone 7, so what is it?

The shots come just hours after a leaked advertising campaign for the Turtle outed Verizon as a carrier for the Pink Turtle, without so much as a mention of the Pure.

Our tipster confirms the Pure is also headed to Verizon, but doesn't have a release date. (Though it's hard to imagine the release date would fall too far out of line with the Turtle, which is expected to hit stores at the end of April. Business Week's claim that the release will be May or June of this year supports this.) Anyway, this thing: It's strange! It's got a paneled interface, with fixed squares for everything from music (with Zune typography) and email to RSS feeds and what looks like a unified social networking hub. As hinted earlier, the aesthetic is similar Windows Phone 7, but the software is distinctly not Windows Phone 7. This looks like Windows Phone 7: Feature Phone edition.
Our source got a few seconds to use the Pure, and said it was intuitive, "better than Android," and decorated with Windows Phone 7-style animations throughout. That said, the app situation still doesn't add up. There's apparently an download screen for new apps, but it's not populated with anything yet. This could mean two things: Either the Pink phones will tap into the Windows Phone 7 marketplace somehow, which would be great (but also doesn't make sense), or they'll have apps like the Zune has apps—which is to say, only sort of, and only from selected partners.

The more we see, the more the Pure and Turtle look like they're stacking up to be Zune-ified followups to the Sidekick. It's an interesting move, but who does Microsoft think they're going to sell this thing to? Tweens?

Update: Firmware Leak

We've got our hands on leaked Pink firmware, and we've dumped all the icons and photos we could extract. Sadly, there's not way to run this right now, but we can see a lot of what's shown above, like the homescreen application icons, in full resolution. There are also traces of Zune, as well as Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, and Windows Live. There are some shots (discovered by someone else who's got the firmware) that show a lockscreen dialer, but these are likely placeholders of some sort. Also tucked away in the firmware are default wallpapers for both phones, in their rumored resolutions. Finally, we've got a shot from the Turtle's unremarkable camera, which appears to have flash.

(Filenames included in the gallery, because they're pretty descriptive.)

Here's what we can glean from the dump so far:

• The carrier is definitely Verizon, though there are references in the firmware to AT&T and T-Mobile in the US (which are probably placeholders, since the rest of the evidence points to CDMA radios as standard for these phones.) There are also references to a wide range of foreign carriers in the UK, mainland Europe and Asia, but again, most of these carriers don't support what looks like the initial version of the handset's CDMA hardware, as far as I can tell.

• The OS is based on Windows CE, like the Zune and Windows Phone 7. This doesn't mean a ton to users, but the guy who passed us the firmware sums up what that means under the hood:

Everything is programed in .NET a lot like 7 is. It does not say it inside the files where I have seen, but It is coded in XAMl and is in the structure that CE 7 is supposed to be structured, it is my belief that it will be based off CE 7, and it will have a lot of tie in to Windows Live as well.

• Turtle and Pure codenames are used in the firmware, but that doesn't mean that those'll be the shipping names for the product. There are also codenames for the "Pride" and "Lion" handsets, which appear to just be the international versions of the Turtle and Pure, respectively.

• The Turtle's screen is 320x240, while the Pure's is 480x320—the same as the iPhone.

• There are reference to something called "The Loop," which sounds like some kind of central social networking hub.

We're powering through the firmware dump now, so we'll post more as we get it. [Special thanks to our tipsters, and Conflipper]

LG's first Windows Phone 7 handset, which got shown off recently in the sweaty palm of a Microsoft director at the Engadget Show, will be called the LG Panther. Apparently. We know LG likes silly names, but Panther?

Of course, there's a more famous Panther in our world—2003's OS X 10.3, from Apple. The rumored names comes via the UK site Best Mobile Contracts, which we've never heard of so can't vouch for how solid this rumor is—but after Cookie, Viewty, and whatever else they've managed to slip past their marketing team, Panther is hardly the least-flattering if indeed that's what LG names it. [Best Mobile Contracts via WMPowerUser via TechRadar]

Forget typing out searches or searching by voice. Devices running Android 2.0 can now use Google Gesture Search to find contacts, music, and more. All you have to do is "draw" letters on the screen.

This is how Google says the whole thing works:

Say you want to call your friend Anne. Just open Gesture Search and draw letter "A", and Gesture Search returns a list of items that have words starting with "A". If your handwriting isn't all that neat, that's okay. If the "A" you draw looks a bit like an "H", as seen in the bottom left corner of the screenshot, "H" results will be brought up as well. If needed, you can also erase a query by crossing it horizontally: left to right erases the entire query, and right to left removes the last letter or space in the query. Now you can either scroll down the list to find Anne or write more letters to refine the search.

Google Gesture Search is now available on the Android Market. I'd try it, but as good as it sounds, I doubt it can handle my handwriting. [Google Mobile Blog]

Two days after a 8.8 magnitude earthquake displaced them from their homes and separated them from dear ones, people gathered at a fire-station in Concepcion, Chile to charge their cellphones—their comfort objects during this disaster.

Chile was becoming a trending topic on Twitter before even the fastest newscasters got a chance to talk about Saturday's earthquake, thanks to many hastily posted Tweets—most of which likely came from mobile devices. Tweets, text messages, emails, calls, voicemails—everything flew across the networks, draining phones and granting people some comfort and peace. Just hearing a familiar voice or reading words of assurance—knowing that your mobile device links you to the world, to family, and to much needed aid—makes one heck of a difference.

We need food. We need medication. We need a hand to pull us out of the rubble. But we also need a little gadget that lets us cry out to the world so that everyone else has a chance to tell us that it'll be ok. [Boston]

Picture by EVARISTO SA/AFP/Getty Images