It seems that every phone manufacturer out there is trying to imitate the iPhone design one way or the other and even designers aren’t spared. In this latest design by designer Jaren Goh, he tried to take a softer side of the iPhone, which he calls the “Basic Tab”. This phone seems aimed towards the fashion conscious crowd, rather than the tech crowd, especially with all its pretty looking camera tab at the back of the phone.

UTStarcom probably wants to focus its efforts on its network infrastructure business, as they have just sold off their Personal Communications Division for $240 odd million to a group or private investors called Personal Communications Devices, LLC. Said division was the drive in pushing the corporate wares to Virgin Mobile, Verizon and others in North America. Fortunately the new owners will be doing the same thing, and will keep the same team as before, so it looks like more of a ownership change of sorts, for the moment.

It hasn’t been too long since the announcement that Telus will be offering the HTC Touch Diamond to its Canadian customers, but the official specification list of the device is already available, and provides all the juicy details regarding the phone.

In terms of features, it’s obviously the standard Touch Diamond fare, but the main difference is that this iteration will have an EV-DO Rev. A radio, and have a slight boost in terms of memory. The offering the Telus will have 256MB ROM / 256MB RAM as opposed to the GSM version’s 256MB ROM / 192MB RAM. Other tiny differences include an extra 5 grams of weight, and an included case.

With all the cloned phones that we’ve seen from China, it really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that they’ve come up with this phone. To be honest, it’s a surprise that they’ve taken this long to serve us such a clone. What’s the phone in question? Well, it’s a cool clone of Sony Ericsson’s XPERIA X1, with the HTC TyTN II’s tilting display feature added in for good measure. Aside from the X1’s sliding keypad, it also features a 5 mega pixel camera, 3-inch touch screen capable of 16 million colors, and a built-in TV tuner to boot.

Those who love the outdoors will definitely love an rugged outdoor phone to match their lifestyle. This is exactly what Samsung is aiming for with their new rugged candybar GT-B2700, which is certified to be water and dust resistant.

While it might not have the most advanced features, but it certainly does the trick well enough to be an outdoor companion. This phone will retail at the end of summer for $330. Features include:

• Quad-band GSM / GPRS + EDGE radio
• 1.9-inch 176x220 display
• FM radio
• Bluetooth 2.0
• Built-in compass and altimeter
• Music player
• 30MB internal memory
• 1300 mAh battery
• microSD card expansion

HTC has commonly used the “Neon” codename for its Touch Dual form factor devices, which is basically the original HTC Touch with the added sliding keypad. Though the Touch Dual might start to show its age, what with the newer phones such as the Touch Diamond coming out, but as it’s one of the few (current) HTC devices with a physical keypad, it caters to the demand of users who still need a physical keypad.

The latest report from the FCC is shows a NEON400 that sports a CDMA 850 / 1900 support, which would be just right for Sprint, Verizon and Alltell networks, along with EV-DO support.

For users who just can’t wait to get their hands on Google’s Android OS, this might be just the thing. It seems that some adventurous people have found a way to get the Android on Nokia’s N810, and it’s a fairly simple process. There were previous reports of people already achieving this, albeit with a more tricky and troublesome manner. All it requires this time is for users to download 2 files to their device, and install it from there. It definitely voids the warranty of the device, but users who will stop at nothing to get their hands on the Android probably won’t mind.

Telus has just announced that they will be offering the Touch Diamond this summer, and it will come with EV-DO to make things speedy on the data transfers. The phone will be going for $149.99 CAD with a three-year contract, along with data plans ranging from $15 for email and IM (instant messaging) to $30 for email, IM and web browsing.

Whilst it looked like the Blackberry Kickstart would be going for a lower price than normal, it still comes as a surprise to hear (a rumor) that T-Mobile will be selling the Kickstart for $49.99 on a two-year contract. Selling the Kickstart at such a competitive price can only be good for consumers, and hopefully it will be a wake up call to others to try and keep costs down too. Of course, there is no confirmation regarding this issue yet, but still, let's hope that it's true.

It appears that user interface expert, Matias Duarte, which was the man behind the Sidekick and Helio user interface, left Helio late last year to team up with Palm. Though there was no official announcement over the whole thing, it's said that Matias and his team of designers left to take to task of designing the UI (user interface) for Palm's next generation mobile OS. His resume online now states “Senior Director, Human Interface and User Experience” doing “Something new...” since September 2007. Apparently Palm have confirmed that he is employed with them.

Hopefully he will be able to give Palm the extra push that they need to compete with others, as PalmOS really hasn't been making any (positive) waves in a long time.

It seems like Motorola's phones keep getting leaked before they're officially launched, but then again, this more or less happens to most manufacturers nowadays anyways. This time, the phone we're talking about is another Q9 looking phone, which is code named Napoleon.

The Napoleon features GSM, EV-DO Rev. A, and also a fingerprint scanner, which is rare on phones, and obviously shows that this phone is targeting corporate customers. The phone looks to have maintained the Q9 design, and also looks quite similar to the Blackberry Bold, which can't be a bad thing. There isn't any news on the price of the release date yet, but hopefully Motorola won't keep it to themselves for long.

T-Mobile has become the first network to have a true, full HSPA over all of the UK. T-Mobile has just flipped the switch for its HSUPA network all over the UK, which brings their upload speeds to 1.4Mbps, and will have download speeds of 7.2Mbps.

Faster internet is always better, so it probably goes without saying that T-Mobile subscribers will be rather happy with this news.