Things are really looking up for our Spanish RIM friends. First the new BlackBerry Pearl launches exclusive on their shores, and now this bit of juicy gossip. It seems that RIM and Telefonica have been doing a bit of work behind the scenes. The two companies have just announced a new suite of software tools designed to give consumer BIS customers of bit of the BES experience. The Unite! Suite as it’s called, allows users to sync and share calendars, PC content, media, and more between up to 5 handsets. It even allows admins to impose "Rules" and lockdown devices, a la BES administrator policies. The best part, however, is that this is going to be offered completely free of charge to current and future Telefonica subscribes.

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We received word that the long rumored Blackberry 8820 has been received in AT&T warehouses across the country. So far they’re trying to keep this pretty little number on the hush-hush. The fear is that that people will wait until this device is released to buy their new BlackBerry units, which leaves them stuck with BlackBerry 8800s. A reliable source hit us up with some intel saying AT&T is releasing it as a quiet update, and will not be shipping any BlackBerry 8820′s to all stores nationally. Instead, they will ship the product on a store by store basis depending on the current BlackBerry 8800 supply. To sum this up: You’re local store most probably isn’t getting any BlackBerry 8820s until their stock of BlackBerry 8800s is depleted. AT&T did this once before with the Nokia 6102i when they decided to add Bluetooth support to the unit. We would tell you they’re holding off on even a press release, but with general consumer interest around this device, we can’t see them doing that. At this time, as far as we know, there are no actual BlackBerry 8820s units in stores, but we expect them very soon. Price point is also slated to remain at the $299 mark with a 2-year contract. Happy WiFi’in, folks.

One thing we know about the Apple iPhone launch, is that we don’t really know much. Today we received a few screen shots that shed some light on one of the major questions regarding the sales of the iPhone — who will be eligible to buy this new dream gadget? According to some newly surfaced internal AT&T account codes the answer is everyone! We can infer from the 3 codes received that the iPhone will be available to Go Phone Pay As You Go subscribers, Go Phone Pick Your Plan subscribers (hybrids), and of course postpaid users. You heard it here first – prepaid iPhones baby! What we can also assume is that since the masters of prepaid can purchase these, anyone will be able to snatch one up, whether they are in contract or not. This means that if you’re not up for an "upgrade" you will still be able to enjoy your Apple goodness. Now if we can only get the official no-commitment pricing…Who are we kidding, we’ll have that soon. Check the full screen shots after the jump!

UPDATE: There have been a couple articles stating that feature codes are generated automatically when a handset is entered into AT&T’s system, even phones that are not available prepaid. That is true. What is not true is that these feature codes were not generic codes, these are completely unique and never seen before. This was confirmed by multiple AT&T sources. Does this 100% mean the iPhone will be available prepaid? No. It does at least let us know either that the unique, never seen before feature codes entered one by one were incorrect and a mistake, AT&T is generating false information to get us to bite, or the iPhone will in fact be available prepaid.

Here goes some more ritual Unboxing goodness in the form of the Cingular Gold V3xx. The unit is exactly the same as the Grey V3xx and is a little larger and heavier than the standard RAZR. The battery is a slightly extended and has a little more weight to it, due to compensate for the added 3G support. If your in the market for a RAZR-like phone, one that does 3G, and out flashes a light bulb this could be your phone. Check the more link for the rest of the pics!

We recently jacked someone for got some hands on time with the new Novatel Wireless Merlin XU870. This bad boy runs off of full HSDPA/UMTS/EDGE/GPRS and supports all 5 bands of service. After opening the package I was happy to see how compact the device was.  No giant nub hanging out of your laptop with this unit folks, just a small antenna with a flip up extender. My first go at this was on a Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo.  Since a few days ago Apple officially released support for this on its website, I had high hopes for performance before I even popped it in.  All I did was slide the SIM card into the bottom of the data card, pop it in my Mac and instantly bars of service appeared in my finder bar in the top right.  From there just hit connect and there it was, live 3G HSDPA access.  After testing the transfer speeds a million few times I found the average speed to be about 1.2 megs a second and the upload speed to be around 320k per second. Not bad at all! Next I attempted the card on a newer Dell XPS and after installing the included software I connected with about the same speeds. Novatel has made an incredible device which boasts future proof access via firmware updates (so says on the box) for up to 7.2Mbps support. The only complaint I have so far is the location for where the SIM card is placed. It just seems too easy to get to and is even accessible while the card is in use.  Afterall though this is a small price to pay for this kind of portability. Hopefully Cingular at&t will start branding this thing and officially supporting it soon so more people can partake in its HSDPA goodness. Check out the rest of the shots after the jump.

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Cingular Wireless (at&t) demonstrated its video calling technology at this year’s CES running on its 3G network, but we didn’t get a date or details. Here are a couple tidbits on what’s to come. The official name is going to be Video Share and due to the need to stream data and voice simultaneously, customers will need to be in a 3G area (obviously). The first phone to support this feature will be the LG CU500v which is just an updated version of the LG CU500 we already are familiar with. The expected launch frame is mid to late June but knowing Cingular I wouldn’t set this in stone. We will keep you posted as details pop up.

With the coming transition of Cingular to the "new" AT&T we should have expected new combined plans to start popping up. Here are the first few. These new Unity plans will offer customers unimited mobile to mobile calling and also mobile to AT&T wireline. It also includes the usual perks like free nights and weekends. To be eligable for service customers need to have combined billing with AT&T, unlimited long distance service, and unlimited local service. The big kick in the face with this is that you give up your rollover minutes on these plans. Oh well, I guess we can’t have it all. Read on for the new brochures for both, individual plans and family talk plans.

Click on a screenshot to see the full pdf

Monday, January 15th, Cingular officially stops being Cingular and becomes the new at&t. Details have surfaced letting us know how the transition will happen and it seems like at&t wants to get this ball rolling pronto! According to an internal briefing, we are going to see both brands being used in ads and also at the retail level with the tagline "Cingular is now part of the new AT&T". That is until the corporate suits decide that the brand recognition of both companies is high enough to get rid of the Cingular name altogether. Continue on for the full document.

Our boys over at Mobileburn have a brand new review of the upcoming Motorola ROKR E2. According to the site the biggest changes to the unit are the new OS called JUIX and the lack of iTunes support in favor of your more traditional audio formats. But you already knew all of that.  "I like its funky looks and I certainly love the new UI" they praise. Click on for more details.