You can go ahead and pity / envy UK mobile subscribers. If it wasn’t hard enough already, Vodafone has just thrown two more premium handsets into the fray to choose from. If you hit up Vodafone’s official UK website, you can now start placing orders for the gargantuan HTC Desire HD or the solidly-built Nokia N8. The HTC Desire HD is the European equivalent of the Sprint HTC EVO 4G (minus the 4G) found state-side. The phone sports a 4.3-inch WVGA display, runs Froyo out of the box and is powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU. If this handset tickles your fancy, you can pick it up at most Vodafone retail outlets, or optionally online. According to Tech Radar, Vodafone have confirmed the following pricing and plan details:

The HTC Desire HD is available free on £35, 24 month price plans and customers buying the device online will get 900 minutes (compared to 600 offline) unlimited texts and 750MB (500MB offline) of mobile data,” the company added. Buying online will also give you 5MB of European roaming data in your bundle

If HTC is not your cup of tea, the Nokia N8, might be of interest. The N8 is the first Symbian^3 handset to hit the market. The phone has garnered mixed reviews (ours is coming soon), but has gone down well with the Nokia purists. The phone is free when signing up for a £30-a-month two year service agreement. The Nokia N8 is available in lime green exclusively to Vodafone subscribers; we’re still not sure if that’s a good thing.

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It looks like RIM is going to be sending the BlackBerry Torch 9800 up north and across the pond. The Globe and Mail is reporting that Canada’s three largest wireless carriers — Bell, Rogers, and Telus — all will be carrying RIM’s latest creation in the not-so-distant future. Rogers has officially confirmed the Globe’s report with a press release saying they will have the 9800 in the “coming weeks,” and Virgin Mobile — in true hipster fashion — tweeted about it. Vodafone U.K. also has a splash page up for the new BlackBerry touch-screen slider device. Anyone north of the border or across the pond have plans to pick one of these bad boys up?

Read [Vodafone] Read [Globe and Mail] Read [Rogers] Read [Virgin Mobile]

While the US is now in full iPhone launch mode, those closest to the International Date Line have long been enjoying the hype of the iPhone launch and the resulting shortages that are associated with such demand. One of the first carriers to officially announce that it has sold out of its stock is Vodafone UK. A bright orange message on Vodafone’s website confirms that the carrier is plum out of iPhone 4s and is not expeingte to be replenished for a few weeks. This may only be the first of several carriers in the UK to sell out as it is rumored that entire region only received a meager 16,000 handsets. Shortages are reported at O2 and even some branches of Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U reportedly never received their iPhone 4 shipments. Anyone in the UK enjoying a bright and shiny new iPhone or are you still waiting in vain?

Read [16,000 for UK] Read [Vodafone]

Apple’s iPhone 4 is a undeniably selling like wildfire both here in the States and overseas. Similar to the U.S., the UK iPhone is experiencing delayed availability with the ship by date now pushed back to July 14th. If you missed the June 24th and the July 2nd pre-order window, your only option now is to try to score an iPhone 4 from your local Apple store or your favorite wireless carrier at launch next week. Thankfully, many opportunities exist for the UK iPhone customer as, unlike the U.S. where exclusivity reigns, the UK iPhone 4 will be sold by O2, Orange, Vodafone, Tesco Mobile, and T-Mobile with the the first three carriers announcing their iPhone 4 pricing and associated tariffs earlier this week. Hit the jump for a full roundup of each carrier’s pricing and best of luck in snagging the latest and greatest handset Apple has to offer.

Read (Apple UK store)

Read (O2 iPhone 4)

Read (Vodafone iPhone 4)

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Remember the Samsung 360 H1 we scooped the hell out of back in September? Well here’s its successor, the H2. Building on top of what was already an very impressive featurephone with a 3.5″ OLED display and 5 megapixel camera, the H2 is said to have a Super AMOLED WVGA display, 8 megapixel camera with HD video recording (720p, no doubt), 1GHz Cortex A8 processor and run LiMo complete with Vodafone’s 360 services. Of course with this being a leak, all of this information is far from official, but word is we’ll be seeing the H2 land on Vodafone in time for the World Cup.

[Via Unwired View]

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It’s official, the Google Nexus One has landed on Vodafone. Interested customers eager to get their hands on the definitive Google superphone can head over to Vodafone’s UK website where pre-orders are being accepted starting today. The Nexus One will be available for free on a 24-month, minimum £35 ($55 USD) monthly price plan or an 18 month, minimum £40 ($62 USD) plan. Each price plan will include 1GB of cellular data usage and an additional 1Gb of data usage when connected to premium BT Openzone hotspots. Unlike the American version of the handset, Vodafone — not Google — will be providing direct support for the handset. Accordingly, the Nexus One will be also be sold in Vodafone retail stores, on Vodafone’s website, and via telesales starting April 30th.

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Not even a whole two months removed from their announcing Windows Phone 7 Series, Microsoft is back today with another event in which it is expected to reveal its Project Pink line-up including the handsets known as the “Pure” and “Turtle”. Whether or not they’ll run WP7 or something else entirely isn’t clear, but all of this will soon be clear. As the event carries on we’ll be updating this post with the latest information, so be sure to check often lest you be left out of the loop. All of the goodness is after the jump.

And would you look at that, right as the event got underway KIN.com went live with all of the information about the new handsets.

KIN ONE

• Compact keypad for one-handed texting
• Multi-touch display
• 5 megapixel camera with LED flash and SD video recording
• Wi-Fi
• GPS
• External mono speaker
• 4GB internal memory (enough for 1,000 songs)
• Media powered by Zune

KIN TWO

• Horizontal sliding QWERTY keypad
• Multi-touch display
• 8 megapixel camera with LED flash and HD video recording
• Wi-Fi
• GPS
• External stereo speaker
• 8GB internal memory (enough for 2,000 songs)
• Media powered by Zune

Windows Phone 7 is about simplifying people’s lives, whereas KIN is all about amplifying people’s lives. It represents Microsoft “cranking social up to 11″ for “people who live to be connected, share, express and relate to their friends and family.”

The homescreen of the KIN is known as the Loop, an always running and constantly updating portal into your social life with support for services like Windows Live, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. You can customize Loop by adding your best friends to your favorites. This will ensure you see more frequent updates from your favorite people. Also found on the homescreen is KIN Spot, a little green dot where you can drag all of your favorite media content to share with friends and social media networks. The device’s browser is tightly integrated with the Spot so sharing an awesome BGR scoop with your friends couldn’t be more simple.

The KIN also comes with KIN Studio. “It’s your phone, online, on any web browser.” With KIN Studio, all of your call logs, texts, contacts images, videos, and more are stored in the cloud and viewable in a pretty nifty looking timeline. Pretty much everything you do on the KIN is compatible with geo-tagging, so if you forget where you were when you took a particular picture or video you can go online and refresh your memory thanks to the integration of Bing Maps.

The KIN ONE and TWO are the first Windows Phones to feature a full-fledged Zune experience. Music, video, podcasts, FM radio, you name it, the KIN’s got it (okay, no Zune gaming). Purchase yourself a Zune Pass subscription and you’re good to listen to millions of tracks on device or on your PC.

The KIN ONE and KIN TWO will go on sale with Verizon next month, while Vodafone will be offering the two devices across Europe in the Fall. Pricing has yet to be announced.

Definitely cool stuff, but the KIN line-up is not without huge, huge flaws. There is no support for third-party apps, the hardware looks to be pretty cheap and uninspired (the design could easily have been stolen from a Playmates Ninja Turtles toy circa 1989), and the displays are tiny. You know, two out of the three things that did Palm in in the past year.

Developing…

We’re not going to go as far as the Silicone Alley Insider and declare the Nexus One “a flop” but the sub-par sales numbers do tell us something… launching with the 3G bands of the #4 U.S. carrier and selling exclusively through a web portal may not be a wise go-to-market strategy. Mobile research firm Flurry estimates that only 135,000 Nexus Ones have been sold after 74 days on the market. As a comparison, the Motorola DROID sold 1.05 million units and the iPhone sold around 1 million units in the same time period. The DROID had a rumored $100M marketing push, and the iPhone was a full $599 out of pocket at time of launch, which make these Nexy’s sales figures even less impressive. We’re sure the N1′s sales numbers will improve as it launches on Verizon Wireless and Vodafone in the coming months, however… we just thought the insane AdWords push from Google would have yielded better results.

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Good news for UK wireless customers as the Daily Telegraph is reporting that the Google Nexus One is slated for an April launch on Vodafone UK. Originally announced back in January, the Nexus One was expected to launch with Vodafone in the Spring of 2010 with Vodafone reportedly hoping to get the handset out the door in March. Inside sources have reportedly told the Daily Telegraph that the March date is most likely off the table and April is a much more realistic time frame for launch. Such a date is not surprising as April is a pivotal month in the Spring season and fits perfectly with Google’s original projection. Let’s hope similar inside sources inside the US will be as loose lipped as their UK counterparts and will soon share the launch date for either the Verizon Wireless or the AT&T Nexus One. You know where to go if you are feeling rather talkative.

[Via Android Community and Engadget]

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The Wall Street Journal has chimed in and offered their inside information on the Windows Mobile and Project Pink rumors that have been circulating recently. Though it lacks the details of the earlier leaks, the Wall Street Journal confirms that Microsoft will publicly announce Windows Mobile 7 at MWC 2010 and are flying out Steve Ballmer to head up the show. As rumored, the latest generation of Microsoft’s mobile platform is expected to radically change the look and feel of Windows Mobile bringing a whole new Zune-like UI to this currently lackluster OS. Project pink was also confirmed by the WSJ and, as rumored, is a new series of handsets based upon Danger’s Sidekick line of mobile phones. The Project Pink phones are said to be social networking powerhouses which will appeal to a teen-aged audience. Though not expected to be announced at MWC 2010, the “Pink” handsets are slated for a spring launch on both Verizon Wireless and Vodafone.

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Vodafone UK officially jumped on the iPhone bandwagon by launching both the iPhone 3G and 3GS today, joining O2, Orange and Tesco Mobile in the now non-exclusive UK market. Vodafone customers looking to keep costs low can score an older 8GB iPhone 3G for free with a minimum monthly plan of £35 ($57USD). Folks that must have the latest and greatest still have the pleasure of receiving a free iPhone but those high rollers will have to agree to a minimum monthly tariff of £45 ($73USD) for an iPhone 3GS 16GB or £75 ($122USD) for the 32GB version. Sales of the iPhone are expected to be brisk with Vodafone moving an estimated 50,000 handsets in this first day of sales.

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Google’s Nexus One announcement went smoothly as planned — Nexus One confirmed, Android 2.1 detailed and T-Mobile as the launch partner confirmed. All done, all good, except for the little bombshell that was presented at the end. The Nexus One will be hitting both Verizon Wireless and Vodafone this Spring! All you folks who eschewed the Eris and waited on the DROID will get your just reward in a few months. Any DROID or Eris owners out there just throw their handset through the window in disgust?

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Already available from O2, Orange and even Tesco Mobile, the UK’s third largest carrier, Vodafone, finally announced this morning that it will begin selling the ubiquitous Apple smartphone on January 14th. Vodafone subs will be able to snag either the iPhone 3G or the iPhone 3GS for free on all tariffs over £35 and £45 respectively. Both of these prices assume a 24-month contract, but an extra £5 will shave off 6 months. Anyone interested in tethering should pencil an extra £5 into their monthly budget as that’s what Vodafone says will buy you the right to 500MB of data for tethering. One must pay to play, we suppose.

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We hate to tease our American readers who are holding their breath until it arrives on American shores, but Vodafone UK has begun selling the HTC HD2. Free on all tariffs over £35 on a 24 month contract or free on all tariffs over £40 on an 18 month contract, the HTC HD2 is a monster of a smartphone with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor and 4.3″ WVGA capacitive touchscreen display. Plus most users will hardly realize that the HD2 is running Windows Mobile 6.5 thanks in part to HTC’s Sense UI. Just watch out for a sharp bezel around the 5 megapixel camera. It scratched the hell out of our desk.

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With the BlackBerry Storm2 getting nice and official over night, we here at BGR thought that it would be nice for us to take a moment and focus on just what its launch means for our loyal readers that aren’t living in The New World. Earlier this week, UK-based The Guardian proclaimed that the Storm2 would be announced by both RIM and Vodafone this week. Clearly this was the case as we now know it will be arriving on or around the 26th of October, but its report missed out on one huge revelation — Vodafone’s exclusivity on the device will only last “a few weeks”. This of course paves the way for other carriers such as O2, Orange and T-Mobile to get in on the Storm action. While all of the aforementioned Storm2 candidate carriers have remained mom mum on the matter, The Guardian is hedging its bets on Orange carrying the Storm2 in time for Christmas. What does this all mean for the UK? Well, when one considers that every major carrier is going to be offering the iPhone 3GS and has the option of picking up the Storm2, it looks as if a major price war is about to erupt in time for the holidays.

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