When we say we have specifications, boy, do we mean it. One of our connects has sent us the full rundown on Motorla’s Opus One (their first iDEN Android handset) that we revealed a little while back. The features on the device are actually pretty reasonable, and we’d imagine it to sell for a reasonable attractive price-point at release. The Motorola Opus One will run Android 1.5 with iDEN service enhancements, make use of a “Zeus” CPU, and will feature a 3 megapixel autofocus camera.

Detailed list of full specs after the breakage!

• 3.1″ hVGA 320×480 capacitative touchscreen display
• 3 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash
• Accelerometer
• Proximity sensor
• Wi-Fi 802.11b/g
• Bluetooth
• microSD card slot
• 2.5mm headset jack
• Home, Menu, Back, Speaker buttons are capacitive buttons with haptic feedback
• iDEN PTT & PTX
• Android LBS which is integrated into the iDEN GPS engine
• “Enterprise email”
• Plastic-molded housing with some rubberized texture finishes
• 58mm in width, 118mm in length
• 100g weight
• 512MB Flash / 256MB of RAM
• 64k and 128k iDEN SIM card support
• A-GPS
• Motorola dual-mic technology noise-canceling for noisy enviroments
• Flash Lite v3.1.x
• Some of the preloaded apps include: corporate email client with ActiveSync support, MOTONAV navigation app, barcode scanner, and document viewer.

That’s what we have for you on the Motorola Opus One at this time. Not the most mind-blowing Android device, but with it being an iDEN device and all, we’ll cut it some slack and even say that it could do reasonably well at launch.

Well, you don’t have to. We’ve tested this out ourselves, and here are the instructions if you’d like to venture into the wild and try and install the update manually.

• Download this file
• Rename the file to update.zip and place it in the root directory of your microSD card
• Power off the phone
• Power on the phone while holding the ‘X’ key on the physical keyboard to enter recovery mode
• When you see the triangle with the exclamation point, press the volume up key and camera button key (only press the camera key down half way)
• Navigate to “apply update.zip” and press the gold center button on the keyboard to select it. It will start the update process
• Reboot the phone after it’s finished.

That’s it! Let us know how it works out, and please don’t try it if you’re not comfortable.

Thanks, David!

Avril Lavigne. Luke Wilson. Whoopi Goldberg. Those three names don’t exactly jump out and immediately connect with us when we see them. And isn’t that the point of advertising? The point of branding? To connect to something, identify with it, and relate to it. Sure jazzy music and clean visuals (or dark, ominous tones with scary eyes) will help liven up your advertisement, but if you’re bringing a celebrity in to help, why don’t you make sure the celebrity is someone that people actually care about? I don’t mean to knock on Luke or Whoopi as I’m a fan of both (Canada can have Sk8ter chick), but while they might be intended to reach a certain demographic, in actuality they don’t help, they hurt. People pass it off as something they don’t care about. There’s no instant reaction or memorable moment that people will immediately remember or associate with any of those commercials.

Luke Wilson is brilliant. But he’s not relevant right now. That’s not to say it’s a bad thing, he just isn’t as visible as he was a couple years back. Once he has a bang up movie come out, I’m sure we’ll all care again, but right now, we don’t. And to pick Luke Wilson to carry your entire ad campaign is mind-shattering and stupid. Of all the people in the world, that’s the best your agency came up with? How about Ben Affleck? He would have killed it. Hell, Matt Damon would have, too, and all he wants to do is help kids (NSFW). What, too expensive? Even if AT&T spent $10M in talent alone for awesome brand ambassadors, that’s still not too much to spend when you need to defend your network against the largest, and most solid network in the country with some of the smartest attack ads ever played. People want to root for their hometeam, their city, their favorite company, and AT&T doesn’t give them a chance to do so. No one is going to stick up for Luke Wilson’s commercials.

Either of those two aforementioned people would have been funnier, more personable, and could actually strengthen brand opinion in a time when you needed slam dunk ad rebuttals.

I love AT&T. I really do. I love the flexibility I get with switching phones, I love that the technology that I care about is 99.99% always going to be GSM-based. I honestly don’t have that many issues with AT&T and think people really blow certain issues they encounter out of proportion. But it isn’t about what I think, it’s about mind share and people’s opinions. People that aren’t glued to the internet. Verizon was incredibly smart to start their Map For That campaign. It made people question their cell phone service provider much like we’d question if the last Avril Lavigne song we could remember was really from the year 2002.

Never before has anyone really attacked networks like Verizon did. It was always about the phone itself. My phone can MMS, my phone can browse the web, my phone can work anywhere in the world. But Verizon hit hard and said it doesn’t matter if you have an amazing cell phone, your network is shit and it won’t work where or when you want it to. T-Mobile also isn’t earning cool points while their subscribers continue to leave because their phones have gotten so bad and their brand is getting diluted as there’s no clear strategy. Get More? Come on. Motorola CLIQ? They’d be lucky if they moved 175,000 of those things since release. Behold II? The BlackBerry 9700 is the only thing T-Mobile has right now and that isn’t even a conquest device as AT&T offers it, so it’s a wash. Bring on the awesome ads that will make people stay on your network, ads that really connect with us and make us say, “You know what, I like T-Mobile, I’m going to ride this out.” It was a mistake getting rid of Catherine Zeta Jones, an amazing, beautiful, personable, and strong celebrity. It was also a mistake bringing her back. Why? Because no one cares. It’s an afterthought now.

T-Mobile is becoming the new Sprint.

What do we get for T-Mobile’s ads? Avril Lavigne, Whoopi Goldberg, Jesse James, and other people I’m not even going to bother tearing apart. T-Mobile’s myTouch celebrity picks are mind-numbing. The first ones were bad, but they at least sort of made sense from a marketing perspective. Whoopi Goldberg, Phil Jackson, and Jesse James appealed to three very different demographics but the problem was no one who needed to care, cares about any of them. No one went out and bought a myTouch because of Whoopi, Phil, or Jesse. It didn’t happen. Did stay at home moms see Whoopi and say, “I’m going to buy a myTouch”? Nope. Did people buy a myTouch because they saw Phil Jackson and thought, “OMG. The back of my phone can look like a basketball”? Nope. Did people buy the myTouch because Jesse James just looks like a bad ass? Maybe.

In all seriousness, the phone is what’s going to sell if you don’t have anyone that’s memorable, and that’s really the point of what I’m saying. If you’re going to do it, knock it out the park, don’t Luke Wilson it. AT&T could have done countless other things to rebut Verizon’s attacks and they didn’t have to involve a celebrity that we don’t connect with. T-Mobile is grasping at straws with their ads of the amazingly stupid-named myTouch with celebrities that we don’t care about. They’re both wasted campaigns that miss the mark by suits in marketing that obviously have no idea who they’re trying to sell to anymore. Me, you, your parents, your friends — we’re the potential customers, and we’re not stupid. Plus we’re cool.

That’s what one of our connects are telling us. We’ve been informed that Apple plans to completely redo their iDVD application (in addition to others in iLife 2010), and besides iDVD not being refreshed in a pretty long time, one of the reasons appears to be the inclusion of iTunes LP creation. This will allow artists (indie and major) to create a custom iTunes LP and submit it directly to Apple right from the new application that will be a part of iLife 2010. This is unconfirmed at the moment, but our connect has been pretty accurate in the past and we thought you’d enjoy this little bit of information

Thanks, L.!

Who said the weekend has to be uneventful? Colorware went live recently with their BlackBerry 9700 colorizing service, and if you’ve been contemplating a lime green handset, there’s no better device to get colored up than the Bold 9700. We were lucky enough to get two of our units done earlier this week and we have a couple shots of one of them for you. As always with Colorware, you can buy a new device from them which will ship already customized, or you can send in an existing phone and let them do their magic.

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We weren’t too positive about that last one as it was from a new source, but this new image comes from a pretty credible connect of ours and it seems to be more reasonable. Here’s what we’ve got for you this time:

iMacs starting at $1098, iPod nanos starting at $138, iPod touch starting at $178, MacBook Pros starting at $1098, Apple TVs starting at $208, Airport Express starting at $88, Magic Mouse and Wireless Keyboard going for $64 each, and a whole lot more! Again, we’re feeling pretty confident about this one and everything looks like it’s in the realm of what Apple would normally do for Black Friday.

P.S. Also note that the Black Friday deals are only on Apple’s Online store, not retail stores.

Thanks, Lindsey!

While it is set to go on sale November 22nd, business customers on AT&T have been able to order the 9700 starting yesterday morning. If you got in early enough, there’s a good chance your unit shipped out the same day just as ours did. Here’s a quick unboxing for anyone desperately waiting for their BlackBerry 9700s to arrive, and you can always re-read our BlackBerry 9700 review in case you really want to tear your hair out. Also, if anyone else picked up an AT&T unit, or even a T-Mobile unit for that matter, we salute you, friends. BlackBerry fiends need to stick together…

P.S. We’ve been told most AT&T store locations actually have BlackBerry 9700s in stock as of now, but they’re not supposed to sell them until the 22nd.

Click on over to our AT&T BlackBerry 9700 unboxing gallery!

Oh, you don’t remember? Well we’re back at it again, this time with one of our connects doing the unboxing ritual for us. There’s not all that much exciting to report, you know, with the handset shipping with a USB cable, charging adapter, instruction manual and battery. But hey, an unboxing is an unboxing damn it, and we’ve got the goods. We promised ourselves we weren’t going to take any shots but, with the Palm Pre going for $99 in Canada and the awesome HTC DROID Eris selling for $99 on Verizon, is anyone really going to spring for a $99-priced Palm Pixi? Only time will tell.

Thanks, Ninja J!

New location just opened, and if you mention this post you get 0% off. Stop having a boring life.

Thanks, to everyone that sent this one in!

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Pardon us while we think out loud, but that high resolution screen with an HTC Sense UI-looking clock/weather widget looks like Android to us. We’ve also confirmed that this photo was taken of a Verizon handset, and with all signs pointing to an impending release, we’re just going to venture out on a limb and say that we believe this photo is of HTC’s next Android device for Verizon Wireless. In case you forgot, the rumored device we’re talking about is supposedly one bad ass piece of telephonery — 5 megapixel camera, Android 2.0, and much, much more. One of connects said this thing could be out as early as Black Friday, and while it seems a little far fetched, we’re slowly coming around to the possibility.

UPDATE: Actually, I meant to write mid-December. Our previous scoop said either the Curve2 or Dragon would come out around Black Friday, and we know that the Curve2 is being released on November 20th.

One of our connects just blessed us with a couple shots of the HTC DROID Eris and graciously unboxed the retail packaging. We could bore you with meaningless details about how the phone is thinner and lighter than the Sprint HTC Hero, feels much better in the hand, and is generally the best Android device besides the Motorola DROID our connect has used, but we’ll stop there. Enjoy the photos!

Thanks, Jon!

Forget the first commercial you saw, this one takes the cake. We’ve been told it should start airing on TV this week. Video is after the break.

One of our really solid connects just had some information for us and we think you’re going to love it. With the Motorola DROID being Verizon’s hot handset at the moment, you’d figure that the Moto would be it for a while, right? Well, if our guy is right, we could soon be bombarded with a lot more handsets. Apparently if the DROID launch/sales go really well, (it probably will) Verizon will push up handset releases and practically aim for the smartphone crown. Were talking HTC Passion, Motorola Calgary, Curve2, etc.

Apparently the Curve2 or HTC Passion / Dragon will launch on Black Friday, “whatever is ready first.” The second device would be used in a holiday push around mid-December. I asked why Verizon wouldn’t space this out more and he/she said “best network, best smartphones campaign.” Fair enough.

There are also some handsets coming soon that we “don’t know about,” apparently. Could all four Android devices really launch on Verizon before the end of the year, or really close to it? Plus a couple BlackBerrys, and some other stuff that hasn’t surfaced yet? It seems a little crazy, but hey, more power to them.

UPDATE: We’ve also been told that Verizon will release 15 new phones, mostly smartphones, starting with the BlackBerry Storm2 and continuing into the end of December.

Who’s up for one more shot of the HTC Droid Eris? One of our connects wrote us in and dropped this photo on us. They also said, “Overall the same as the Sprint Hero but for some reason it seems faster, slightly thinner and taller.” Otherwise it “seems the same” and is running Android 1.5. We already told you the Droid Eris will be powered by a 528MHz Qualcomm CPU, and while it won’t ship with Android 2.0, well, you know where we’re going with this…

UPDATE: Updated with better shot!

Thanks, PhenomenalONE!