Every year countless gifts are given during the holidays. Some of them are great, and some of them… well, you can’t win ‘em all. We’ve never done a Gift Guide before but with countless new products popping up almost weekly, we’re surprised those of you who aren’t glued to BGR are able to pick out a gift at all. Sorting everything by price point didn’t make much sense as the average price of what’s listed is around $199 after rebate, so we sorted it by lust-facto...

Guess what, Sprint Hero users? The update that you have all been so patiently waiting for has finally arrived. No, we’re not talking about anything as big Android 2.0, but a bug killing maintenance release. Available OTA and coming in at 3748377 bytes, firmware 1.56.651.2 fixes that pesky SMS issues which caused significant battery drain as well as enables the device to play friendly with DST. So far we’re not noticing any other changes (we wish there were an official change log we could take a pe...

If there is a company that wants to jump into the netbook market and offer something unique and solid, it would be HTC. It has already produced some rock-solid handsets like the Hero, Eris, Touch Pro2 and HD2, so why not a netbook? HTC CEO Peter Chou mentioned that his company is still very much interested in building a netbook. We think that Mr. Chou may be onto something with the idea that HTC should put out something unique and not just another “me too” netbook. After all, it seems like the ent...

A couple days ago, HTC tweeted the Hero would be anointed with Android 2.0, just like the DROID, and now, HTC’s website is showing us that the Hero will be offered on Telus’ network in GSM/HSDPA goodness. No specification surprises in the GSM variant: Telus’ Hero will have the same Qualcomm MSM7200A 528MHz processor, WiFi b/g, BlueTooth 2.0, and 5 megapixel camera as its CDMA cousin. There has been no indication from HTC as to whether the GSM Hero will ship with Android 1.5 or 2.0 in tow, bu...

Yesterday, Sprint executive David Owens dropped a ton of great news for Sprint customers in a live chat. Some of the news isn’t groundbreaking, but it’s still good to know and get confirmation from Sprint directly. Read on for the list of items that were mentioned. (more…)

Sprint seems to keep bleeding, keep, keep, bleeding subscribers. After losing 801,000 post-paid subscribers, which is slightly better than the 870,000 that analysts expected, Sprint might need to really change its game to do more than just stay afloat. Consequently, Sprint’s losses for the quarter are a whopping $478 million compared to $326 million YoY. Revenue dropped about nine percent to $8.04 billion. Interestingly enough, Sprint’s prepaid service, Boost, added over 600,000 subscribers thanks...

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: Update...

The Android 2.0 news keeps on a comin’! According to HTC via Twitter, the Hero will be blessed with an Eclair software update although an exact release date has yet to be determined. All signs indicate HTC will forgo the 1.6 update and focus on getting the Sense UI tweaked for 2.0 and kicking on the Hero. First the DROID, now the Hero…what handset will be next to grab a little Eclair?“The rumors are true! Hero will be getting an Eclair update. We ask for your patience as we update Sense for ...

With employee HSPA training well under way, one of our TELUS connects hit us up late last night to let us know just what smartphone hungry Canadians can expect once its HSPA network overlay goes live next month. Apart from the obvious ones – iPhone 3G and 3GS — TELUS will be dishing out the BlackBerry Bold 9700, LG Chocolate BL40 and the Nokia E71 (odd, we know). Road warriors should also note that TELUS will be offering the Sierra Wireless 306 USB data stick which is capable of taking full advan...

Your mileage may vary, but it appears that Sprint’s telesales has begun offering up the HTC Hero a few days ahead of schedule. We called telesales ourselves to check out the matter and were told that we could order up some Android goodness tonight for $279.99 on a 2-year before a $100 MIR. We’ve already given you our thoughts on the device and if you can deal with a little bit of lag here and there, it’s off to the races starting right now.Thanks, JayTV and everyone else who hit us up!

While Sprint’s HTC Hero is housed in a different and arguably less sexy shell than the standard HTC version, the internals are the same. That’s a 5 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and a whole lot more running on Sprint’s CDMA voice and data network. We’ve put together a bunch of things we loved as well as things we disliked about the Sprint version of the HTC Hero after the break along with some photos. (more…)

We don’t even know where to begin with this one… The man on the left is Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. What’s in his hands? A Verizon-branded HTC Android device. Why is this interesting? You know, the fact that it’s not announced? Also could that be a Motorola Sholes in the photo on the right?Thanks, Berry!Read

We were lucky enough to get our hands on Best Buy Mobile’s entire Holiday Playbook and after combing through it, there’s a couple little nice nuggets of information. Really more confirmations than anything else, but hey, we aren’t ones to turn down info. Before we get to handsets specifically, it seems Best Buy has some pretty hard statistics on sales opportunities — check this out:The average store sees over 64,000 customers during October and NovemberOut of those customers, only 1% r...

Best Buy announced yesterday that it would be Sprint’s exclusive retail partner (for 60 days, we hear) for the highly anticipated HTC Hero, which will be available at each of Best Buy’s 1,044 locations across the country beginning October 11th. As is always the case with Best Buy Mobile, there is no need to bother with that pesky mail-in rebate as BBYM is spotting customers the $100 and offering the Hero for a straight $179.99 on a 2-year contract. We’ve also learned that while pre-orders ar...