The upcoming LG VX9600 Versa will ship with a modular physical QWERTY keyboard – yes, we all know this. The presence of a “soft” keyboard however, has been questioned by many. Thankfully, a newly leaked image and information posted on Howard Forums will serve to put that debate to rest. According to HoFo user Snap315, the Versa will feature an on-screen keyboard that will be present in the browser, notepad, for texting and other applications much like the Dare. The on-screen keyboard appears to be an improvement over the Dare’s keyboard though, and features directional arrows, dedicated “.com”, “@”, comma and period buttons as well as colored keys to indicate non-letter keys like the “Clear”, “Done” and “Shift” buttons. From the looks of things, Versa keyboard will also retain the “pop-up” letters (while typing) that were present on the Dare and made popular by the iPhone. So there you have it folks – with the Versa sporting both an improved on-screen keyboard and a detachable physical QWERTY keyboard, it looks like you can have your cake and eat it, too.

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One of our Bell ninjas has just come through for us in a huge way by sending us the entire Bell and Solo Mobile line-up for Q4. A lot of new devices are going to be hitting the shelves in time for the Christmas push and by the looks of it, Bell is ready to do some serious battle with rivals Rogers and Telus. Oh, and before you go ignoring this paragraph, it was internally announced that Bell will be getting an Android phone made by Motorola sometime in 2009. Just throwing that out there. The last and final thing that needs to be said is that these dates assume that not everything goes smoothly. As we all know, things can always happen at that cause delays, right RIM? Anyway, let’s go to it.

Handsets

• BlackBerry Storm launches on November 21st.
• HTC Diamond in early November. Includes 200 songs on 4GB internal memory.
• HTC Touch Pro will launch in early December
• LG Reveal in early November. Includes “Shimmer Kit” consisting of a case and crystal covered Bluetooth headset by Swarovski.
• LG Voyager in mid-November. Includes is 350 songs on a pre-loaded 2GB microSD card.
• Samsung Cleo in early November
• Sanyo Pro 200 in late November
• Sanyo Pro 700 in late November

Monthly Plans

• Introduction of monthly roll-over minutes
• Uber plans now include evenings and weekends starting at 5pm
• $15 per month for unlimited SMS and voicemail
• Option to buy $30 data plan without voice plan

Hit up the break to see what Q4 has in store for Solo Mobile.

Solo Mobile Devices

• BlackBerry Pearl 8130 in White
• Samsung Cleo

Solo Mobile Plans

• $15, $20, $25, $30, $35, $40, $45, $70 plans netting 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 350, 750 per-second minutes respectively
• Unlimited SMS on all voice plans $25 and up

Solo Mobile BlackBerry Plans

• $45: 150 minutes, unlimited calls after 7pm, unlimited data
• $15: 2mb of browsing, unlimited email
• $30: unlimited data

Could this be the first Christmas in recent memory where Bell is relevant? Only time will tell.

Kicking things off with the LG Voyager, Verizon Wireless has just gone live with its visual voicemail service. No doubt inspired by the iPhone though Apple was hardly the first to introduce such a service (just ask its legal team), Verizon’s new service allows users to listen to voicemail messages by navigating through a visual representation of their voicemail inbox. In a nutshell, it marries voicemail and a call log. So what sets Verizon’s offering apart from third-party alternatives? For one thing, it’s cheap! At $3 per month, Verizon’s service is a fraction of the price of services like PhoneTag which charge $9.99 per month or more. Of course PhoneTag also transcribes voicemails and that is the core value of its offering, whereas Verizon’s service doesn’t quite go there. For your $3 you can store up to 40 messages for a maximum of 40 days and create up to 10 caller ID-based greetings. As for the implementation, the UI won’t be winning any American Design Awards any time soon but at that price you pretty much can’t go wrong. So if you’ve got a Voyager and you’re game to check out Verizon’s offering, the first thing you have to do is check your firmware version. VX10KV09 or later are ready to roll but if you’ve got something older you’ll need to drop by your local Verizon store for an upgrade.

[Via AppleInsider]

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