Alright T-Mobile, seriously, how can you charge $299.99 for a Wing on contract with a straight face (do carriers have faces?) while every single one of your competitors is rocking a device that's essentially two generations fresher for the same price? Alltel becomes the latest to add HTC's quintessential WinMo QWERTY smartphone to its stable, charging $279.99 for the privilege of adding a Touch Pro to your account on contract after $100 rebate. From the looks of things, it's basically Sprint's version with a tweaked version of the TouchFLO 3D UI that's either prettier or uglier than the stock build, depending on your point of view. Let's be honest, though: doesn't everything look good in VGA resolution?

[Thanks, theups]

Answering questions posted by users on Microsoft's official Windows Mobile Team Blog, an employee has laid down a nasty reality check that's going to piss off a user base that's already salty from years of being underserved: Internet Explorer Mobile 6 will not be made available as an upgrade or download for existing handsets. The alleged reasoning is that "the rich media experiences that IE Mobile 6 enables require more powerful, advanced devices," but let's get real here -- competitors like Opera and Skyfire already manage to match what Microsoft's new browser is trying to do and they work like champs on the latest round of hardware. Internet Explorer requiring more horsepower than the Touch Pro or the X1 has to offer? Please, Microsoft -- just give it to us straight, this was a business decision through and through.

[Via Pocket PC Thoughts]

We knew it was coming, and the day Canadian WinMo users have been dying to see arrive has, well, arrived. Telus Mobility has at long last decided to offer HTC's Touch Pro for those with the requisite coin, and while it's just the same as every other CDMA Touch Pro in terms of features, you'll be locked in for a solid three years (or eternity, same difference) if you're lusting after the $299.99 price tag. For those unwilling to sign the dotted line on such an agreement, you can pay $549.99, $599.99 or $649.99 on a 2-, 1- and 0-year plan, respectively.

[Via MobileSyrup]

We just got the official announcement of Celio's REDFLY C8N a few hours ago, and Laptop magazine's already had a chance to touch it and make a video! Their initial impressions? That $20 REDFLY Media Cable you have to buy to hook the C8N up to your phone is a tangled mess! This is exciting stuff, folks -- that is if you are just dying to shell out $299 for a buddy for your Windows Mobile device. Check out the terrifically brief video of the terminal after the break.

We noticed this on AT&T's web store in the wee hours this morning, and sure enough, they've gone ahead and announced the LG Incite in all its official glory today (normally the announcement comes before the web store stuff, but whatever). It's got WiFi, a 3-megapixel camera, a 3-inch touchscreen equipped with haptics and 400 x 240 resolution, AT&T Navigator, microSD support up to 16GB, triband HSDPA, and Windows Mobile 6.1 -- in other words, LG's produced a nice QWERTY-less foil to the Fuze here. It's available straight away in stores, too, as long as you're willing to shell out the $199.99 on contract after rebates.

Edinburgh's own The Medical Phone is just about set to unleash the mobile for the true argonaut in the iCEphone. The Windows Mobile-powered "Swiss Army knife of mobiles" is dubbed a micro-notebook by its manufacturer, and while we're hesitant to go along with that, we can't deny the utility here. Sporting a Jacob's Ladder-style hinge and a full QWERTY keyboard, the unit features three independent panels, a 3-inch 400 x 240 resolution touchscreen, a mouse / tracker pad, dual SIM card slots, HSDPA support, quad-band GSM connectivity, GPS, a 3.1-megapixel camera, WiFi and a 532MHz Freescale iMX31 CPU. We're told that the phone is just weeks / months away from a release in Thailand, and it should be hitting the UK sometime in the March - April time frame for around $1,000. Bonus video coverage after the break.

Goodness, that was quick! We'd expected LG's Incite smartphone to pop up maybe by the end of the week if we were lucky, did all of our homework, and went to bed on time, but AT&T's gone ahead and jumped the gun by throwing up the glossy touchphone for sale already. To recap, most of the rumored specs were spot on: wide QVGA, 3-megapixel cam, Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, WiFi, and GPS round out a promising feature set, but you're going to pay to the tune of $299.99 on contract before a $100 mail-in rebate on a Visa gift card. What happened to good, old-fashioned cash?

[Thanks, Luis]

LG and AT&T have done a pretty commendable job of keeping leaks about their glossy new WinMo set to a bare minimum, but you can only keep a phone this ritzy under wraps for so long, right? Word on the street is that AT&T stores will be ordering the LG Incite as of this Thursday, filling a gap in the lineup between the Vu and the Eternity -- full touchscreen dumbphones -- and the Fuze, the hot new QWERTY smartphone of the range. If the rumored specs hold up, we're looking at a WQVGA display, 3-megapixel cam, 3.6Mbps HSDPA, and Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. Any would-be Fuze buyers second-guessing themselves now?

[Thanks, Kal]

We seriously have no idea how Bell managed to beat Telus out of the gate with this one, but they did -- so, you know, more power to 'em. The HTC Touch Pro has now landed on Bell's airwaves, putting the mighty WinMo set on the path to becoming one of the most widely-launched smartphones in North America in recent history; on that note, Verizon is probably feeling a little sheepish right about now, but with any luck, they'll be fixing that up in short order. Meanwhile, Bell subs can go ahead and hook up a Touch Pro for just $239.95 CAD (about $195) on a three-year contract, so if you can see yourself punching away on the same QWERTY board for thirty six months, get to it.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Now that HTC's Fuze is live on AT&T, a few lucky souls out there have gone ahead and emptied their wallets to make your purchasing decision just a little easier. The Fuze, otherwise known as the HTC Touch Pro, has been carefully photographed and videoed by the WinMo connoisseurs over at WMExperts, and quite candidly, we're simultaneously jealous and impressed with the level of detail here. If you're looking for loads of multimedia to keep you satisfied until you have a chance to score one of your own, the read link has the goods.

We know how it goes -- once you get your Windows Mobile setup situated how you like it, making tweaks is a rare, rare occurrence. To that end, you probably passed on the highly dangerous first beta of the WebKit-based Iris browser. At long last, the entirely more stable beta v2 has emerged for those courageous enough to give it a go, and the designers are promising that the over 100 fixes and improvements make it "incredibly fast" and almost life-altering. If you're not keen on waiting for the next iteration of Internet Explorer Mobile, and if you're somehow not pleased with Opera Mini or Mobile Firefox, roll the dice with this one and see how things turn out.

[Via the::unwired]

The long, agonizing wait for Alltel to come clean with this gem is over. Starting today, subscribers can phone up the carrier with questions about the Touch Diamond and receive a response other than "Whatcha talkin' 'bout Willis?" 'Course, it's no shock whatsoever to see this Windows Mobile 6.1-based handset surface on the soon-to-be-Verizon's network, but those who've been waiting patiently will be utterly stoked to know that you can now plop down $249.99 (after all rebates and a 2-year agreement) in order to take one home.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

And then there was one. Following a November 24 launch of the Touch Pro on Verizon, that'll leave just T-Mobile among the big four US carriers without a version of HTC's top-of-the-line QWERTY set -- though at a staggering $419.99 on a two-year contract, we're not sure that we'd bother anyway. To be fair, that price comes before a $70 mail-in rebate, but that only knocks it down to $350, which still makes the Touch Pro one of Verizon's priciest devices. Following telesales availability, we'll get to see it, touch it, and take it home from retail locations starting on December 1, which gives us a few days to collect soda cans and take 'em to Michigan for the 10-cent deposits.

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

Hey Sprint, you listening? Granted, GSM doesn't do Sprint a whole lot of good in the States, but swapping a CDMA radio into HTC's first WiMAX effort here would make for a downright mighty response to the Touch HD. The previously-seen T8920 has turned out to be the MAX 4G, an 800 x 480 monster with 8GB of Flash on board, two cameras, an FM radio, GPS, WiFi, triband EDGE, and -- most importantly -- WiMAX support, making it the first GSM / WiMAX handset anywhere in the world. It'll be launching on Scartel's Yota network in Russia, and if you have friends cool enough to have a MAX 4G of their own, calls between the two of y'all will automatically be routed over the WiMAX airwaves using VoIP. A launch date hasn't been announced, but unless you're in Russia, there's probably not much point in even bothering to lust after this one.

Windows Mobile 6.5 was just a whisper on a Motorola phone chief Sanjay Jha's lips two weeks ago, but now that Ballmer himself has confirmed that there's at least one more rev of WinMo 6 en route before Windows Mobile 7 hits it looks like the floodgates have opened -- check out these hot screenshots, one of which seems to have been liberally dipped in Zune sauce. We're hoping that means we'll see some Zune integration with this next generation of handsets, but we're not going to get too worked up yet (cough, Xbox). It does look quite nice, though, and we've got our fingers crossed that this revamp is more than just a pretty new home screen and app launcher -- you're way late to that party, Microsoft. No telling on when 6.5 will actually get here, but Ballms said it'll be sometime next year, so we're guessing we don't have too long to wait.

Update: As several of you have pointed out, some of the icons are a little suspicious -- that "Today" icon is OS X's Home icon, for example. We're hoping this is the real deal and not just a user-made skin, but we wouldn't start making any long term plans here.

[Via WMPowerUser]