Dual-band? Check. Dual-SIM? Check. One phone? Triple check. Believe it or not, Coolpad has reportedly crafted a phone that's multifaceted like no other -- one that not only includes room for a pair of SIM cards, but includes GSM and CDMA radios. Furthermore, the unit can purportedly switch between GSM and CDMA accounts on a whim, making you wonder why on Earth this didn't arrive before you plunked down for a second handset. The mobile is supposedly going for anywhere between $100 to $1,000 (depending on model and "who you know on the inside"), but you'll have to trek to Indonesia, China or Africa in order to acquire one.

Oh, snap. Just the other day we were bemoaning the fact that the Touch Diamond sent to us courtesy of HTC lacked both HSDPA 850 / 1900 and GSM 850, but according to the product page at CompUSA, the version it's selling has all of those. Yep, a purported quad-band Touch Diamond is seemingly in stock right now for Americans willing to part with $779.99, but remember, all those bills nets you a 2.8-inch VGA display, HSDPA 7.2, Windows Mobile 6.1 and oodles of sexy. Go on, help HTC get one closer to two million this year.

[Thanks, Tom]

Update: Hey look, UKers can get in too. Just £463.99 including VAT. Thanks Leigh!

Update 2: For shame! HTC just pinged us and said this thing is the same as every other Touch Diamond, meaning that North American 3G is not supported.

Heads up, affluent sect. The immensely pricey Professional 105 line is expanding, as two new members slip in to tempt your stuffed wallet. Mobiado's Professional 105 EM is available in Cocobolo and Ebony, and the frame is even constructed from anodized aluminum; you'll also notice sapphire crystal buttons and a black finish. As for the Professional 105 GCB, it's layered with a 5-micron thick 24-karat gold plating and jazzed up with a fancy logo 'round back. Both candybars feature quad-band GSM support, a measly 1GB of internal storage space and a ho hum 2-megapixel camera, but fret not, as it'll (very likely) be the most expensive lackluster cellphone you'll ever pay for.

[Via UnwiredView]

3G is so Monday. Today, NXP Semiconductors is getting down with the "world's fastest high-bandwidth cellular soft modem," which will obviously be aimed at smartphones, MIDs and other handhelds thirsting for WWAN. Notably, the PNX6910 supports multi-mode LTE / HSPA / UMTS / EDGE / GPRS / GSM capability, and it's reportedly capable of achieving data transfer rates of 150Mbits down and 50Mbits up. To put things in perspective, NXP suggests that users could download an "entire HD movie in less than 7 minutes," though we're not sure what constitutes an "entire movie." Oh, and before you get too excited in here, you should probably know that the chip won't even be available until Q2 2009 at the earliest.

VoIP has been ushered onto the iPhone in quite a few incarnations, but we'd wager than none of 'em are as useful as iCall. Said application is currently in beta form, though a release isn't quite ready for the public at large. Put simply, it enables iPhones to switch from GSM to WiFi (when WiFi is nearby, of course) on-the-fly in order to save cell minutes and bypass the hassle of manually changing over. Interested? We thought you'd be -- hop on past the break to see a demonstrative video of the app in action, and keep a close eye on the read link for a sure-to-surface-soon download.

Oh, come on, Qualcomm, show a little emotion; shed a tear or something! After some two years of planning and urging legacy customers to migrate, Australia's Telstra has flipped a big, red, scary-looking switch somewhere, sending its CDMA network into darkness, never to return. The move effectively obsoletes roughly 3,500 CDMA sites around the country along with what the carrier bills as "redundant equipment" -- a nice little cost savings, no doubt, not to mention the freeing of significant chunks of spectrum for more advanced services. As you might have guessed, Telstra is jumping through these hoops to get customers onto its Next G-branded UMTS network, mirroring a widespread trend away from CDMA-based technologies and toward the GSM roadmap. Globally, it seems like CDMA2000 has years of life left -- but without a shred of major carrier support for the 4G path, its glory days may be numbered.

[Via Pocket PC Thoughts]

We've handled handsets with unorthodox keypads before, but there's quite a bit more about this here device that's off-kilter than just a unique method of input. Discovered in the always unpredictable database of the FCC, the Mobicom-built mobile plays on the 850 / 1900 GSM bands and features a built-in MP3 player, file manager, speakerphone and accelerometer -- you know, for accessing icons by simply tilting the phone. The most astounding inclusion, however, isn't the integrated NFC technology that allows users to make payments on the go, but rather the unmistakable logo of a financial services company. Sitting front and center. On a cellphone. Something tells us this thing better print greenbacks if it hopes to seriously lure any suits away from their precious BlackBerrys.

[Via PhoneScoop]

Callers, your worst nightmare is coming true... maybe. According to a report, a group of hackers at the Black Hat conference in Washington D.C. claim that they're able to hack GSM calls with equipment costing about $1,000. If you believe the team (and we're inclined to at least have a listen), they can decrypt GSM phone conversations and text messages on a network using inexpensive tools called field programmable gate arrays. Until now, the cost of the technology required to hack GSM transmissions has been prohibitively expensive for all but your government and large-scale snooping operations, but that's beginning to change. Not only can this technique allow access to calls, but some of the tech demonstrated at the conference might also enable a user to pinpoint a phone's distance from the surveillance hardware, and find out what type of device is being used. There was no mention of CDMA hacking, so you might want to move over to Sprint for all your seedy activities. Er, we mean stay on Sprint.

We still don't know whether Telus will be so hasty as to decommission its existing CDMA network in favor of UMTS / HSPA ahead of the long road to 4G, but it any rate, it looks like the Canadian carrier's next-gen technology of choice is darn near locked up. A job listing for a Senior Switch Engineer details CDMA and EV-DO experience as part of its requirements, naturally -- but here's where it gets interesting: they want "knowledge on UMTS, IMS, and LTE evolution" as well, without any mention of UMB or WiMAX to be found. In other words, if we wait around long enough, we'll be able to call Telus a GSM carrier, which should make the Rogers monolith just a little uneasy.

[Thanks, Justin Y.]

What if Toshiba were to produce a Blu-ray player? If there's one surefire sign that a company is recognizing the mortality of its own standards, it's throwing some support behind the competition's -- and that's exactly what Qualcomm has done in announcing new roadmaps for its mobile and cellular base station chipsets that include LTE. LTE, one of several 4G standards competing for the hearts and minds of carriers across the world, has a huge leg up on Qualcomm's own UMB and WiMAX (which is technically a pre-4G standard, anyway) by having the blessing of the GSM Association, the global juggernaut of mobile industry organizations. Anyway, Qualcomm's new plans call for future chipsets to support various flavors of UMTS, HSPA, and EV-DO, theoretically making it easier for carriers of all creeds to migrate to LTE while still supporting legacy cells and devices. The new silicon is expected to be available next year, and without a single major carrier having signed up for UMB, we'd say that's not a moment too soon.

Palm's GSM Centro has been about the worst-kept secret in the entire smartphone industry for the past few weeks, and indeed, it's now official -- for Europe, anyway. The unlocked handset features a quadband GSM / EDGE radio with nary a trace of UMTS in sight (this is still Garnet, after all), 64MB of user-available storage, a 1.3 megapixel camera, and a 320 x 320 display -- in other words, the same Centro we all know and love (or tolerate, or despise, depending on your point of view) with just a little bit less CDMA and 3G data to its name. It'll hit the British market on the 14th of the month and the remainder of Europe by the end of February for €299 or £199 (roughly $440 or $392); no word on when the official AT&T version will be available yet, but US folks desperate for one of these unlocked versions in the meantime shouldn't have a lot of trouble importing it, we'd imagine.

[Via Treonauts, thanks Andrew]

We know, it's not like the nüvifone is a total surprise any longer, but just in case you tend to rest easier after digesting information straight from the source, here goes. Garmin's recently (and abruptly) announced handset obviously marks the firm's first solo foray into the cellphone arena, and according to Cliff Pemble, the firm's president and COO, it's the "breakthrough product that cellphone and GPS users around the world have been longing for." That being said, the unit will feature a 3.5-inch touchscreen with a trio of primary icons -- Call, Search and View Map -- along with an internet browser, HSDPA support and preloaded maps of North America and / or Eastern and Western Europe. Furthermore, it houses "millions" of POIs, doles out turn-by-turn, voice-prompted directions and becomes Garmin's first device to include Google's local search capability. As for pricing and availability? We're looking at a Q3 2008 release, but we'll have to wait things out before finding out a price and who exactly will be carrying it. Check out the gallery below for shots of the device and its UI, and head on over to Engadget Classic for lots more pics.

We hit the show floor excitedly looking for iriver's GSM phone which they showed off earlier in the week, but when we got to their booth, the little guy was nowhere to be found. We managed to wrangle a chat out of some of the company's product designers and marketing people, and they explained their hesitation at continuing to show the W7-cum-GSM-phone due to the similarities of the phones UI to an all-too-familiar device. According to the iriver people, the iPhone-like interface which was showcased originally was only meant to demonstrate what the phone was capable of, not a finalized version of the OS. Of course, it's little consolation to us, having seen a brief snippet of the phone, though we're assured that some new hotness -- or hot newness -- is on the way from the cats in Korea.

A 20-year old EU legislation is on the brink of being abandoned, and it's good news for those wanting more 3G across the pond. Reportedly, European Union telecom ministers supported proposals to "open radio frequencies allocated exclusively for GSM mobile phone services to other technologies, such as 3G mobile data." If approved by the European Parliament, creating a 3G network in the 900MHz band could provide "up to 40-percent greater coverage than one in the 2,100MHz band for the same capital expenditure," according to the GSM Association. Furthermore, some 300 million more individuals across Asia, Europe and Africa could purportedly have access to mobile broadband by 2012 if operators could use the 900MHz spectrum for 3G services. Sounds good from here, but we've no idea how long it'll take to hear a final decision on all this.