Every once in a while, a carrier and manufacturer will pause the parade of superphones to nod to their humble roots. Today, Samsung and Sprint introduce the modest Samsung M370 flip phone. The pewter gray handset has a clamshell design, a 2.4-inch internal display, and a 1.3-megapixel camera. There’s also Web browsing, Bluetooth support, and …

LG unwrapped more details about its Ice Cream Sandwich software upgrade schedule for existing LG Android smartphones. The news, which popped up today on LG’s Facebook page, confirms much of what we already knew–that Optimus phones like the Optimus LTE and Optimus Black (known in the US as AT&T’s Nitro HD and Sprint’s LG Marquee, respectively) will indeed receive the …

U.S. Cellular is stuffing its pockets with more Gingerbread. Next week it starts stocking the Huawei Ascend II, an Android 2.3 smartphone that first debuted for Cricket. The rather modest touch-screen phone has a 3.5-inch display, a 5GB camera, and Swype preloaded on the virtual keyboard. The carrier will offer it for free–after a $100 mail-in rebate–on its Web site …

Samsung today introduced the Galaxy Y Duos and Galaxy Y Pro Duos, a pair of Android smartphones in the Galaxy product family that hve space for two SIM cards, letting you lead a double life on your phone. The two SIM cards mean you’ve got two phone numbers at your disposal, one for work, for instance, and one for your …

Chinese phone maker Huawei may have one of the first press conferences at CES next month, but it’s at February’s Mobile World Congress show where the company intends to impress. Earlier today, Huawei circulated the teaser e-mail above (border my own), promising to announce the company’s “fastest and most high-performing” smartphone to date. That doesn’t tell us much about the …

If you’re one of the new owners of a Samsung Galaxy Nexus who’s experiencing wobbly signal strength on Verizon, a reprieve is on the way. This article was originally published December 19, 2011, and updated on December 21, 2011. The carrier, in a tweet, promised phone owner Jack Doyle that Verizon is looking into and actively developing a fix for …

Now playing: Watch this: Dialed In #204: The mighty Galaxy Nexus has landed! 37:58 There we were last week, minding our own business, when Verizon surprised us all by announcing it would release its Galaxy Nexus flagship phone the following day. Well, we hopped to it and managed to get a device early and publish the first review of the …

Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich software update is hardly truckin’ it. The Android 4.0 release, which the company promised last week would roll out to Samsung Nexus S owners, has hit a snag. Frustrated users on Google’s Android forum and elsewhere, have complained of over-the-air downloads failing to correctly install, leaving them with the previous software version, Android 2.3 Gingerbread. “Mine …

The Pantech Pocket for AT&T is no Skinny Minny of a smartphone. Instead, its Big Bertha design is one of the Android smartphone’s standout traits. Pantech’s Pocket has a 4-inch screen with dimensions that are rarely seen: a 600×800-pixel configuration known as super-VGA (or SVGA). That translates into a 3:4 aspect ratio that’s both shorter and squatter than most other …

From the outset, it appeared that AT&T had all the political elbow grease it needed to complete its ultimately failed takeover of rival carrier T-Mobile. Yet pressure from Sprint, the Department of Justice (DOJ), antitrust interests, and finally the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had AT&T fighting to revise the terms of its buyout proposal. Today, after a nine-month drama of …