I nearly did a double take when lifting AT&T’s HTC Vivid out of its cardboard box. It’s one of the first HTC phones in a long time whose form looked cheap to my eyes. Shiny black plastic all around with just a thin metal plate on the battery cover, the handset lacks the thoughtful build …

Want a seriously cheap Android Gingerbread phone that doesn’t suck? You got it! Meet T-Mobile’s Samsung Exhibit II 4G. It has T-Mobile’s HSPA+ speeds (hence the “4G”), a front-facing camera, a 3-megapixel rear-facing camera, and a 1GHz processor. Plus, it’s filled with a bunch of useful apps, like T-Mobile TV HD. Overall, it’s a nice chunk of plastic smartphone power …

Now that dual-core phones are a dime a dozen, what’s next? Quad-core phones, like this leaked HTC Edge, if the photos are correct. An Nvidia Tegra 3 processor accounts for the 1.5GHz quad-core processing prowess, according to PocketNow. The Edge also supposedly boasts a 4.7-inch display with 720p HD resolution, an 8-megapixel camera with a backlit sensor and 28-millimeter, f/2.2 …

It’s been a couple of weeks now since we first glimpsed the Nokia Lumia 800, one of the first two of Nokia’s brave new Windows Phone world, just after it was announced at Nokia World. This phone had promise: a 3.7-inch WVGA AMOLED screen, a 1.4GHz processor, a singular design in crazy bright blue and magenta, and a fancy 8-megapixel …

I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised by AT&T’s Samsung Focus Flash. The specs looked more than reasonable for a smartphone that costs a quarter of the price of most high-end smartphones out there. More than that, the features all came together to achieve a solid Windows Phone at a stellar value. While the Samsung Focus S may be a …

To absolutely nobody’s surprise (twice), HTC today announced the HTC Rezound for Verizon, the first U.S. smartphone to use HTC-owned Beats Audio. Originally known as the Vigor, the Rezound is HTC’s stateside answer to Europe and Asia’s HTC Sensation XL with Beats Audio, which CNET got a chance to see in early October at CTIA. The Rezound, which features the …

It may be a few months late to the BlackBerry Torch party, but T-Mobile announced today that it’s finally getting its own BlackBerry Torch 9810. We first saw this updated vertical slider model this past summer for AT&T. The BlackBerry smartphone runs BlackBerry OS 7, and hooks into T-Mobile’s “4G” HSPA+ network. RIM’s signature QWERTY keyboard finds a home on …

Hours after launching the hotly anticipated Gmail for iPhone app (and for all iOS devices), Google pulled the broken app from the Apple App store and apologized on Twitter. “The iOS app we launched today contained a bug with notifications,” the tweet reads. “We have pulled the app to fix the problem. Sorry we messed up.” Google later followed up …

Most Android smartphones sold for $100 or less are basic hardware shells that do an adequate job, but won’t blow you away with their features. Not so the HTC Evo Design 4G. Sprint’s fifth member of the Evo family is a slightly smaller (but hardly tiny) handset that’s beautifully designed and imbued with a robust set of features, including 4G …

Now playing: Watch this: Dialed In #197: Zombie phones returned from the dead 46:28 This is one thriller of a show you can’t miss! Stephen sets the mood with some intros that will make you scream, we consider what it takes to bring Nokia back from the dead, and if RIM and Web OS have a chance at reversing their …