The Samsung Zeal uses e-ink to change the characters on the keyboard buttons. Samsung We see plenty of phones with unique designs, but this week Samsung is bringing Verizon customers a shape we haven’t seen in awhile. The Samsung Zeal is a dual-hinge messaging phone. Flip it in portrait mode like you would a clamshell …

Skype pushed out an update to Skype for Android today, its VoIP telephony app for Android smartphones. Skype for Android 1.0.1 makes a number of changes based on its user feedback, which has been lukewarm overall. Among the bug fixes are support for 320×240-pixel (QVGA) and 240×400-pixel screen resolutions, support for the hardware “back” button, and behavior that exits Skype …

MetroPCS has plucked the simple Samsung Contour (SCH-r250) for its lineup. The candy-apple-red flip phone has a VGA camera, and both internal and external displays. The Contour is a very simple phone for making calls. Features-wise, it supports Bluetooth, multimedia messaging, and voice commands. There’s also a slew of MetroPCS apps, including MetroWeb for the Internet, e-mail with mail@metro, Metro …

Opera Software just unveiled Opera Mobile 10.1 beta for Android tonight, but we’ve had a chance to play around with a prerelease version for several days. Opera has already had a presence on Android phones in the form of Opera Mini, a Java-based proxy browser that delivers Web pages fed through Opera’s servers. Opera Mobile, by contrast, is a standalone …

We have to hand it to Mozilla: its mobile team has recently been hauling out tweaks and updates to its mobile Firefox browser for Android and (two) Nokia Maemo devices. Mozilla unveiled the hotly anticipated Firefox for Android app (called Firefox 4 beta) early last month. It was a good first effort, but we balked at the beta software’s huge …

Samsung sure seems to be padding AT&T’s roster of messaging phones. After announcing the eco-friendly Evergreen earlier this week, Samsung today unveils the Solstice II. Sold for just $29.99 on contract–just like the Evergreen–the Solstice II has a 3-inch touch-screen display that supports a 240×400-pixel resolution with 65,000 colors and features the Samsung TouchWiz 2.0 interface. Other features include a …

When Microsoft prepped cell phone manufacturers about Windows Phone 7, they were crystal clear in defining the minimum hardware specifications each phone would have to support the mobile software–a touch screen, 1GHz processor, and 5-megapixel camera, for instance. Android’s rapid development, on the other hand, makes minimum hardware specs murkier. They’re documented but less understood than the distinctions between the …

Skyfire for iPhone ($2.99) may be one of the shortest-lived apps in the iPhone App Store, surviving only five hours today before Skyfire pulled it from the marketplace after noticing strain on their servers that resulted in poor user experience. “The servers haven’t crashed,” a Skyfire spokesperson said, but they did stutter as customers who bought the browser streamed Flash …

PALO ALTO, CA–Let’s get it over with. There is no Facebook phone. Mark Zuckerberg made that abundantly clear with a firm denial at a Facebook mobile event today at company headquarters in Palo Alto. But Facebook did announce a single sign-on. Single sign-on is roughly an extension of (and replacement for) services like Facebook Connect, connecting you to third-party social …

The Samsung Evergreen is both environmentally and budget-friendly. Samsung AT&T is getting a new quick texting phone on November 7, one that Samsung is pushing hard as an eco phone. The Samsung Evergreen is built from 70 percent recycled post-consumer materials, and its packaging is made from 80 percent recycled post-consumer paper. The packaging uses soy ink, and in lieu …