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Back in February the WiFi Alliance outed a future Samsung Windows Mobile phone, the GT-i8000, which was sporting Windows Mobile 6.1. And that's about all that was known about it.

And we don't know too much more today, except that it's GSM-bound. The Unwired spied the above shot at the Global Certification Forum, which shows the radio frequencies it'll support. OK, that's not entirely true. As you can see, it'll have HSDPA, MMS and video telephony. Fairly standard stuff these days, huh?

Gentlemen, start your speculating engines.

For all you users of Microsoft's My Phone sync service, things may be a little spotty today.

The My Phone service will be not be available on May 18 to enable deployment of a service upgrade.  During this maintenance period, you will be unable to access the My Phone web site or to sync your phone with the service.  We apologize for any inconvenience.

Hang in there, folks. This, too, shall pass.

Via LiveSide

Remember the Blackjack III/Mirage/Samsung i788/AT&T Epix? The Boy Genius has gone and gotten his hands on one.

His first thought? This thing is fat. Not phat, not pfat, FAT. "Probably the thickest phone in their lineup," he says.

What else do we get?

• An actual model name. i907, which a launch sheet originally leaked to BGR called the Mirage and said was is to be released Oct. 23. (Will it and the AT&T Fuze make it on time?)
• Windows 6.1 Professional with haptic feedback.
• That optical mouse Dieter cough loves so much.
• GSM bands of 850, 1900 and 2100Mhz represented.
• GPS.

BGR says the screen leaves much to be desired. Head on over, check out his gallery, and see for yourself. Well played, sir.

Edit: Fixed Fuze release date to Oct. 23 sted Oct. 2. What? You were squinting, too.

Each week we bring you the Best of SPE and this week is no exception. From Android to Windows Mobile and everything in between, we've got your smartphone news fix right here.

Looks like Microsoft's going to continue to have some fairly major competition in the cloud. Dashwire, the popular sync service and a direct competitor to Microsoft's beta My Phone service, recently secured $1.6 million in funding. Dashwire syncs contacts, pictures and other PIM data to the cloud and can upload photos to various online services.

Said Dashwire founder and CEO Ford Davidson:

“We’re growing our business right now. We will hire a few more developers. We’ll have some new things released later in the year, and we’re cranking away on it.”

So we'll be looking for more from Dashwire in the future. Currently it runs on Windows Mobile and Symbian phones, and BlackBerry and Android clients reportedly are in the works.

Xconomy via mocoNews

We know there's a special breed of people out there who don't like touching the screen of their phones and instead stick to a stylus. (We're looking at you, Mal!) But what if Microsoft's trying to go one further in Windows Mobile 7 and make it so that you don't have to touch the phone at all?

ZDNet's Mary-Jo Foley has uncovered slides from a January 2008 internal Microsoft presentation that showed "non-touch" technology. Basically you'd put the phone on a flat surface and wave your hand over it in various motions to make it trigger various actions. (These are not the droids you're looking for.)

"But, Phil," you say, "who cares about slides from January 2008? That's, like, a year and a half ago!" As Ms. Foley explains, the mock-ups in the slides have cameras in the top corner of the phone, not unlike the Zune HD mock-ups we've seen. And remember that the Zune hardware team is now part of the Windows Mobile team. And remember that touch (and specifically multi-touch) will play a big part in WM7.

She also notes that the phone is seen interacting with other devices – slide projectors, gaming consoles and the like – which is right in line with where MS is moving things.

Will any of this actually make it into Windows Mobile 7, which we're expecting to be announced next year? Who knows. But if it turns out to be true, we'll all have to stop worrying about Microsoft thinking outside the box.

Non-touch: Still on the Windows Mobile 7 Feature List?

Bad news for those of you outside the United States who were hoping to get your hands on the Samsung Jack. It looks like it's going to be a U.S.-only phone.

Says Samsung Austria to TamsWMS:

Like the Propel Pro, you are looking at yet another US-only handset. This means that Samsung Austria has no pictures or samples…

The good news: There's always the HTC Snap for some Windows Mobile Standard fun.

Look. We don't know PPCGeeks user kidmet. He's probably a pretty cool cat. But we can't imagine it'd be too much fun to ride around in his back pocket all day. We'd just assplode.

And that's exactly what his spare Touch Pro battery apparently did.

I walked into my house early this week to the smell of burning. I couldn't find where it was coming from. Last night as I was gathering my laundry I noticed a burn through the back of my jeans. A HUGE hole. I had a spare Touch Pro battery in my back pocket. It had expanded and obviously started a fire in my jeans. They were in a clothes pile and buried, so I assume that there wasn't enough oxygen to start a fire.

We don't know if this was an OEM battery or if it was straight from HTC. But we're glad your butt's OK, kidmet, and we're glad this isn't an everyday occurrence.

Looks like Ars Technica has done a nice summary of the TechEd 2009 and depending on your thoughts and feelings about the new UI layout in WM6.5, you may find this admission from Senior Project Manager Loke Uei Tan either remarkable for the talent or shocking due to the obvious time constraints, which resulted in an uninspiring UI layout:

The reason why we couldn't complete the interface on Windows Mobile 6.5 is because of time. We only spend what, eight months, nine months, to build 6.5 from ground up and it's actually an amazing engineering feat. But, in order to do that, we had to do some prioritization and we had to cut certain features. Eventually, we will make sure that the UI capabilities are carried out throughout the whole platform.

This pretty much confirms what we already knew: WM6.5 was not really suppose to happen, that in effect it was a stop-gap till WM7 gets released.  Just how old is WM7?  Anyone remember a thing called "Photon" mentioned at the end of 2005?  Yeah.

Anyways, being WMExperts, we're going to be less snarky than Gizmodo and give the WinMo team a little pat on the back, with a firm, violent shaking saying 'you better not let us down with 'Photon' er WM7'!

When Microsoft first released the list of what'll get an app blocked from Windows Marketplace for Mobile, some of the reasons weren't entirely clear. Now, we're happy to say, a number of them have been answered.

Microsoft's Loke Uei spoke on the Winmo World podcast (which features the guys from wmpoweruser, Unwired View and pda.pl) and cleared up some of our questions.

• No VOIP apps using a carrier's data. (WiFi is just fine. But no Skype over 3G. Sorry, folks. Saw that one coming.)
• No apps with an OTA download of over 10MB. (That's for the initial app download. So, no 800MB Myst games. Once the app's on your phone, it can suck in as much data as you want. Er, so long as it's not VOIP.)
• No apps that change the default browser, search client, or media player on the device. (Admittedly, they need to define this a little better, but they're working on it, and apps like Opera, Skyfire, Kinoma and the like should be OK.)

There's also a lot of talk about fragmenting the Windows Mobile application ecosystem with these rules, which will keep a number of apps out of the Marketplace. Our take on that:

The Windows Mobile application ecosystem already is fragmented. Yes, there are software houses that sell their apps under one roof, and there are sites such as Handango (and the WMExperts Software Store) that sell a number of apps. But it's safe to say Microsoft will be bring a weight and legitimacy to to the process that has been lacking for the average consumer.

The Marketplace should help bring the ecosystem together. Will it reach the level of integration of Apple's App Store? Certainly not at first. And maybe not ever. (And that's not necessarily a bad thing.) But suffice to say the Marketplace is still one of the larger developements for Windows Mobile to come out of the past couple of years.

Less than a week after it was officially announced, Microsoft has issued an update to the official Windows Mobile Facebook application. Here's what's fixed, according to the Windows Mobile Team blog:

This version should help anyone that was getting the “cannot install due to insufficient privileges” error and it should also help with some hanging errors.

If you've been having problems with the app, head over to WindowsMobile.com/facebook and try out the update. When you download it, it'll be identified as Facebook_v1.0.0.7p (the old one's just v1.0.0.7.). And here's another tip when upgrading:

You’ll want to uninstall the old application and then make sure that the facebook.vol and fbmail.vol files are deleted from your root directory before reinstalling.

And sure enough, that took care of all of my problems. (The ones I was having with the Facebook app, anyway.) Huzzah!

SPB has released a Beta Update to their Mobile Shell 3.0, SPB Mobile Shell 3.0.1 Beta 1.  The update Beta fixes several "bugs" in the original and adds a few minor features. According to SPB, the release is not designed to add additional "standalone" features but rather to fix known bugs and add small features.

I installed the Beta update on the AT&T Fuze and the overall performance of Mobile Shell seemed to improve. The application felt more responsive to the touch. One fix was to resolve the tremendously slow screen rotation between portrait and landscape modes. The rotation speed was back to normal levels (maybe a hair faster) when you extend the keyboard of the Fuze. However, when you rotate the Fuze horizontally (without the keyboard extended) the screen no longer rotates. The fix is still in the Beta phase so I'm sure SPB will correct this.

A few of the more notable additions/fixes with the Beta include the addition of a "Show Today" widget; the addition of a "Remove All" command in the call log menu, and support for the "call" button in certain screens. From an individual contact screen, when you highlight the desired number to call and hit your "call" button the number is now dialed. In the original 3.0, the "call" button pulled up your dial screen.

There's no word from SPB when the update will be finalized and it's nice to see the prompt response SPB has made in addressing these issues. The SPB Mobile Shell 3.0.1 Beta can be downloaded here and for those interested, follow the break for the complete change log provided by SPB.