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Leave it to Verizon to spoil the party. The great news that Microsoft will make Windows Marketplace for Mobile available for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 was tempered somewhat a whole bunch by news that Verizon won't allow the Marketplace upfront. Instead, VZW is launching its own app store and will announce it July 28.

From Gigaom [via]:

Verizon’s Ryan Hughes, VP Partner Management, said in an interview Friday that the network operator’s app store will be the sole marketplace on devices sold by the company, meaning stores such as Research In Motion’s BlackBerry App World or Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Marketplace won’t get placement on Verizon handsets unless a consumer downloads them. Hughes also said that Verizon is focusing on aggregating content from four different developer communities: Windows Mobile, Palm, Android and BlackBerry.

So it sounds like Verizon will be shipping phones without Marketplace already on them. It's not yet known exactly how Marketplace will be pushed out to current phones, whether it's just an app install or a full ROM upgrade, so we're not sure how Verizon customers would go about getting the Marketplace post-purchase.

If this turns out to be on the level, Verizon will lose any goodwill gained by finally unlocking the GPS on the Saga and Touch Pro. (And we're still waiting on the Omnia, tap, tap, tap.)

Update: Gotta love Daring Fireball's reaction.

Cracks in the case are the scourge of every cell phone owner. To wit: The Palm Treo Pro, iPhone and Palm Pre are just three of the more recent high-profile phones that have suffered some apparently random plastic breakage. Add the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 to that list.

But cracks in cases are nothing new. What you see above, however, is interesting in that we get a good look at a slight design change in the Xpeira X1. (Look at the 90-degree corner there to the left of the numbers.) Any engineering types want to chime in on structural integrity of the two designs?

Via XDA Developers

Here's what you may have missed in the smartphone world last week.

• Pre-Order T-Mobile myTouch 3G Now
• T-Mobile US Has No Plans to Release HTC Hero
• Two More Updates to Android This Year

• New BlackBerry Tour Owner? Get Started @ CrackBerry!
• SkyFire Browser Getting Closer: New Version Released to Beta Testers
• Ongoing Twitter Contest - Win a BlackBerry and More!

• Will we see an Android-based Nokia device soon?
• The Nokia N97 offers a glimpse of Nokia's future success.
• I highly doubt Apple will pass Nokia in 2012

• How To: Install Homebrew Apps Without Rooting, Post-1.04 Update
• webOS 1.1 Coming Soon? Exchange Improvements on Tap for Palm Pre
• NFL Mobile Live Coming to Palm Pre August 1st

• TiPb iPhone App Store Picks of the Year
• iPhone 3.1 Beta Walkthrough
• Does the iPhone need a hardware keyboard?

• T-Mobile Dash 3G available online, in stores
• Evidence points toward Touch Diamond 2 on Sprint
• NRG MiniWeather for WM Standard: Pretty Awesome

We're about to really get into the ones and zeros here, and we're going to do so after the break, so bear with us. But the skinny is that it looks like legendary ROM chef Conflipper has found evidence that the HTC Touch Diamond 2 will be coming to Sprint. (That's just us slapping a Sprint logo on a TD2 up there, so nobody freak out just yet.)

Sure, that might not be a surprise, given that Sprint carries the original Touch Diamond and we've seen a Sprint-branded Touch Pro 2. But how Conflipper came to this conclusion is pretty cool, and he's shared it at ppcgeeks. Click on through to the other side as we break down all the dirty details. (And thanks, Brandon, for the tip!)

We have a winner! WMExperts member "wagonis" was randomly select from the past two days' worth of comments and will soon be enjoying the Motorola H12 Bluetooth Headset. 

The winning comment was posted on our coverage of the NRG Miniweather application. Fear not, we'll have more free stuff coming up real soon. Stay tuned.

Dear Verizon,

So here we are, halfway through the year and many moons removed from our open letter imploring you to unlock the GPS on your Windows Mobile phones. And in December 2008, you promised to do so in the first half of the year for the Samsung Omnia and Saga, and the HTC Touch Pro. And we rejoiced.

We're now a little past the midpoint of 2009, and indeed the Saga and Touch Pro have had their GPS chips released from the shackles of VZ Navigator, free to get turn-by-turn directions from the likes of Google Maps and Bing, among others. And for that, you have our thanks. While we're not quite ready to overlook you locking customers into (and having to pay for) VZ Navigator in the first place, it still means a lot in this crazy smartphone game when a company promises to do something and then follows through. So, thanks.

But while two out of three ain't bad, the job's not done. We can talk all night, but that ain't getting us nowhere. It's time to get the Omnia unlocked.  No more hacks. No more unofficial ROMs. Let's get that done so we can all turn our focus to some of the great new phones you have coming down the pike and go back to being one big, happy smartphone family.

We're still watching.

Love,

The WMExperts Team

Sprint this morning announced a seven-year, $5 billion deal that hands responsibility for its network over to Ericsson, which certainly has been around the block once or twice. So as we're seeing the launch of new Windows phones on Sprint, the bullet points of what it means:

• Sprint retains full ownership and control of its network assets, and solely owns network strategy and investment decisions.
• Customers will continue to work directly with Sprint employees as their primary contact, as Sprint retains full control of the customer experience, customer technical support and services review.
• Sprint retains technology and vendor selections.
• Ericsson assumes responsibility for the day-to-day services, provisioning and maintenance for the Sprint-owned CDMA, iDEN and wireline networks.

That from the full press release, which you can also find after the break. Also of note is that some 6,000 employees will be transferred to Ericsson's control.

Dieter's done some additional analysis over at PreCentral.net (Sprint, of course, is the Palm Pre's only carrier at the moment), and that's where things get really interesting. The long and the short of it is that we may see a stronger network from Sprint in the future. And there may will have been something to the rumors of Sprint flirting with LTE technology and not just WIMAX for its 4G network.

And we're in full agreement with Dieter in that this makes Sprint even more of a middle man — remember that it spun off its WIMAX business to Clearwire and also sold a bunch of its towers and then leased them back. So Sprint's cutting a lot of its operating costs, while at the same time becoming less of a traditional carrier.

Stay tuned, folks. Things could get interesting in the coming months.

The news that Weather.com had cut off WeatherPanel's access to its data sparked a torrent of outrage from you guys yesterday. And rightfully so – it's a darn useful app.

But never fear, as the with all things Windows Mobile, you just know someone's going to come up with a workaround for a problem. And that rings true for WeatherPanel.

PPCGeeks member tcbusch has posted a .dll fix that will restore WeatherPanel back to its former glory. As tcbush explains:

A little over a year ago I received an email telling me that weather.com was going to require authentication. At that time I knew WeatherPanel was going to stop working when this policy was enforced. I thought about how to overcome this issue and created a webserver redirection scheme that would embed the authentication into the url query that weatherpanel sends to weather.com. I have been sitting on the code for over a year waiting for the day that arrived earlier in the week. ... I implemented my fix on a server to verify it worked.

So, you have two options:

1. Download tcbusch's fix (unzip the new .dll file, make sure WeatherPanel is disabled, and replace the old file in Program Files>Marsware>WeatherPanel with the new one.)
2. Just download the updated CAB file.

Let them never say it can't be done! And thanks to thacounty in our comments for the tip!

Just a quick reminder that if you're registered with us and leave a comment through mid-day Friday, you'll be in the running for a free Motorola H12 Bluetooth headset.

Full details in yesterday's post, and head here if you're not registered with us yet.

Though HTC were kind enough to add a Weather sliding panel (aka CHome) to some of their latest Snap devices, it does lack a little in detail.  Specifically, you don't actually get a forecast but instead of just an icon + temp.  Not bad, but we want more!

Filling in this gap are a number of "freeware" options by some of the kind folks at XDA, however I've only found one that works with this latest build of WM6.1 Standard--NRG MiniWeather v1.3, designed by XDA member NRGZ28.

Read on for a quick overview of this great app!