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We're incredibly happy to announce that we're adding another member to the Smartphone Experts family of sites: Nokia Experts!  Nokia Experts will be run by the inestimable Matt Miller, also known as The Mobile Gadgeteer, host of ZDNet's Smartphones and Cellphones blog, palmsolo, and all around mobility guru.

Matt has a ton of knowledge about a subject that the rest of us at Smartphone Experts have historically lacked, namely Nokia, S60, and the Symbian OS in general.  He gives himself a brief introduction here, in the unlikely event you're not familiar.

Nokia has, as yet, not successfully made a big smartphone push in the United States, but that's quite likely to change as they have a slew of exciting new devices coming out and are also likely to have their E71 messaging smartphone picked up by AT&T very soon.  In other words, if, like us, you're relatively new to Nokia and S60 but want to learn more, Nokia Experts is surely going to be one of your best resources.  Heck, Matt's already published a full review of the Nokia 5800 Tube XpressMusic touch screen S60 device.  The 'Tube' is already a best-selling device overseas and is more of a worthy contender than you might think, so the review is definitely worth a read.

Go on and head over to Nokia Experts now and give 'em a big ol' hello!

Did you know that you had a program on your AT&T Fuze that serves as a business card scanner? It's often overlooked amongst the AT&T Bloatware but WorldCard Mobile is down at the bottom of your Program listing and is a handy tool if you have to deal with a lot of business cards. It's not without challenges and does have a slight learning curve but if you have a lot of business cards to sift through, it may make the job a little easier.

WorldCard Mobile (version 1.0f.080901b on my Fuze) is a product of PenPower Technology that utilizes the Fuze's camera to take a snapshot of a business card and then matches the fields on the card to match the fields on a contact entry. Sounds simple enough? In testing WorldCard, I found it to be more productive with business cards with simple layouts. The more elaborate layouts tend to throw the recognition software more curve balls but have no fear, when thrown a curve ball, the application can be adjusted manually.

In hitting "Browse" you are taken to the photo of the business card and you can highlight the text you want to identify for a certain entry field. When you finish highlighting the area, a pull-up menu appears with selections available for how you want to define the text (First Name, Last Name, Company, etc.). I found the more you use WorldCard Mobile, the more it learns the card layouts. WorldCard can also be used for other text documents such as return addresses on envelopes or advertisements in publications. Keep in mind that the recognition of fields may need a little more adjusting in these situations.

Once you get finished adjusting the field recognition, you check the correct entries and tap "ok" to save the information in your Contacts. At first it may seem as if manually entering the information off the business card is more easier than calibrating WorldCard. I don't know how efficient WorldCard would be if you only had one card to enter but with a stack, it may help prevent writer's cramp.

Despite a previous update from the Mozilla team, it now looks like the Firefox Mobile browser, codenamed Fennec, could be ready for a Windows Mobile beta as soon as next week, and they've chosen a phone to do the honors.

From this week's meeting:

We are targeting a Milestone release for the first week of February, targeting the HTC touch pro.

There you have it. And dollars to donuts once the kids at XDA Developers get hold of this, we'll see it ported to other HTC phones pretty quickly.

If you still can't wait and want to give Fennec a try on your desktop, hit us up here for a link to the emulator versions.

We recently showed you how to go hands free with Vito Voice 2 Go and many of you use WinMo's built-in Voice command, but both take up quite a bit of RAM. If you're still looking to go hands free and control your phone with your voice, then you might want to try dial2do. Although less robust, it doesnt take up any memory on your phone and is a killer hands free GTD application. 

Instead of hibernating on your phone's memory, it's all done in the cloud. Simply call into 12133252615 (usa) and tell dial2do what you want to do. You can say things like text, email, calender and more. Its social friendly, so it works with some of your favorites like Gmail, Evernote, and Remember The Milk. What separates this app from  competitors Jott or Nuance? It's free. If your phone is memory sensitive or you just want to control email and others with your voice then dial2do may be worth a shot. You a voice-command junkie?  Tell us your solution in the comments.

Not to be outdone by Microsoft in tossing out bad news while they're hoping the rest of the country is still busy wondering just what smartphone the president of the United States is using, Sprint just dropped this press release about how they're going to save $1.2 Billion (with a B) in labor costs.  That's one way to write a press release headline, another way is to not hide the sad truth: They are going to lay off 8000 workers by March 31st.  The layoffs will come at all levels and in all areas, so basically nobody's safe (though we guess CEO Dan Hesse will stick around a little while longer).  We wish these folks the best of luck finding new work.

Sprint also cops to the fact that of the big 4 in the US, they're the only carrier to have lost net subscribers quarter after quarter, but they do point out that they're happy about the Palm Pre and how it may save their bacon.  We're impressed with the Pre to, Spint, but you're going to have to do a little better than that.  You've dropped subscribers, the physical infrastructure behind your network (which you now lease), and now a bootload of employees.  There's getting down to your fighting weight and then there's wasting away, we're starting to worry (again) that we're looking at the latter.

Everyone is raving about the sales the iPhone is making and it deserves its props, but its still not putting up Windows Mobile numbers. In fact, during the third quarter of 08 apple only shipped about 4.4 mill iPhones while Windwos Mobile put out a healthy 5 mil.  Now, part of the the drop in the iPhone sales is that they may have finally reached all the markets they hadn't yet with the iPhone 3G, so they may be coming close to some kind of geographic saturation. 

Various leaks of Windows Mobile 6.5 seem to be popping up everywhere. Now it's appeared on the funny looking Compulab Exeda, the crazy little guy that runs Windows Mobile and Android. OK, the phone's not really a looker. But it's the interface we're after here. What we're seeing is a different take on that honeycomb interface, so we're pretty much expecting some variation of that when the real thing's released.

It's possible that this is still an alpha build of the OS, but we're still expecting an official announcement about 6.5 (and all those cloud services) soon at Mobile World Congress. Will the syncing be seamless like Microsoft says? Or will we have just another skinned Windows Mobile phone in our pockets? Let us know what you think in the comments

Via Engadget

We've been expecting a femtocell from Verizon, and now it's available and it's called the "Network Extender."

While the principle is the same as Sprint's AIRAVE — the router-looking piece of hardware uses your broadband Internet connection to spit out a short-range cell signal — the pricing is different. Instead of paying, say, $100 for the hardware, then a monthly fee for the service, Verizon's Network Extender costs $250 up front, with no monthly fees.

We're all for paying more up front to forgo the monthly shakedown. You'll save money in the long run. But we keep coming back to the same ol' argument when it comes to femtocells. If you're already paying for service on a company's network — and Verizon arguably still has the best — why would you want to pay more for a signal that you're supposed to have in the first place?

So, any of you Verizon chaps going to shell out for this?

Verizon Network Extender [via BGR]

I've gotta admit I've never really understood (though I'm sure I'll be corrected in the comments) just why a touchscreen has to be manually aligned after a hard-reset. For as high-tech as our phones are, its accuracy relies on my steady hand? That's no good. I certainly don't have a surgeon's touch, thanks to all the caffeine, nicotine and a few other -ines that got me through law school late nights blogging.

But, like with so many things in life, the folks at XDA Developers have us covered with AutoAlign Screen, which conveniently enough, will automatically align your screen. As XDA member azharsunny puts it, you'll save time, precisely calibrate your screen, and keep you from digging out that stylus. 

The cab files currently are for the HTC Touch HD & Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, HTC Touch Pro and HTC Touch Diamond only.

Edit: Looks like some people are having problems with the app. Be sure to back up your phone before first (which you should have done anyway). Consider yourselves warned.

Via pocketnow

We've been hearing rumblings that AT&T has restructured data plans and believe we have finally deciphered things where it's understandable. If you are currently using a MediaNet plan, they are being discontinued and replaced with an Unlimited Data/Messaging Plan that will run $30 a month. Instead of having a variety of MediaNet flavors to choose from (Basic, the Works, MediaNet 200, MediaNet 1MB), you have one data package. The common line of thinking is that this move was done to compete with Verizon's data plans. It appears that there are some additional incentives for customers on AT&T's Family Plan as well.

There is one word of caution, these plans are intended for use with non-PDA phones (Motorola Razor, Samsung A737, etc.) that have internet and messaging capabilities. For Windows Mobile devices, AT&T requires their PDA Data plan which, coincidentally, also runs $30 a month. We bet that some of you may be paying more than $30 for the AT&T PDA plan (heck, some of us are!). In other words, it might be worth a call (and some savings) to AT&T and see if you are on the current $30 PDA Data plan and if you're not -- get on it.

[Read: Engadget Mobile]

One of the attractions to the new HTC line-up is TouchFlo 3D. There is no argument that graphically, Touchflo 3D is a eye catching application. While it may be pretty to look at, how functional is it? Before Touchflo 3D hit the market, one of the more popular Today Screen alternatives was SPB's Mobile Shell. There are some reservations over Touchflo 3D's usefulness and SPB Mobile Shell might be a viable alternative for those HTC owners who are looking for something different. Could Mobile Shell hold it's own against the animated graphics of Touchflo?

We decided to compare these two applications and as Michael Buffer so aptly put it, "Let's get ready to rumble!" (key techno dance music please). Read on after the break to see how they measure up against each other.