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AT&T unloaded 235 if its cell towers last week to Florida-based Global Tower Partners. [via]

Don't worry, Sunshine State. You're not going to lose your coverage anytime soon. It's not that uncommon a practice for a carrier to sell towers, then lease them back. We reported last summer that Sprint did the same thing, albeit in a much larger deal. In that sale, 3,300 towers were sold to TowerCo LLC for $670 million. So, towers don't come cheap.

And hot on the heels of the tower sale comes AT&T's fourth-qarter earnings report. [via] The bad news: earnings per share fell 10 cents compared to the fourth quarter of last year. The good news: The first three quarters of the year made up for that, with the full year EPS up from $1.97 to $2.16. And, yes, we have the iPhone 3G to thank for much of that.

After a decent little delay, the all-new T-Mobile Shadow (aka the Shadow II and Shadow 2009) is now available. [via]

Specs are still what we've been expecting, and what we saw earlier this month at CES. Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard. 320x240 screen. 1100mAh battery. 2-MP camera. EDGE only for data (as of right now), though you do get WiFi and Hotspot @Home access.

You can get the new Shadow now in White Mint or Black Burgandy for $199 on T-Mobile after contract and rebates.

Ed Note: Malatesta checks in with a great tutorial on RSS and why it makes your mobile life better. If you're not already subscribed to the WMExperts RSS Feed, here's the link to our feed. As Malatesta writes below, RSS really is like "TiVo for your favorite websites." If you're not using it now, you should be.

RSS or Really Simple Syndication (as of RSS 2.0) is a method by which a user can check updates on his or her favorite website, blog, news site etc without having to actually “visit” that site through their web browser. Instead, the information or “feed” is retrieved automatically and brought to the user instead The benefits are simplicity and speed as you don’t have to check every website to see “what’s new” but rather you can just view the headlines directly.

The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce this technology to the Windows Mobile user who may not be aware of how this system can dramatically increase productivity and decrease frustrating browser load times.

How it works: Desktop

To use RSS, you don’t need to know how the system works in detail but it is nice to know some of the basics. For one, if you are viewing this story through a Firefox webrowser, you may notice this icon in your address bar (at right).

That’s now the universal symbol to indicate an RSS feed is available for a website. Not all sites have them but you’ll be quite surprised that many nowadays do. If you want, you can simply click that symbol with your mouse cursor and a dialog window will ask if you want to “bookmark” this RSS feed. Doing so will add a new folder with RSS “live” bookmarks to your browser. The term “live” is used since they are updated automatically, pulling down the latest headlines, bloglines and information—what you see is what is on that site at that moment!

Say you do this for your top 10 or 20 websites. What this means is now you can check to see if those sites have any new stories posted simply by looking at your Live bookmarks. No change? No new story or posts. In essence, you can literally check up on all your sites within seconds by just looking through your RSS feeds.

Besides your home or work browser, you can also use RSS feeds hosted by websites like Google Reader or Bloglines. This allows you to view anywhere all your RSS feeds from any computer. You can also access these feeds from your mobile browser, if you prefer.

How it works: Windows Mobile

You can do the exact same thing on your Windows Mobile device (Standard or Professional) as your desktop. As mentioned above, using your Google RSS feeds via your Pocket Internet Explorer, Opera Mini/Mobile, etc are all ways to keep your RSS feeds up to date and save you time from visiting all of your sites just for updates.

There is also a “client based” approach by which you download a special RSS reader program. Some are free, others costs money, though they are usually fairly priced. What’s the benefit for a client-based approach? For one, it still saves your from launching your web browser and having to navigate to a site. Number two, client based RSS programs tend to have many more features (especially the pay-ware type): send a link as email, view pictures, sync on schedule, sort for keywords, Today Plugin and system notifications for updates, as well as full Podcast support.

But the best part of mobile RSS is this: Stories are pulled down from the sites (including photos), formatted for your PPC or smartphone with no “fluff” from the site i.e. you are just viewing that one story: no ads, no other stories and no filler for graphics, which wastes bandwidth and time. What you get is only the story you want to read about, accompanying photos and smooth legibility within seconds.

This is what I mean by saving time (over a 3g connection):

3 seconds: Time to launch RSS reader (Newsbreak) 45 seconds: Time to pull down the RSS feeds of 17 websites (x 15 headlines each = 255 headlines!) 1-5 seconds: Time to pull down actual story with pictures & graphics (only if you click on the headline to read the story)

So instead of me visiting 17 separate websites on my mobile browser, I simply pulled down the headlines, all in less than 1-minute. Now I can minimally browse through the headlines and determine if I want to read any of the stories. When I do find a story that interests me, the story takes 1-5 seconds to pull down the text and any graphics. Take a moment to think of how long that would take to do via a mobile browser. Very impressive! Now let’s see how to set this up…

Setting up

Adding RSS feeds to most clients is easy as they usually allow you to manually type in the RSS address, import a list of them from an external file, or the preferred: search an online database. For an example, say you want to read Engadget Mobile, you would launch the “New” window and go through the process, searching for your preferred site. Once you have all your feeds set up, you can then save and export all of them to your storage card or computer for safe-keeping or even share them with a friend.

But what else can these programs do for you? Take for instance, what is in my opinion, one of the best pay RSS programs out there: Ilium Software’s Newsbreak 2.1 ($19.95) (see here for full review). Using this program, you can have it auto-update your feeds every 2 hours, auto-search it for keywords (e.g. “Windows Mobile” or “Iraq War”) marking them with an icon and it will actually notify you when new stories are published, all without you even touching the device. Think of TiVo but for your favorite websites.

That is getting technology to work for you and is what makes your device truly a “smart” phone.

RSS programs can also handle Podcasts of your favorite shows or sites, allowing them to be automatically downloaded and even kept on your Storage Card to save space. Then on you way to work or on a break, throw on some headphones and listen away.

“Read more online!” Nooo….!

There is one down side to some RSS feeds. Running a website is not a free business, which is why you tend to see flashy ads and banners on many sites as they help pay the bills. No money, no website. But what if you never had to visit the website? Well, if you’ve been paying attention that is exactly what RSS technology enables!

For some sites, they get around this in two ways: (1) they put a small ad at the bottom of your RSS story (2) They only give you part of the feed/story, leaving the torturous “Read more online…”, a link to their site so you can finish reading the story.

Now in a way, this still is better than before as now your web browser will launch, but it takes you right to that story. Still, sometimes they take you to their full-site instead of their mobile one (assuming they even have one) and you spend the next 15-20 seconds pulling down needless graphics.

Unfortunately, they are only two solutions for this, as you cannot change that websites’ RSS feed content (that is up to them). (1) Don’t use their RSS feed and save it for home (2) Follow the dreaded “Read more online…” link and bite your tongue.

But there is a 3rd solution that helps ameliorate the pain: Developer John Cody has developed a free plugin called “John Cody’s SkweezeIt!”. After installing, when you click the “Read more online…” link, a pop up window will ask you “Do you want to Skweeze this link?”. What it is doing is now giving you the option to run that link directly through Skweezer, a web site dedicated to reformatting and removing waste from websites to make them more palatable for your mobile browsing experience.

Using this free and superb option (trust me, you’ll think it’s wonderful if you’ve had the “before and after” experience), clicking that dreaded link becomes a much easier option to choose.

So we managed to snag one of those hard-to-find-is-it-here-or-not Sprint Treo Pros before they were put under indefinite lock-n-key.

Care to see our full photo gallery and here some of our first thoughts on this soon-to-be Sprint messenger device? Read on…

We've had our eye on the Pharos line of phones for a little while now, and it looks like the Traveler 117 has cleared the FCC. [via unwiredview]

This is a navigation-centric phone (thus the name), with aGPS on board. Other goodies:

• Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro.
• 256 ROM/128 RAM. (Yeah, that's not that much these days.)
• 480x640 VGA touchscreen.
• Quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900); tri-band 3G (850/1900/2100)
• agps
• 2MP camera.
• WiFi.
• Bluetooth 2.0 +EDR.
• MicroSD.
• 2.5mm headphone jack.
• 1410mAh battery.

All in all, a decent little device. Hopefully we'll see more out of the Pharos line (and its cousin, Velocity Mobile) in the near future. You can get the Traveler 117 online now for $529.

Aye Carumba! Remember how Palm (and Sprint) hate committing to release dates, yet we pester them anyways? Well here’s why.

We’re hearing from Sprint themselves that the Treo Pro, originally slated for early December (see FCC docs), then January 25th, then February 15th is being pushed back further till the vague “end of February”. All outstanding orders are now canceled, with Sprint’s apologies and a $25 credit is being applied to our accounts.

We actually haven’t heard of any cataclysmic problems with the phone, in fact some early hands on have been quite positive, so this may be just some minor radio tweaking.

Speaking of, there is some potential huge news here from reader Joe G:

"This will be the 1st Sprint Palm device to support simultaneous voice and data usage. Taking full advantage of Sprints Rev A EVDO Network.”

Whoa, who saw that one coming? Could it be true that after years of GSM having this amazing ability, CDMA users are finally getting it? We do know it is technically within the specs of Rev A, so it sounds real to us. Hopefully that’ll keep your mouths watering till late next month.
 

Thanks Joe G

On the heels of the news that Windows Mobile out sold iPhone during the third quarter of 2008, we are know learning that the WM platform is preferred for most enterprise applications. According to statistics from Evans Data's Wireless Development Survey (registration required to access the report), the number of developers that plan to build enterprise apps for Windows Mobile surpasses those that are focusing on Apple iPhone by 40%.

John Andrews, CEO of Evans Data, states

“Largely, this is a matter of Windows being a more mature platform while Apple has only been in the market a relatively brief time. It should be noted that during the past year, while Windows has remained flat in terms of adoption, Apple has increased three-fold, thus closing the gap,”

The introduction of Windows Mobile 6.5 next month at the Mobile World Congress and the potential release of a fully functional application store, should address the concerns of flatness and keep the gap from closing too much.  We point that out because, well, Redmond Developer News definitely points out the glass-half-empy side of the report, noting that .Net development has seen some reduction since the iPhone came out.  As with political polls, sometimes the trendlines are more important that the numbers.

[VIA: Mobiletopsoft.com and News.Softpedia.com]

We were largely underwhelmed when we got our hands on the iPaq Data Messenger earlier this month at CES. The hardware was solid, but there just wasn't much else there to make us want it over, say, the HTC Touch Pro. And it's still not seeing any carrier love here in the U.S. As a refresher, here's what's under the hood.

• Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
• 2.8-inch 320x240 touchscreen
• Dimensions: 5.7 x 1.74 x 11.4 cm
• 128 megs RAM, 256 megs ROM.
• WiFi (b/g)
• Standard slider keyboard
• Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR
• Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900), the European flavors of HSDPA (900/1900/2100 MHz)
• aGPS
• 3.1MP camera with 5x digital zoom and LED flash.
• 1140 mAh battery.
• Micro USB for sync and charge.
• Micro SD card, up to 8 gigabytes.

If you just have to have one, you can now pre-order it from HP for the low, low price of about $600 (US).

Via Engadget Mobile