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This week's Around SPE is sponsored by the the TiPb iPhone Accessory Store, which has long been your best source for iPhone accessories. A lot of iPhone 3G upgraders were left out in the cold when their car chargers turned out to not be compatible, but they've got plenty that are, not to mention plenty of headphones that are a step up compared to the standard white buds

Last week both CrackBerry.com and WMExperts found themselves on the cusp of major releases -- the BlackBerry Storm, BlackBerry Bold on AT&T, the HTC Fuze on AT&T, not to mention a few others on the Windows Mobile side. So while everybody has been anticipating new devices, all of the editors at SPE are anticipating something else that will be starting on November 17th. The hint is right up there in the picture!

Read on for the full skinny on what's been happening around SPE!

WMExperts

WMExperts made a big splash Friday afternoon with the 'net's first and only video of the HTC Fuze for AT&T! Be sure to check back Monday morning because we're also cooking up a full review of this latest and greatest Windows Mobile smartphone. It looks like the Fuze release date has finally been pinned down, too.

WMExperts also tends to cover some more general industry news, so all the action at the FCC last week definitely caught our eye. Lastly, we're more than a little proud of our writer George Ponder, who used a Treo Pro to help manage the election in his district.

CrackBerry.com

Over at CrackBerry.com, thousands of BlackBerry enthusiasts rejoiced as AT&T stayed true to their promised November 4th release date and launched the Bold. Picking election day turned out to be a smart move for AT&T and RIM, as stations like CNN played the new AT&T BlackBerry Bold commercial all day long.

The BlackBerry Storm, RIM's first touchscreen BlackBerry, continues to build on the hype leading up to its launch. Vodafone has dropped word of a November 14th release, and the Vodafone BlackBerry Storm bus has been traveling London which has turned out a bunch of Storm preview videos. While Verizon has not given official on the availability of their Storm, the educated rumor points to the week of the 23rd.

You'll want to keep it locked to CrackBerry.com this week. The What Would You Do for a BlackBerry Storm? Contest has come to an end and the top ten finalists have been selected. In order to win their new BlackBerry, the winners have to carry out their “To Dos” which will be published on CrackBerry.com as they come in. The first one hits on Monday!

The iPhone Blog

According to JD Power, the iPhone is absolutely destroying the Blackberry in *business* satisfaction due to it's drop dead ease of use and killer UI, but does Apple just not “get” the Four Pillars of PIM, something Palm nailed way back in 1997? Probably not, as the latest iPhone OS 2.2 leaks focus on over-the-air podcast downloads (admittedly super sweet!) and yet more App Store tweaks.

Speaking of the App Store, turns out Opera Mini was NOT denied (but probably would be), WeightBot's developers aren't done innovating on the iPhone just yet, and Shazam wants a piece of Midomi in our App vs. App battle royal for music mastery. (Leave a comment and you just might win an iTunes gift certificate). Of course, if you want to win a whole slew stuff -- an Ultimate iPhone Accessory Pack no less -- check out the Phone Different to find out this week's way to enter (hint: requires @theiphoneblog and rhymes with “sweet”.)

TreoCentral

Over at TreoCentral, we learned via a Barron's article that analysts at Avian Securities and Morgan Keegan downgraded PALM due to the belief that Palm's cash position will significantly erode ($248 million at the end of the latest quarter to $75 million over the next year) which leaves “little room for error.” The downgrade was also due to a U.S. retailer survey resulting in the belief that smartphone sales will come in below expectations for the next several quarters.

We also found out in that same Barron's article that we might not (corrected, thanks Scott!) be seeing the Treo Pro on AT&T and the Treo 800w on Verizon in time for the holiday shopping season.

Plus we learned that Apple almost bought Palm back in the summer of 1997. Jean-Louis Gassée noted in an article over at Monday Note:

A perhaps little known fact: in the Summer of 1997, Steve Jobs called Eric Benhamou, 3Com's CEO (the company owned Palm). “Give me the Palm and come and join my Board of Directors. Only Apple can make Palm a true consumer brand.” Nothing happened. Apple's foray into the product segment had to wait ten more years.

Android Central

We've settled in over at Android Central, now that the G1 seems to be out there and getting used by a surprisingly large number of people. Just check out these download statistics for the Android Market to see what we mean, or check out some the backstory behind Android Apps.

Our favorite new app: the Android Gameboy emulator! A close 2nd favorite use for the G1 might be the newly discovered tethering method, though. Meanwhile, we're keeping our eye on the just-discovered Android Jailbreak and security risks that have popped up.

Our friends over at TechRadar are reporting that Microsoft

Excuse us while we take a minute to wrap our minds around this one.

First we had TouchFlo 3D on the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1.  Now it appears turnabout is fair play as the X1 panels have been ported onto HTC

A few months ago, we reviewed GPSToday and called it one of Windows Mobile's killer apps. We also hinted back then that some more features were to come in future revisions, specifically relating to social networking and communications.

Welp, that time has come. This week, GeoTerrestrial updated their program with a bunch of lil' fixes and improvements and few big ones, including GeoMail. GeoMail is simply a method to send your current coordinates or street address via email/sms to friends and colleagues.

The other major update is a new standalone version. With the popularity of HTC's TouchFlow interface, running 3rd party Today Plugins is a bit of hassle. Now you can download a separate non-plugin version of GPSToday. Sweet.

Read on for my quick overview/review of GPSToday's GeoMail feature.

First, some other minor updates that come with 0.9.9.3:

• Weather updating mechanism is tightened up
• Today screen flicker is removed
• Now you can change the temperature display color on the today screen to suit your needs

GeoMail

This is now probably one of the best features of GPSToday. Ever been meeting up with someone in the city and you want to send them your location? Not very easy if you use Google Maps or Live Search as (1) You can't send people your blue dot (2) Just because you see yourself on the map, doesn't mean you know the actual street address.

GPSToday and GeoMail solve this by simply looking up your GPS location, converting to a street address and with just a few clicks, being able to send that info via email or SMS.

But what's really cool here is how GeoMail handles this feature. When you send the info via email, the recipient gets 3 options via links

• A link to a map for desktop users
• A link to a map for mobile phone users
• Option for GPSToday users to open the info in GPSToday (via menu)

In other words, the program does not need your recipients to have GPSToday installed or some special software on their end. That non-proprietary feel is very nice and GT seem to have covered all possible scenarios of real users.

If sent via SMS, the recipient will get your geolocation & street address. And the super cool part: if you have GPSToday installed and receive somebody's geolocation info via their GPSToday...it automagically opens up your GPSToday to display their location with a little message. They then show up on your map as a little pin, with their name and even their message.

Hands off, no fiddling, no copy n pasting, no looking up. It just does it for your. Plus you can respond back to the person with your location and a message. You can even send to multiple recipients.

A+ GeoTerrestrial.

Registration for GeoMail

One quibble some may have is that you need to register an account to use GeoMail. Like the program itself, it's free and there are no gimmicks here. Though you may wonder why you have to register (we did) and this is what GeoTerrerstrial had to say:

The reason is that next version onwards geomail will allow sending/receiving locations by choosing recipient usernames, via the geoterrestrial network (a third way over sms and email). That method will be a bit slower than sms (but free unlike sms), and much faster than email. Even better than that, it will also allow us to de-couple sending/receiving methods based upon user preferences. For example, a user will be able to send a message via email, but the recipient will receive it instantly via sms, and so on. We think that will be really neat.

And as a teaser, GeoTerrestrial lets us know of another new feature they are working on, cryptically called GeoGroups which will also take advantage of the "geoterrestrial network". You heard it here first :-)

Plus, as far as signing up goes, this is pretty painless as you can do it all on the device and they require no personal information (just a username and password). Still, we suppose one could argue about security risks, so if you have a fear (or a reason to fear) someone spying on you...well, you should probably not even have a phone with GPS.

Final Thoughts

What can we say? We're smitten with this program. It's free, it looks cool and it's probably one of the most useful applications to take advantage of your device's on-board GPS.

With GeoWeather (weather based on your current location), GeoTagging (automatically tag your photos with your geolocation info), GeoLogger (log your movements, hikes, etc.),the future GeoGroups (?!) and now GeoMail, GPSToday is packed full of features that are just (geek alert!)...really awesome.

If we had any gripe it would be this: somehow add a GeoMail icon to the Today Plugin, or give us an option for an expanded Today Plugin. We think it'd be really cool to just one-click (via icon) launch GeoMail without having to launch the map and go into some sub-menu. But that's a minor criticism.

Two bigger issues are still no-compatibility with non-Touch Screen devices (we feel for you Moto Q9 users) and street address lookup is still U.S. based only.

But hey, if you're in the U.S., have a touchscreen WM device and GPS...this seems like a no brainer.

Post your thoughts and comments below!

See that phone there? That's the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1.

And that's still as close as you can get to it.

Word on the street is that the third-party vendors who supply components of the device — think processor, GPS, radio and who knows what else that's packed into this thing — can't keep up with demand, and thus we still have seen neither hide nor hair of the X1 on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

From the Dutch-language Tweakers.net (translation):

Xperia handsets are currently only in dribs and drabs, said the spokesman Harold Abstract opposite Tweakers.net. The problem in all countries where Sony Ericsson phone last month on the market. "We have a problem with the supply of components by third parties. That does not make enough parts on time, leaving too few copies of the device can be made."

Oh. That could just mean all kinds of good (read bad) news for AT&T, which, as we just learned, is still trying to get the HTC Fuze out the door.

Via Inxperia

Meanwhile, you can hold yourself over with our own review from way back in April or this more recent one from Mobile Tech Addicts.

A couple of days ago we asked "Where be the Fuze?" Apparently the boys and girls over at the Boy Genius Report were reading and have been kind enough to track down the answer.

The date: Nov. 11 — that'd be next Tuesday, just a week after what we initially thought would be the launch.

The price: $299.99 with the standard 2-year contract/rebates/data plan.

The cost goes up from there. If you want it off-contract, you're gonna have to shell out $499.99.

What else do we learn? There should be a camera-less version for the worrisome enterprise types. Expect a national advertising campaign starting next month.

Hit up the BGR link here for the rest of the dirty details.

Verizon-Alltel? Done -- the FCC joined the DOJ and said “OMG U can has buyout.” As BGR reports, they added a few more markets that Verizon will need to pull out of for anti-competitive reasons. So $28 billion dollars gets Verizon bragging rights as the US's largest carrier, bypassing AT&T.

The FCC didn't stop there, though. They also approved that whole Sprint-Clearwire deal we told you about in May. It's a little complicated, but the gist is that Clearwire is now an independent company, 51% owned by Sprint, the rest by Google, Intel, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Brighthouse. Clearwire will provide WiMAX service to all of the above, who will the presumably bend that sweet sweet data to their own services. Although AT&T didn't like this deal either (they really lost out today), the FCC was pretty effusive about the potential for WiMAX.

The thing we're most excited about, though is that the FCC has approved the contentious bands known as “White Space” for broadband use. “White Space” in this context refers to bands within the broadcast television spectrum that aren't used by regular TV channels. Both Microsoft and Google were pushing hard for the FCC to allow these unused 'in-between' parts of the spectrum for data and for awhile it wasn't looking very likely. This should get broadband to rural areas right quick, at the very least, and it could potentially really shake up the wireless industry. It's complicated, here's a quick blog roundup to get you started.

We're suckers for all things vague and blurry around here. Witness the above photo.

Uberphones reports that this is a Verizon Wireless training schedule that lists Nov. 15 as the day VZW workers will get their online training with the Samsung Omnia. Keep squinting. You'll see it, too.

Obviously, that kind of blows our previously reported Oct. 14-Nov. 15 window out of the water. But it also means that Verizon customers (hopefully) shouldn't have too much longer to wait for the Omnia. Of course, we've said that before.