PalmInfoCenter has snagged some spyshots of Palms forthcoming smartphone “Gandolf.” It is rumored to run the Palm OS (Nope its not dead yet) and will have a GSM radio (my sources also say there will be a CDMA variety as well on Sprint).

Hellooooooo Palm, Didn’t you hire John Rubinstein? You know, the guy behind the iPod. Do you have him tied up and gagged in some basement somewhere? Let this guy run wild with your R&D department. Don’t let this prototype see the light of day, if you do the press will eat you alive. [via]

There are certain charges in life you can’t avoid, the electric bill, water bill, rent, taxes, and cellular charges. Mosh Mobile, a MVNO in Indiana, is hoping to deliver free wireless service supported by advertising.

Text message ads sent to your phone at anytime. In exchange for these ads your service includes unlimited free calls, unlimited data usage, and unlimited SMS. Would you be willing to sign up for free cellular service in exchange that people will push ads to you and your calling data would be sold to marketers?

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Contrary to reports on other large websites, that shall remain nameless, SK Telecom is NOT going to buy Sprint. Here’s why:

SK Telecom is valued at roughly $18 billion, which is a third of Sprint value of $62 billion. SK Telecom simply doesn’t have the money to do make the bid alone. Sure, SK Teleom can solicit private funding but it would be hard, if not impossible, to gather more than $44 BILLION to make a bid for Sprint that shareholders would accept – and thats not including a premium.

However, I do believe that SK Telecom IS talking to Sprint but people are reading the tea leaves wrong. SK Telecom WANTS to be in the US market as illustrated in their MVNO with Earthlink – Helio. Now, I predict that SK Telecom will make a substantial investment into Sprint with some partners, potentially bringing the company into private ownership – a lesson learned from Alltel. That would greatly benefit Sprint by removing some major public scrutiny as well as the company can gain more control of their own destiny.

Now, we can speculate further that it could be possible that SK Telecom is talking with Sprint about a joint bid for the 700 Mhz spectrum that is planed to go up for public auction. Considering how cozy Google and Sprint have gotten over WiMax could this potentially setup a three way bid to create a new generation high speed network? Again, this is all speculation.

Tired of all the iPhone stores, we are too. So, we are letting HP steal a little thunder with their new phone. Yes, HP makes a GSM phone.

The HP iPAQ 510 Voice Messenger is a Windows Mobile Powered (Standard), GSM Toting (Only EDGE though), WiFi Sporting full featured smart phone. Featuring a 2.0″ color screen, 64MB of RAM for the user, Micro SD slot and svelte dimensions of just 2.8 x 0.71 x 4.65, this little handheld has some really interesting features.

The iPAQ features HP Voice Reply that allows you to respond to emails by recording a message and it will send a .wav file as a reply. Still focusing on the voice the iPAQ also has voice command that will read your email to you as well as read your appointments for the day.

The device is available direct from HP for $319.00 and is UNLOCKED to work on any network.

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There is a TON of innovation happening over at Helio. Ocean users can now add true Microsoft Exchange to their uber connected multi flipping device.

Announced today the downloadable application adds synchronization of Exchange Mail, Contacts and Appointments to the Ocean. Available as a free 60 trial, final price will be $10 per month. To add some value to the monthly fee, Helio will also enable a viewer application to open Microsoft Office and PDF files as well.

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The second Sprint bought Nextel everyone scratched their heads when, or if, Sprint would make the two networks interoperate. With the introduction of PowerSouce phones (Dual mode CDMA, iDen handsets) months ago, people wanted to know if Nextels famous ‘Chirp’ would work with Sprint walkie talkie phones.

Sprint last week completed its first successful walkie talkie call between an iDEN and a CDMA phone. A spokeswoman has confirmed that test was an important advancement in Sprint’s efforts to launch walkie talkie service using its Revision A CDMA network. The carrier intends to launch a service that both works like and is compatible with iDEN walkie talkie servies over its mobile broadband network in 2008.

I know the loyalty of Nextel users, but do you know anyone who uses Sprints PTT?

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Forgive me if I’m not as excited about this as it should be. After months of waiting, Cingular AT&T has made its Video Share service available in 160 3G cities across the country.

The video-calling service is expensive and limited for now. You can only one-way video chat and the streaming is only supported on a handful of phones. Additionally it will cost $4.99 per month for 25 minutes, or $9.99 for 60 minutes which is outlandishly expensive. Somehow I don’t think that this will be a hit.

Also, isn’t the intro video creepy and disturbing?

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So you think you can’t justify the $499 and $599 price tag for the iPhone and thought you would save money getting a free PDA phone, in this case a Treo 680. According to PalmAddicts a free phone is actually more expensive then the iPhone.

So the difference between a free Treo 680 and a $500/$600 iPhone over the course of 24 months is a grand total of $40… or $1.67/month or less than $0.40/week. [...] Someone might argue that the iPhone’s battery may need to be replaced by then, which is true, but then again I’ve gone through several different Treos over the past 4 years because their either broke or wore out. So for the purposes of this discussion let’s not factor in hardware wearing out. By the time the iPhone battery needs to be replaced, there may be other alternatives, as there are today for iPod batteries which wear out.

All this study showed me is the cellular service is ridiculously expensive.

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Symantec has made available for download a beta of Norton Smartphone Security Premier Edition. This piece of software that resides on your handheld features antivirus protection, antispam for SMS, firewall, personal data protection through encryption, and locking the device via password protection all for the Windows Mobile 5.0 OS.

Right now the beta is FREE but we should remind you sometimes Symantec gets a little delete happy, so we suggest you backup like crazy if you participate in the beta program.

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Gizmodo has shinny shinny screenshots of the forthcoming SideKick.

The Sidekick Zante / Q900 / Slide is due sometime in October with the Danger OS everyone has come to love. For connectivity it will use the extremely slow and painful EDGE network (by T-Mobile of course!), 128MB of internal Flash storage (or up to 2GB with a MiniSD card), MP3, WAV, AAC and WMA support, 1.3 MegaPixel camera, Push Email, SMS, MMS and IM

Estimated retail price is $269 which is kinda nice for this shinny toy.

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