Not that it’s much of a secret, but this is the first official image of RIM’s latest BlackBerry smartphone, the BlackBerry “Bold 9700″ or Onyx from T-Mobile. You get a high-gloss black finish with leather grain detail on the back.

Some other features include high-speed 3G Web browsing, Wi-Fi calling, visual voicemail and support for corporate and personal e-mail. The phone also comes preloaded with mobile applications from BlackBerry App World, including Amazon MP3 store for music downloads and TeleNav GPS Navigator for turn-by-turn directions.

Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile and France Telcom’s Orange have announced Tuesday that they plan to merge the two mobile phone carriers, making them the largest carrier in the U.K. once combined. Currently T-Mobile and Orange are the 3rd and 4th largest mobile operations in Britain behind O2 and Vodafone. The merger would launch the combined companies into the number one spot with 28.4 million mobile phone users and a 37 percent market share, leaving O2 trailing with 27 percent and Vodafone 3rd with 25 percent of the mobile market in Britain.

The merger involves plans to maintain their own distinct brands for the first year and a half and then agree on one common brand which could be one of the two existing or something completely new. The two companies will also start streamlining their operations by eliminating overlapping administration, retail stores and base stations with lay-offs likely in the near future.

Calling 911 can save your life, but there are some situations where if you talk, you are endangering your life further. Maybe you are hiding from a dangerous killer for instance. Or maybe you had a stroke and can’t talk. Well now Iowa County has launched the Nation’s First 911 via text message.

So far, the service is only available to residents of Black Hawk County who subscribe to a T-Mobile service provider, but that could grow. Emergency text messages can be helpful for deaf, hard-of-hearing or mute victims who find themselves in a dangerous situation.

The HTC Touch Pro2 is available on a bunch of carriers around the world but not in the US. So the announcement of Touch Pro2 on T-Mobile is good news indeed. The phone is expected to be released on August 12 but we don’t yet have any details on the price.

Some features include a 3.6-inch WVGA display, a 3.2 megapixel camera, AWS 3G and GPS. It also features Straight Talk technology which should make this phone one of the best speakerphones out there. Frequent conference callers will love it. The color is called “mocha”.

One of the problems with T-Mobile in many areas is that there are very limited retail outlets where you can walk in and check out their offerings or sign up for new service. The other big problem is that T-Mobile’s network isn’t that great in many smaller cities and rural areas.

T-Mobile and RadioShack announced a new retail agreement today that will almost double the number of retail stores T-Mobile has in the country. RadioShack stores will be selling T-Mobile service and devices including the G1 and myTouch 3G with Google.

Lawmakers are looking into possible antitrust violations centering on exclusive deals that most of the major cellular makers offer with handset to get customers. The exclusive deals allegedly make it hard for small providers to compete.

For now, exclusives are still the norm and Samsung and T-Mobile have announced a couple new exclusive handsets called the Samsung Comeback and the Samsung Gravity 2. We have talked about the Comeback already, so I won’t focus on that handset other than to say T-Mobile will offer it for $129.99 with a new agreement and it is available now.

T-Mobile has made the new myTouch 3G available for pre-order for those who don’t mind the lack of a physical QWERTY keyboard. It’s a solid choice for Tmo customers looking to get some Android. If you’ve been waiting, you’ll be able to place your pre-order from $199.99 with guaranteed delivery by August 5th.

This pre-order offer is good until July 28th, which gives you plenty of time to figure out if this one is for you. If you need a refresher on the MyTouch’s specs, you’ll find them here.

HTC only recently announced its new Android-powered smartphone called the Hero. HTC has a number of smartphones on various wireless networks in the US and is the maker of the T-Mobile G1 smartphone that runs Android.

HTC has announced its latest smartphone called the HTC Ozone that will be a Verizon Wireless exclusive. The device is described as an easy-to-use smartphone with a simple design and lots of connectivity options.

The highly anticipated myTouch 3G (aka HTC Magic) will soon make its way to T-Mobile USA in early August. The Android-powered handset features a 3.2-inch HVGA capacitive touchscreen display and a 3.2MP autofocus camera with YouTube and Picasa uploading support.

Some other features include a microSD card slot with an included 4GB microSD card, GPS, WiFi, Microsoft Exchange support and supports quad-band EDGE, UMTS/HSDPA (1700MHz/2100MHz) connectivity. You can pre-order it starting on July 8th for $199 with a 2-year contract agreement.

T-Mobile has a new mobile phone that it is offering to its customers called the myTouch 3G. The handset features an interesting software offering that makes it great for users looking for information about their local surroundings.

The application is called Sherpa and is a local discovery app that learns what a user’s favorite types of locations are as it is used. That means that over time if a person searchers for more restaurants than retail stores, the application will return restaurant results rather than shopping.

What’s this? A branded myTouch 3G? Yep. The first T-mobile branded MyTouch 3G shots in the wild. Can a launch be behind? Maybe. Who knows when.

According to the poster on Android Forums, this device was handed out by someone at Google, not T-Mobile. Not much else going on here though. It looks like a nice successor to the G1.

This looks a little different than that Bigfoot we saw a while ago, but you can definitely see the resemblance. It just looks…wilder. According to Boy Genius Report, this is Samsung’s Android-powered Bigfoot for T-Mobile, which will be hitting the high end of the carrier’s smartphone line.

It features a 3-inch capacitive AMOLED display, full QWERTY, 3 megapixel camera, and HSDPA. It is supposed to launch very soon, so you may want to hold off on that G1 for now.

The S in iPhone 3G S means more than just faster 3G speeds, which is now 7.2 mbps, for the new iPhone. It also means a faster processor. But just how fast is the iPhone 3G S?

Well, thanks to T-Mobile we have the first official word on the iPhone 3G S processor: 256 RAM (that’s double the iPhone 3G) and a 600 Mhz processor. The chip is most likely built using a 45nm process, but that’s just a guess.

My Pre is reporting that a tipster with a webOS emulator has found that the Pre will use IMAP IDLE. This means that users on GMail will have near instantaneous reception of new emails. Because it’s getting pushed to the phone from the GMail servers.

Pre users are going to love that. At the moment, the only phone to support GMail push is the G1 (and soon the HTC Magic or any other Android device). Palm’s relationship with Google is proving to be extremely awesome for Pre users.

If you’ve been waiting on pins and needles for the Samsung I7500, looks like the FCC has approved the device. That means it should be hitting retail in the next few months. The 3.2″ AMOLED screen should be pretty frakkin awesome.

Word is the phone will go on T-Mobile’s network but there is no official comment from them. To refresh your memory, here are some specs: Qualcomm MSM7200A CPU at 528 MHz and a 3.2″ HVGA capacitive OLED display, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash and a standard 3.5 mm stereo headset plug. Apparently, the I7500 will support quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE and dualband UMTS/HSPA, Bluetooth, WIFI and GPS and includes 8 GB internal flash memory which can be expanded by microSD memory cards.