If you’re a company that is still making landline phones, you have to come up with something that’s gonna make people want them. Like mimicking the iPhone for instance. Could be coincidence. Maybe. The OpenFrame Platform from OpenPeak sure looks a lot like Apples wonder phone. The frame is the center piece for the wireless phones.

They’ve been working on it for about a year and it should be available in early 2009, priced from $200 and $300, distributed by telecom service providers. I wonder if they’re also planning on providing cool apps so you can really get the whole experience of an iPhone for the home. I wonder if this could fly.

There have been lots of rumors about the highly anticipated Android-powered, HTC Dream phone. Now it’s official. T-Mobile confirmed today that it plans to launch an Android mobile phone made by HTC. They are hoping to make it a direct threat to Apple’s popular iPhone.

A spokesman for Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s parent company gave no details on the launch date, but according to the New York Times, the phone will hit stores in the United States before Christmas. Maybe even as early as October. Apparently the device will have a touch screen and will slide out to reveal a full five-row keyboard.

Elecom has some new wooden speakers that are fairly clean looking and cheap. Which I guess is appropriate, since they look like everyone’s cheap prefab entertainment centers etc. They Measure 80mm × 110mm × 130mm and weigh just 1.15Kgs. The new MS-130 amplifier speakers also have an output of 3 W × 2ch with a frequency of 20 Hz to 20kHz. Some other features are a stereo mini input, microphone input and output for headphones. The Elecom MS-130 should be available in Japan later this month for the price of $45.

At NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program Spring 2008 show, graduate students were exhibiting some interesting and unusual projects. Like Oscar G. Torres’s Helios Power Tree, for instance. The leaves are constructed from thin solar cells that are all connected to a battery at the tree’s base from the branches and trunk. The battery uses solar power to charge and powers blue lights around the tree. There are USB outlets on the base.

The idea is that the tree would sit in a public space so that people can use the solar energy that it collects to charge any of their USB-powered gadgets. Money may not grow on trees, same with gadgets, but it turns out that juice to power those gadgets can grow on trees.

For many fans of gadgets, games and electronics Best Buy is the place to go shopping when you need to scratch the gadget itch. What some don’t realize is that Best Buy owns and operates some other very popular retail locations around the world.

Best Buy announced today that it has agreed to buy 50% of Carphone Warehouse for a cash amount of $2.1 billion. The purchase will allow Best Buy to open retail stores in Europe and provide Carphone Warehouse with the funds to pay down debt and offer new services.

I’d like to officially say that this device is the last egg straw. There seems to be an overabundance of egg themed gadgets lately, and I think we might be abusing the whole egg thing. There’s the egg phone, wobbly egg speakers, even the egg mouse to name just a few. You gadget creators are driving me crazy with the eggs already!

Now for the latest…egg. The Egg Speaker Charger Concept device functions as a pair of satellite speakers when ‘hatched’ open, with its base functioning as a subwoofer. The base will also double as a dock for a compatible MP3 player, charging your device through induction.

A mouse is more then just a mouse to some people. Those people want some style and color. For those, this cute little Japanese mouse is meant for comfort and fits in the palm of your hand. The Elecom Egg mouse is not new, but you may not have seen it since its a Japanese product.

For their 20 year anniversary they are releasing the M-EGUR series in six different colors. It’s being released in black, white, gray, blue, orange and pink and features three buttons, a scroll wheel and a glossy finish. It will be released mid May in Japan only for $29.

It’s hard to say how they did it, but it appears that somehow Telecom Italia Mobile has convinced Apple and Steve Jobs to offer the new upcoming 3G version of the iPhone to customers in Italy with quite a bit more leeway than we’ve seen here in the states. Not only will the iPhone not require that two-year service contract along with the purchase, but it will also come unlocked.

This is something that Apple has been very stringent about stateside and has been volleying versions with hackers since the beginning, keeping the iPhone locked and with a single, exclusive carrier. What this means is that in Italy customers can just by the iPhone and use it with any carrier that they choose.

Our favorite droid from the Star Wars saga has had more products built in his likeness then there are stars in the solar system. Chalk up another. The R2-D2 home telephone wants to take up space in your geek home and heart.

One of the legs unhooks as a standard handset. Features include head spinning and flashing lights when a call comes in (or at the push of a button if you want to impress your friends), ring selection (which can be standard, animation or R2-D2 noises), last number redial and volume control. It retails for £79.99.

You’ve got lots of wires coming off of your computer station as you read this. They each have a different size AC plug, providing no end of headaches to your standard white power strip. One possible solution to this issue is Tributaries Cable’s new T12 power strip with rotating outlets.

After removing video clips that were deemed as offensive to officials in Pakistan, the country decided to lift a country-wide ban on the YouTube website that it had imposed last week. The popular video sharing site had videos of cartoons originally published earlier in a Danish newspaper depicting the prophet Mohammad in which Pakistan lawmakers described as “blasphemous”.

Even as Best Buy rolls out its own converter box for the upcoming national transition to DTV, awareness among consumers about this change over seems to be on the rise. This is according to findings from a new CEA study.

The Consumer Electronics Association found awareness of the DTV transition has grown some 80 percent since 2006. The joint effort between the federal government and the private sector to educate on this change seems to be working, with consumers learning about the transition from television (72%), family and friends (39%) and the Internet (26%).

Best Buy is getting all set to unleash its digital converter boxes on the shopping masses as America counts down towards the government mandated DTV transition occurring in 2009. It will have in stores on Feb. 17 the new Insignia Digital-to-Analog Converter for Analog TVs – also known as the NS-DXA1.

The NS-DXA1 is pricing at around $60 at Best Buy, but coupons being made available from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) knock $40 off of that. These boxes change “over-the-air broadcast signals to a readable analog format for TVs that rely solely on over-the-air broadcasts for content as opposed to receiving programming through a cable or satellite subscription.” They measure 8.5- x 6-inches and are eco-friendly.

Cricket Communications is unveiling as part of its line up of consumer mobiles a new entry level model. It is called quite simply the Cricket EZ and prices at around $50.

The Cricket EZ is a typical candy-bar style cell phone developed by CalComp and equipped with VIA Telecom’s cdma2000 1xRTT baseband processor. It measures 4- x 1.7- x 0.5-inches and sports a 128×128 color LCD display. It comes with polyphonic ringtones and wallpapers.

There are just those times out in the field when you’re hunting any standard old two way radio won’t do the trick. When that happens Motorola wants you to instead reach for your new camouflaged Motorola Talkabout T9650RCAMO, complete with game call buddy tones and pricing at around $120 per pair.

The Motorola Talkabout T9650RCAMO is designed to blend in with what Motorola assumes you are wearing while you hunt: camouflaged clothing. So you don’t potentially scare off your intended Bambi kill when radioing your hunting partner, you can use one of five “game call tones” so you can identify yourself. These tones include duck, turkey, elk, goose and coyote.