Research in Motion has made a Bold move in its fight against Apple in the smartphone arena with the new BlackBerry Bold.

Debuting this summer, the Bold boasts is the first RIM phone to use HSDPA technology for faster data delivery, pitting it against the 3G iPhone that Apple is expected to announce next month. It also has more storage, GPS, a video camera and, according to Bloomberg, lets users listen to their iTunes libraries.

AT&T, the exclusive US home for the iPhone, will also be the first carrier to offer the Bold. With all the new consumer-friendly features, smartphone fans will have a big decision to make when choosing between the Bold and the iPhone: keyboard or touch-screen.

RIM has also launched a $150 million venture fund in partnership with Thomson Reuters and the Royal Bank of Canada that will invest in companies building smartphone applications.

HTC has unveiled its latest touchscreen Windows Mobile smartphone, its first that's as stylish as it is feature-rich, according to an InformationWeek report.

The Diamond boasts a sleek look in a stainless steel frame - complete with a diamond pattern on the back. In addition to HTC's TouchFLO interface, the Diamond features a custom YouTube application, a rich 3D graphics engine and "powerful" mobile Internet capabilities. Sounds like this one might actually impact iPhone sales.

Unfortunately for those of us in the States, it's not designed to run on US mobile operator networks.

Orange is the first carrier to offer the Diamond. The cellco says it worked closely with HTC to develop the best possible handset to show off its enhanced photo, music, TV and download services, making the Diamond the newest addition to the Orange Signature handset family.

The HTC Diamond from Orange will be available in the UK in July and will roll out across France, Spain, Poland, Romania, Switzerland and Belgium throughout the rest of 2008.

Engadget Mobile has posted what is supposedly a picture of the very first clamshell-style BlackBerry. The site, which snagged the image from the Boy Genius Report, says the new phone has a "Pearl-esque" keyboard and two screens - one internal, one external. Rumor has the device going by the name Kickstart and making its debut by year-end.

As a rule, we try to keep our stories focused on content for cell phones, but we couldn't resist mentioning a post we found on Dial-a-phone that focuses on the cell phone as content.

The article is aptly (we think) titled "12 Stunning Examples of Mobile Phones as Art." The picture below represents a multimedia piece from artist Rob Pettit.

To see the other 11 "stunning examples" and learn about the artists, click here.

(Image credit: dialaphone.co.uk)

According to government statistics released this week, Australia has more cell phones than people.

That's according to the fiscal year ending June 30, 2007, the Australian Communications and Media Authority reported. There were 21.26 million phones in operation, which is a 7.6% increase on the previous year. Meanwhile, Australia's population at Sept. 30, 2007, was 21.1 million, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said.

The government also reported that the number of pay phones dropped to 49,862, a fall of more than 8,000 from the previous year. Clearly we're living in a more wireless world by the day, though it's not clear who is yakking on the extra cell phones "in operation."

Beginning July 1st, Californians will face a $50 fine if they're caught using their cell phones while driving. Autopia reports that California joins several other states, including New York, Washington, D.C., New Jersey and Connecticut in cracking down on driver distractions—but while 23 states have laws prohibiting texting while driving, the number of distractions in cars continues to climb.

The report went on to say that some 10 to 20 percent of all meals in the U.S. are eaten while in the car—a statistic that may surprise city-goers who don't drive much—and that nearly 80 percent of crashes entail some form of driver distraction (not just cell phones) within three seconds of the accident.

On the heels of yesterday's global handset shipment report, Verizon announced that it ended the first quarter with 67.2 million wireless subscribers and 1.8 million FiOS Internet and TV customers, ZDNet said. Here are some statistics quoted from the report:

- Verizon added 1.5 million net customers to give it a total of 67.2 million.

- The company's total churn was 1.19 percent and 0.93 on a retail post-paid basis.

- For comparison, AT&T reported 71.4 million wireless subscribers, a total churn was 1.7 percent and retail churn of 1.2 percent.

Both companies are doing well compared to Sprint, which is losing subscribers at a rate that is doubling every quarter.

MediaPost reports that shipments of mobile devices worldwide were up 13.7% in the first quarter compared to the year earlier period, but that the results are likely to be softer next quarter because of the credit crisis, according to ABI Research.

Some statistics quoted from the report:

- The research firm expects mobile device shipments to hit 1.28 billion, a 12% annual gain for 2008.

- In terms of market share, Nokia led the way with nearly 40% while Samsung and LG increased to 16% and 8.4%, respectively.

- Losing ground were Motorola and Sony Ericsson, falling to 9.5% and 7.7%, respectively.

The report also said that while the big five still dominate—Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson—Research in Motion, HTC, and Apple are all seeing increased sales of their own handsets.

(Image credit: Clipart.com)

In case you were wondering why we're down on the major U.S. cell phone carriers so often—you know, aside from high plan prices, restrictive policies, contract cancellation fees, and the fact that they disable perfectly good features in handsets if they can't figure out how to monetize them—here's yet another reason.

Engadget reports that LG will launch the KF750 handset in Europe in May. This sleek beauty has a number of interesting media features, such as a five-megapixel camera, face recognition, and the ability to shoot DivX videos at a stunning 120 frames per second. It also has haptic feedback keys (which vibrate the phone when you touch them), an auto-rotating touch screen (similar to the iPhone, we presume) and a plethora of Google mobile applications.

Like all new phones, though, we won't see a compatible version stateside until a carrier gets around to picking it up and "approving" it for our networks, which is something that other countries don't have to put up with. So if we're lucky, we'll see it 12 to 18 months after Europe does. It's a hard life.

According to Engadget, Microsoft just announced that its $500M buyout of Sidekick maker Danger is complete, and that it's rolling the new team into its own unit, the Premium Mobile Experiences (PMX) division.

The report said that Roz Ho, the former Mac business unit head at MS, said the goal of PMX is to have people "smile every time they look at their phone," which "hopefully means we'll be seeing a lot more Danger influence on Windows Mobile than the other way around." Now for the ($500 million) question: Will Microsoft release its own, branded phone and go directly after Apple? It's not like they haven't tried their hand at hardware before.