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Apple just dodged a bullet.

A New York California federal judge dismissed a potential class action lawsuit which alleged that Apple propagated their popular iMac screens without disclosing certain manufacturing defects to its customers, saying that the allegations were too general to be considered.

The lawsuit stated that unwanted vertical lines would appear on the devices after the warranty period had expired and that Apple “internally recognizes and concedes” the defect, but did nothing to warn consumers.

While the class action suit was dismissed, the judge did state that the common-law claim regarding Apple’s deliberate conciliation could be amended to add more detail, and thus decrease the scope of the suit.

(Source: Law360, requires registration)

Coincidentally (or maybe not so), Apple released a firmware update to address problems which have arisen on the 27″ iMac screens. The firmware is stated to “address issues that may cause image corruption or display flickering”.

The results of this update, however, have been mixed. Our own Daniel Brusilovsky tweeted that even after the iMac software update, he was still having issues with the screen. Others are having better luck, stating that the problems have subsided.

It doesn’t seem too far fetched to believe that these two events are correlated. Apple knew that their product had widespread malfunctions, and as such, are finally trying to rectify the situation. Luckily for them, the class action suit was too broad.

Next time, they might not be so fortuitous.

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Achieving Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance for online transactions is an expensive and timely endeavor; routinely costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and spanning several quarters in tim. According to Gartner, PCI compliance will cost up to an average of $2.7 million among Level 1 merchants and $267,000 among Level 2 merchants. Further, Visa and Mastercard will be imposing new PCI requirements upon online merchants, which will include more frequent on and off site security reviews, beginning in 2010; thus forcing more companies to upgrade their systems to meet compliance standards. Demand billing and recurring subscription management company, Aria, offers a solution built to manage PCI compliance for companies.

The winner of DEMO’s enterprise category and people’s choice award, Liaise, is moving from private to open beta by launching their much anticipated mobile calendar integration and introducing their Team Services platform.

Liaise focuses on collaboration within email: it analyzes the content within your incoming and outgoing emails, captures the important information (Liaise dubs these KeyPoints) which needs to be acted upon, and sets up a management list based on this info.

To quote from our previous coverage of Liaise:

The product works quite intuitively. For instance, let’s imagine I am sending an email to a fellow writer: “Greg, make sure you interview the CEO of Liaise on Thursday.” The software will then recognize that my email is a call to action directed towards Greg and that it is due Thursday (these are the KeyPoints). The priority for this will be set at normal because it is due a few days from now. However, Liaise is a learning software; so it will change the way it works based off of the language I use and the edits to the suggestions which Liaise has made. For instance, lets say that I manually changed the priority of this issue to Very High. In the future, when I use the phrase “make sure,” in an email, Liaise will set the priority to high. If Liaise does not identify some parts of an email, there is an edit option to add your own action items.

Previously, Liaise only worked with desktop clients, but hoped to expand into the mobile market. Today, they have done just that. Now, utilizing Microsoft Outlook’s synchronization process, users are able to see their KeyPoints directly on their iPhone, BlackBerry, or with any other device that supports an Outlook-enabled calendar.

Liaise has also upgraded the interface of their application. When a team used Liaise to collaborate before, users would have to individually update their to-do list. With the addition of Team Services however, they no longer have to send new emails to each other to update the status of shared action items or issues. Instead, these updates are automatically synchronized when completed (or not) through each user’s calendar, simplifying the process.

The product now gives users the ability to hide KeyPoints from the individual they are emailing. This is beneficial because it allows Liaise users to check up on their subordinates without making it seem obtrusive. Thus, end users get the tasks assigned to them, and Liaise users are constantly appraised of their progress without seeming like they are micromanaging.

Liaise is sticking to their original price point and will be charging between $4.95-9.95 per user, per month when the beta is completed. Liaise is headquartered in Sunnyvale and has received an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from Southern Cross Venture Partners.

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Relaxed, a stealth startup centered around Apache CouchDB has raised $2 million from Redpoint Ventures according to an SEC filing which was confirmed by CEO Damien Katz. Three original authors of Apache CouchDB–Damien Katz, J. Chris Anderson, and Jan Lehnardt–are listed as Executive Officers of the company.

For those who are unfamiliar, CouchDB is a free open source indexable document database server which uses Javascript as a query language. CouchDB is designed for the reporting and storage of large amounts of semi-structured, document oriented data, unlike SQL databases which store and report on very structured and correlated data.

CouchDB is part of the rapidly growing NoSQL movement, which is schema-free and focuses on adding horizontal scalability to databases. Major companies already use NoSQL database systems including Amazon’s Dynamo, Facebook’s Cassandra, and Google’s BigTable. Other NoSQL-related projects include Project Voldemort, Hypertable, VPork, MongoDB, Apache’s Hadoop and more. Two other companies in this space recently received funding as well: Swedish-based Neo Technology garnered $2.5 million in late October and 10gen raised $3.4 million in November.

Apache’s site describes CouchDB as such:

“In an SQL database, as needs evolve the schema and storage of the existing data must be updated. This often causes problems as new needs arise that simply weren’t anticipated in the initial database designs, and makes distributed “upgrades” a problem for every host that needs to go through a schema update.

With CouchDB, no schema is enforced, so new document types with new meaning can be safely added alongside the old. The view engine, using Javascript, is designed to easily handle new document types and disparate but similar documents.”

While we don’t know much about what Relaxed will be doing, we speculate that they will provide support for developers using CouchDB in addition to trying to expand the adoption of CouchDB by enterprise companies. Their role seems similar to that of RedHat’s in the Linux community, but we won’t know more until Relaxed makes an announcement early next year.

Prior to Relaxed, the three founders were affiliated with a CouchDB consultancy company, appropriately named couch.io. At couch.io, they focused on CouchDB support and training, as well as the managed deployment of customer’s CouchDB cluster.

CouchDB is still in its early stages at version 0.10, but has gained significant traction and has been adopted by many websites and software projects, including Ubuntu. For a more high-level view of what CouchDB does, see their overview.

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Monetizing remnant advertising is not an easy task, but 5to1, a TC50 finalist, seems to be off to a good start, and they’ve added on another $1.81 million to their previous round of $4.5 million from existing investors Fuse Capital and Prism VentureWorks. The platform employed by 5to1 gives content owners the ability to place ads in relevant places at the right time, and to the correct audience. The company is run by former Fox Interactive executives Jim Heckman and Ross Levinsohn and this extension brings its total intake of funding to just over $6.3 million.

Jim Heckman, the founder and CEO of 5to1, says the following about the funding:

“5:1 secured a small extension of funding to add a little runway so we could stay focused on growing the business. Wasn’t an urgent move, but our adoption is much better than expected, so didn’t want to risk any loss of focus. No new partners or investors were involved and we don’t expect to be engaged in money raising activities in the near future.”

5:1 did note the extension, when final paperwork is filed, will “end up at $2 million” and the company is days away from surpassing 400 million duplicated uniques amongst 30 distribution partners.

For more information on 5to1, check out our TC50 coverage.

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Whether you're sitting in front of your computer at work on a daily basis, or getting dominated by those damn Call of Duty campers for hours on end, chances are your eyes are taking quite the hit. Help your poor eyes out by reducing the strain they incur with Gunnar's MLG Legend Glasses.

Thinking about moving your electronic services to the cloud? LiveOffice, an SaaS provider of email archiving and hosting, makes the leap that much easier with the release of their CloudMerge technology--offering email archiving for most cloud email providers on the market. In addition to supporting cloud based email archiving, LiveOffice is able to archive email which is on-premise, thus creating a unified archive for all of your email. A core belief of LiveOffice is that your email archive should be portable. By hosting your archive on their end, customers are able to migrate from their current provider to a cloud provider without having to deal with the possibility of losing precious information. Additionally, if customers are dissatisfied with their cloud provider down the road, they can migrate to another provider seamlessly--while keeping all their emails--due to the capabilities of LiveOffice's products.

This past weekend, thousands of gamers descended upon the Anaheim Convention Center to spectate and compete in one of the biggest video game competitions of the year, put on by Major League Gaming. Over two hundred teams of four individuals competed for the Halo 3 Championship where prize money totaled almost $60,000; while an additional $60,000 was up for grabs for titles such as Gears of War 2, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and EA Sports Madden NFL. An estimated 700,000 people viewed the live stream over the course of the weekend.

I had the opportunity to speak with the CEO of Major League Gaming, Matt Bromberg, about MLG’s continued growth through this recession and their plans for the upcoming years.

In this interview, Matt spoke about many of the misconceptions of the gaming business, including companies continued persistence of trying to bring video gaming to broadcast television; instead of focusing almost entirely on internet streaming.

Additionally, Mr. Bromberg spoke on the possibilities of creating an MLG-branded video game as well as the possible integration of mobile gaming to their circuit of console games.

A transcript of the interview is embedded below.

David Diaz: We’re here at MLG Anaheim with Matt Bromberg, CEO of Major League Gaming. Thanks Matt for taking the time to speak with us.

Matt Bromberg: Thank you for having me David.

DD: My first question for you, is now that we’re down in Anaheim, do you have a rough estimate of how many people are here today and how many will show up this weekend?

MB: Yeah, we typically do about 5,000 people a day, so that’s 15,000 over the course of a weekend.

DD: And that was for Anaheim?

MB: That’s what we typically get, I haven’t gotten the full numbers for this event, but it’s usually around that number. And our broadcast audience is typically between 600 and 700,000 men, under thirty. Who generally speaking watch the broadcast for about an average of 72 minutes each.

DD: And that’s for a day, or the entire weekend?

MB: Over the weekend of programming. So it’s interesting, if you start to think about how big is that. And you look at prime-time audience in that demo, 12 to 30 or 34, for the major cable networks. What you find is that’s between 3 and 7 or 8 times the Nielsens rating in that demo. So directionally it’s getting pretty big.

DD: When I came down here I noticed a lot of sponsors including Dr. Pepper and Old Spice. What is MLG’s main source of revenue? Is it these events, or is it through sponsorships?

MB: It’s 75% sponsorships, and about 25% licensing and direct to consumer.

DD: Do the events themselves make money or are they mainly put on to increase your user base?

MB: They’re mostly a break-even proposition. It’s as you know, because you’ve been here, it’s a big undertaking, it’s a big production. It’s six tractor trailers, and we drive them around the country, so it’s a big deal. But the live event is not really what sponsors are buying. They’re buying integration into our digital media and into the online competitions. And so eighty percent of what they’re paying for, eighty percent plus, is integration into that digital world. Then they come here to have the direct contact with the consumer, which they love. But I think it’s a big misconception about our business is that it’s about the live events, because they’re so big and attractive, but it’s not really what the business is about.

DD: Is MLG profitable at this point?

MB: It is.

DD: How much money have you taken in to date?

MB: We have raised about $42.5M.

DD: Can you take us through the growth of MLG, from when you started to where you are now?

MB: We raised our first round of money in very early of 2006. We we doing live competitions for three hundred people, and we had three-thousand people watching the live streams and i think we had 25,000 monthly uniques on our websites. Now we have 11 million folks every month on the websites, and we talked about the size of the broadcast and the live event audience. It’s been a real explosion. We had one sponsor at that time, and now we have closer to fifteen. It’s been exciting for us to really break through into the mainstream media world, really by almost any measure. It’s not just the number of sponsors, it’s the quality: Doritos, Proctor and Gamble, Dr. Pepper, Bic, Ball Park, really top tier marketers.

DD: And what about ESPN? Are they a sponsor or a partner?

MB: They are a partner, they are our coverage partner. They cover the events, they interview our pros. In fact, we do a weekly chat with our pros on ESPN, and they told us recently that–we had some player shifts a while back–and Walshy did a chat there, and they had more questions submitted for him by users than they’ve ever had for any pro athlete they’ve ever done. I don’t know that it’s because Walshy has more fans than say Lebron [James], but it’s because the audience is so pure and focused in that place–our audience is 100% online–and that’s part of the value proposition from a business perspective is there’s an intensity and purity of our audience and a directness of being able to connect to them. It’s pretty unique out there, and it helps us to sell those partnerships.

DD: When MLG first started, the gaming market was up for grabs–it was a pretty crowded niche–what did you do that either other companies didn’t do, or didn’t do well enough?

MB: We had a lot of competitors, and we drove them all out of business, kind of one by one. And I think that there were a couple of big misconceptions. The first one was that competitive video gaming would be about television primarily. That was a big mistake that a lot of people made. We’ve done television in our day, but we always knew that this was really an online activity. Focusing on television killed a lot of people. The other thing that I think we got that other folks didn’t get, is that in order to succeed in this market, you also have to own the online competition. It’s not enough to have live events, it’s not enough to make content. Because every other day of the year when people aren’t here, you want to be the place where people come to compete. Growing that part of our business was a major differentiator for us. And the third thing was a lot of folks came in from a very top-down corporate perspective, and sort of said “hey, we’re a big company, this is the way it goes.” And what they didn’t recognize is that this is an activity that people are already engaging in. We didn’t create it. What we did was shape it, codify it, package it, and build it up. We came in trying to sort of celebrate and appreciate what people were already doing and what they were already into and add to it; not roll in and change the whole thing because it suited our partners or it suited our sponsors, or anything like that.

DD: I know that a few months ago you acquired a company and raised a new round of funding a while ago…

MB: That’s correct, we acquired Agora a couple months ago, and closed a round of funding at the end of last year.

DD: And there were speculations that the money was for the acquisition of Agora…

MB: There was actually some incorrect reporting about it. The funding is now almost a year ago. And we did the Agora deal only very recently. But because the Agora deal was largely a stock deal, I think there was some reporting about…I think people thought we had sold some stock to buy the company, which we hadn’t. Last fall we had been having some M&A conversations. Some folks had been interested in buying the business and we decided we wanted to double-down and reinvest and continue as an independent entity–and continue to run the company. That’s when we raised the money.

DD: What was that money used for?

MB: We did use it partially for acquisitions. But really, for us, just continuing to invest in the platform. We’ll do many more broadcasts. We we also announced a big deal with Electronic Arts whereby we’re doing all their online and offline competitions for the EA Sports titles, which you saw in the back corner [at the event]. It’s a big new addition. We announced a big deal with Doritos, whereby next year we’re going to do four skills combines across the country. Like the NFL combine where you evaluate amateur players for promotion to the Pro Circuit. We are very heavily reinvesting in our technology around the online tournament business. So we’re using it for all those things.

DD: I noticed that there were no games for the Wii. Is there a reason for that?

MB: There are no games for the Wii, this is true.

DD: Is there just not enough interest out there for the games?

MB: Historically we used to do Smash Brothers. Then the new Smash Brothers that came out was sort of disappointing from a competitive perspective. The competitive community didn’t really embrace it. And so I think for us it’s always a balance of finding titles that have enough of a following that we can sort of sprinkle our pixie dust on it and help it grow. And I haven’t yet seen that title [from the Wii].

DD: Do you see MLG ever sponsoring a video game and helping with aspects of the production process? Is that something that’s in your…

MB: Ya. You know, it’s interesting, when I arrived that was actually a big part of the original business plan that the founders had created. Y’know, hey, lets build a video game. There should be an MLG video game. And I always believed it was an incredible idea, but it was an idea that was too early.

DD: Okay.

MB: And now we actually are actively talking to several publishers about potentially creating an MLG game. Because if you think about… part of the growth of our business is that the world has kind of come in our direction a little bit. Four years ago we said that the whole video game business is going to be about multiplayer. And multiplayer by definition is about competition. There’s gonna be a big media property here and this is what we’re gonna do. People thought at the time that it was interesting, but what’s happened, of course, over the last several years is that multiplayer is becoming a bigger and bigger part of the video game business. And the idea that you’re making a boxed retail product for a single player, which is the historical model for the video game business, is completely out the window. And so if you start to think about what we do, which is, we create rule sets for competitions, you think, well, hey, if I can build a video game without any of the single player aspects to it, just a pure tournament title, and we could bring some of the intellectual property around what you need to do for a game like that to make it great, and we have an installed audience to buy it.

DD: Okay.

MB: Yeah, so we’ve thought a lot about it.

DD: Great. And so, what is your take on the explosive growth in mobile gaming? You see all these iPhone games that are coming out…

MB: Yeah!

DD: Do you see MLG trying to tap that market?

MB: What’s interesting about gaming and competitive gaming is that the consumer behavior is the same across segments. I don’t care if you’re a 40-year-old woman playing Scrabble Online or Word Womp, Puzzle Games, Bejeweled, or, you’re an 18 year-old guy playing Halo – You approach it differently, but the basic idea is: You’re playing a game because you want to keep track, and you want to know where you stand, and you want to get better. And that is a common thread, through iPhone games, through cell phone games, through casual PC games, through more hard core, it’s all the same. So I think for us it’s just a question of building… Our brand is very associated with young men, and that purity is part of why the business works. So, yeah, I think we’ll get there one day, but we want to be really careful for the brand to kind of give us permission to do that over time. So it’ll probably be a little while.

DD: Gotcha. And then, the typical ending question, where do you see MLG in 5 years, 10 years?

MB: The beauty, I think, of our company, is that we understand what the model is. It’s major live events, big broadcast, big media, online competitions. And I think that model is going to continue. What’s really exciting for us this year is that we’ll be re-launching our online properties. And the greater data integration and some of the deals we’ve done with the publishers that enable data directly from the game–you have your results updating your MLG profile automatically–those kinds of things are going to unlock a new area of growth in that part of the business. But by and large the model is pretty straightforward, and we’re just gonna keep pushing.

DD: Well, judging by everyone who’s in attendance, it looks like this is another very successful tournament.

MB: Yeah, I think so. We’ve been lucky to be able to grow really really quickly through the downturn. We’re twice as big this year as we were the year before and we’ll be twice as big next year. So especially in this economy we feel pretty fortunate.

DD: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

MB: You bet!

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While the Nintendo Wii continues to have a stranglehold on console sales, both worldwide and in the United States, the Xbox 360 and PS3 are battling it out for the the second place position for year-to-date sales. Just a little over two months ago, Sony announced that they would be slashing the price of their game console, the PS3, to $299. Microsoft quickly followed suit, and in just ten days dropped the price of their most expensive console, the Xbox 360 Elite, to $299. Nintendo, who has sold nearly double the number of consoles worldwide as these two, decided to lower the price of the Wii on September 27th to $199: this was the first time since its inception that the Wii has had a price cut. All three console manufacturers hoped that the decrease in price would help them to increase sales and finish the year on a strong note. The results have been mixed: while all three consoles have seen an increase in sales, the PS3 has seen astonishing growth in the US and abroad, and has wrestled the second-place position in worldwide YTD sales from the 360. As for the Xbox, even in its upgraded Elite form it has seen only minimal gains since the price drop.

With the Holiday Season nearly upon us, we at TechCrunch thought it would behoove us to share with everyone a definitive list of the best smartphones currently available (or launching shortly), so as to help with any possible purchasing decisions which may occur in the upcoming months.

In making our decisions, we looked at these phones from the standpoint of the consumer. Thus, developer struggles, business security, and other such problems were not taken into account. Instead, functionality, price, and the overall usefulness of various smartphones made up the criteria which we adhered to during our reviews. These phones can be found on a multitude of carriers, operating systems, and continents.

Feel free to comment below on the merits of this list of the best smart phones currently available.

iPhone 3GS

You know you’re on top when phone manufacturers are constantly struggling to produce an “iPhone killer”. The iPhone 3GS boasts a massive App Store (with nearly 100,000 apps now), the largest developer base, and is simply put, the best phone on the market.

Status: Launched June 19th, 2009 on ATT
Screen: 3.5-inch 480 x 320-pixel resolution at 163 ppi widescreen Multi-Touch display
Dimensions: 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3 mm; 135 grams
Camera: 3 megapixels w/ AutoFocus, No flash
Battery: 1150 mAh Li-Ion
Standby Time: 300 hours
Talk Time: Up to 12 hours on 2G; Up to 5 hours on 3G
Processor: Samsung S5PC100; 600 MHz
Internal/External Memory: 16GB or 32GB
Extras: 3.5mm Headset jack, accelerometer, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS enabled
Operating System: iPhone OS
Price: $199 for 16 GB; $299 for 32GB

Motorola Droid

If any phone is going to challenge the iPhone’s supremacy, it will be the Verizon Droid. The Droid is on a superior network than the iPhone, and will be running Android 2.0 which has a much improved user interface over previous versions of Android.

Status: Rumored to be announced October 28th; Verizon Wireless.
Screen: 3.7-inch/480×854 Full Touchscreen with Full QWERTY Slider
Dimensions: 60 x 115.8 x 13.7 mm; 169 grams
Camera: 5.0 Megapixels with AutoFocus
Battery: Li-ion 1400mAh
Standby Time: 450 Hours
Talk Time:7 Hours
Processor: Texas Instruments OMAP 3430 processor; 600MHz
Internal/External Memory: 512MB Flash, 256MB RAM/MicroSD (16GB capacity)
Extras: 3.5mm Headset jack, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS enabled
Operating System: Android 2.0
Price: Unknown

Palm Pre

The Palm Pre signaled the resurrection of Palm. It is well-designed, and has a very promising OS, which if tweaked and improved slightly, can challenge any OS on the market.

Status: Available June 6th on Sprint. Available October 13 in Germany and October 16 in UK and Ireland
Screen: 3.1-inch touch screen with 24-bit color 320×480 resolution HVGA display and full QWERTY keyboard
Dimensions: 100.5 x 59.5 x 16.95 mm; 135 grams
Camera: 3 megapixel camera with LED flash and AutoFocus
Battery: 1150 mAh
Standby Time: 250 Hours
Talk Time: 5 Hours
Processor: Texas Instruments OMAP 3430 processor; 600MHz
Internal/External Memory: 8 GB
Extras: 3.5mm Headset jack, accelerometer, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS enabled
Operating System: Palm webOS
Price: $149.99

HTC Hero/T-Mobile G2 Touch/Sprint HTC Hero

The inclusion of HTC Sense makes the Hero the best Android phone currently on the market. It is fast, stylish, and easy to use.

Status: HTC Hero Launched July 24th for Orange UK. T-Mobile G2 Touch Launched July 29th.
Screen: 3.2-inch/ 320×480 HVGA resolution; Full Touchscreen/TFT-LCD touch-sensitive screen
Dimensions: 112 x 56.2 x 14.35 mm ; 135 grams
Camera: 5 Megapixels with AutoFocus
Battery: 1350 mAh Lithium-ion battery
Standby Time: Up to 750 hours for WCDMA, Up to 440 hours for GSM
Talk Time:Up to 420 minutes for WCDMA, Up to 470 minutes for GSM
Processor: Qualcomm® MSM7200A™, 528 MHz
Internal/External Memory:288MB/MicroSD 2.0
Extras: 3.5mm Headset jack, Wi-Fi, accelerometer, Bluetooth and GPS enabled
Operating System: Android
Price: $179.99

BlackBerry Bold

The BlackBerry Bold is RIM’s crowning achievement thus far and the impending Bold 9700 should see widespread adoption.

Status: Available on AT&T; Bold 9700 available November 2nd, 2009
Screen: 2.6 inch Half VGA resolution Dispay Screen; 480 x 320 pixels; 65,000 colors
Dimensions: 114 x 66 x 15; 136 grams
Camera: 2.0 MP w/ AutoFocus
Battery: Li – Ion, 1500 mAh
Standby Time: 324 hours
Talk Time: 4.5 hours
Processor: 624 MHz
Internal/External Memory: 1 GB
Extras: 3.5mm Headset jack, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS capable with extended ephemeris
Operating System: BlackBerry OS
Price: $199.99

HTC Magic/T-Mobile MyTouch 3G

The MyTouch 3G is an easy to use, stylish Android phone. The absence of a standard 3.5mm headset jack is a bit of a disappointment, but otherwise this phone is quite powerful and useful. Furthermore, Mike quit the iPhone for the MyTouch, and that has to mean something.

Status: HTC Magic Launched May 1, 2009 and July 10th, 2009 in Japan; MyTouch 3G launched July 8, 2009. Available through T-Mobile, Vodafone, and Docomo
Screen:3.2″ /320 x 480 HVGA Touchscreen/TFT, TFD, LCD 262k
Dimensions: 113 x 55 x 13 mm; 118.5 grams
Camera: 3.2 Megapixels with AutoFocus (MyTouch has a 5MP camera)
Battery: 1340 mAh Lithium-ion battery
Standby Time: 420 hours
Talk Time: 7.5 Hours
Processor: Qualcomm® MSM7201a™, 528 MHz
Internal/External Memory:192/288 MB (Underclocked)/ MicroSD up to 32GB
Extras: HTC ExtUSB Headset Jack, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS enabled
Operating System: Android
Price: $99.99 (T-Mobile MyTouch $149.99)

BlackBerry Storm 2

The BlackBerry Storm 2, while an improvement over its predecessor, still lacks the “wow” factor necessary to push it higher up on this list.

Status: Available on Verizon Wireless October 28th, 2009
Screen: 3.25 inch 360 x 480 pixel touchscreen; 65k colors
Dimensions: 112.5 x 62.2 x 13.9 mm; 160 grams
Camera: 3.2 Megapixels w/ LED flash and AutoFocus
Battery: 1400 mAh Li-Ion
Standby Time: 270 hours
Talk Time: 5.5 hours
Processor: 528 MHz Qualcomm processor
Internal/External Memory: 2 GB/16 GB microSD
Extras: 3.5 mm headset, GPS, bluetooth, and wi-fi enabled
Operating System: BlackBerry OS
Price: $179.99

BlackBerry Tour

Our biggest qualm with the BlackBerry Tour is its lack of Wi-Fi. Other than that however, the Tour is a great phone if you’re a chronic email user or if you text message a lot.

Status: Available on July 12, 2009 through Verizon and Sprint.
Screen: 2.4 inch 480×360 pixel display screen; 65,000 colors
Dimensions: 112 x 62 x 14.2 mm; 130 grams
Camera: 3.2 Megapixels with AutoFocus
Battery: 1400 mAHr removable/rechargeable cryptographic lithium cell
Standby Time: 336 Hours
Talk Time: 5 Hours
Processor: 528 MHz Qualcomm processor
Internal/External Memory: 256 MB RAM
Extras: 3.5mm Headset jack, Bluetooth and GPS enabled. No Wi-Fi nor accelerometer
Operating System: BlackBerry OS
Price: $149.99

Nokia E71x

The Nokia E71x is a sleek and stylish phone, but like the Magic, lacks a 3.5mm headset jack. Nonetheless, this phone is just right for those on a budget, given its $99.99 price tag.

Status: Available on AT&T
Screen: 2.4″ LCD (Color TFT/TFD) display screen; 320 x 240 pixels (QVGA); 16.7 million (24-bit)
Dimensions:114 x 57 x 10 mm; 126g
Camera: 3.2MP w/ Autofocus and Flash
Battery: BP-4L 1500 mAh Li-Po standard battery
Standby Time: 480 hours
Talk Time: 4.5 hours
Processor: ARM 11, 369 MHz
Internal/External Memory: 110MB/ MicroSD
Extras: 2.5mm Headset jack, bluetooth, wi-fi, and GPS enabled
Operating System: Symbian OS
Price: $99.00

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