Best of SPE, 26 April 2009

We’re pretty sure that if you’re reading this, you’re the sort who likes exclusive, breaking details on Smartphones. We had that aplenty this week. Nokia Experts got the full skinny on the AT&T Nokia E71x in the form of PDF guides and a confirmation of a May 4th release. PreCentral.net scored an internal head-to-head between the iPhone and the Palm Pre. CrackBerry.com saw yet another Storm OS leak.

We’re also pretty sure you like free stuff. So you’ll want to check out the What Would You Do for a Palm Pre Giveaway. We’re also incredibly proud that CrackBerry.com reached - wait for it - One Million Members! They’ll be tossing out celebratory gifts to them this week. WMExperts will be giving away a phone (check there on Monday). Also, did you know that The iPhone Blog is approaching their 1 year anniversary in a couple weeks? Expect some fun to happen there soon, too!

Much more more happened in the smartphone world, so as usual, we bring you our "Best of SPE roundup." Come take a look at what’s news!

Android Central

 This week at Android Central, we detailed a lot of the new features that are going to come with Android 1.5. You can read about onscreen widgets, soft keyboards, and future-proofing Android applications. But as rosy as things are for Android, T-Mobile posted some bleak financial results for Q1.

One milestone to celebrate: the T-Mobile G1 hit 1 million units sold!

It was a fun and eventful week at CrackBerry.com. 9530 Storm owners were happy because a new operating system leaked. The Skyfire web browser debuted in private alpha mode, which looks to show a ton of potential and feature improvements over the native web browser. The BlackBerry 9630 also may have a name - the BlackBerry Tour. And last but not least, CrackBerry.com hit a huge milestone on Friday - One Million registered members! You’ll want to check into CrackBerry.com this week for chances to win some great prizes in honor of the occassion.

A tipster sent in all of the PDF documents for the upcoming AT&T Nokia E71x, that included an image showing a 4 May release date. The Nokia Experts accessory store launched this past week so come visit if you have any accessory needs for your Nokia device. The Nokia 5800 was a popular device this week with another review and thoughts on why it is a fabulous Amazon Video On Demand portable player that makes it a standout from all other mobile operating systems. Don’t forget to download the free Nokia Messaging client for your 5800 too.

Perhaps you haven’t heard, PreCentral.net is giving away five Palm Pre Packs to the five people who submit the best “What Would You Do for a Palm Pre?” entries! The Pre Packs include the Pre itself, a $100 Amazon gift card, a Touchstone charger, a case, and a pair of Motorola S9-HD headphones. If you haven’t entered your idea, go do so now!. Of course, outside of our contest, we also broke the big story that AT&T is training their employees on how to knock the Pre down a peg. We saw the Pre appear in Playboy magazine and in the hands of Angelina Jolie, and another shot of the Pre in the wild showed a new YouTube app for the webOS.

Previously on theiPhoneblog.com: Apple pwns the app market. 35,000 strong now, and over 1 BILLION App Store downloads. To celebrate, Apple gave away over $10,000 in prizes to… well, you’ll see. With a total of 37 million iPhone OS devices (including iPod touches) now on the market, 3.8 million iPhones sold just last quarter, 1.6 million of those activated on AT&T, 40% new to carrier, accounting for 75% of new monthly billings, there’s only one thing Apple pwns more than apps: AT&T.

Meanwhile, Apple just said “NO!” to cramped, terrible, junky netbooks and confirmed again Steve Jobs will be back at the end of June — which is not in time for the WWDC keynote.

Checking in over at TreoCentral we learned that Palm has just lowered the price of the unlocked GSM Palm Centro to $199. You can get it in three colors: Ruby Red, Glacier White and Colbalt Blue. In other Palm news, their stock broke $10 on a day that the market was down, and Bank of America/Merrill Lynch analyst Vivek Arya upped his rating on Palm to Buy from Hold. Plus Arya thinks that Palm could ship up to 2.5 million Pre smartphones in the 2nd half of 2009 and as many as 6.2 million phones in 2010. We also learned this week that the Treo Pro is now available in Mexico through Movistar, Telefonica Mexico’s local carrier brand.

It was another relatively slow week in the Windows Mobile world. The HTC Touch Diamond got a couple of hotfixes, we saw a cool ultrasound-Windows Mobile rig, learned Swift and Swivel may one day come, saw the release of SPB Mobile Shell 3.0, and a couple of great reviews of the Touch Diamond 2. We also got a sneak peek of possible Toshiba phones and the Touch Pro 2.