Today AT&T announced that its Mobile TV service will launch on Sunday, May 4. It will launch in 58 markets, some of which include: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, Seattle and Washington, D.C. The mobile TV service will include 10 channels, two of which, PIX and CNN Mobile Live, will be exclusive to AT&T. Also, for the first 60 days, it will offer a bonus channel called CNCRT. CNCRT will air concerts recorded by artists such as Avril Lavigne, Sheryl Crow, Daughtry, Lenny Kravitz, and others. The service will be available on just two handsets. The LG Vu, which will sell for $300 after rebates, and the Samsung Access, which will sell for $200 after rebates. Subscription fees are $13, $15 and $30 per month. The lowest provides basic access to 4 channels. The $15 plan adds the rest of the channels, plus access to the CNCRT channel. The premium plan adds unlimited web browsing and unlimited CV video.

As it turns out, T-mobile doesn’t monitor the origination of the I.P. address for their Wifi Hotspot@Home calls. Translation: If you make a call using T-mobile’s Hotspot@Home, they don’t care where it is from. We’re not talking calls from places like California, Texas, and New York. We’re talking Argentina, China, London, Israel, and South Africa…Anywhere that has open Wifi, you can make a UMA call to the US for no international roaming charge. Now, if you don’t have unlimited Hotspot@Home minutes they will be deducted out of your anytime minutes bucket (unless it is Nights, Weekends, or M2M) But if you want to talk as long as you want snatch up T-mobile’s $9.99 Unlimited Hotspot@Home add-on. We know this is starting to sound like an advertisement for T-mobile; we’re just excited that we can travel around the world, and still make free calls to the US wherever we find open Wifi! We have read reports of inferior call quality while making these international Wifi calls, but really, is that unexpected? Still a great deal

T-Mobile’s 3G network started going live today, and it looks like that early word from a company memo may not hold true for all users. Some markets may in fact have a silent soft-launch of faster data rates, we’ve heard from several tipsters who’ve said that they’re already getting faster data service, and now the company itself getting the word out that it’s launching data as well. But company peeps were indeed instructed to make sure customers don’t count on that faster data being present; bottom line is you may have it, you may not (but if you take T-Mobile at its word, you should). NYC is the first market to light up, but others should come online soon — anyone trying it out? How’s it going? Hit us up in comments and let us know!

Take your focus off of that forthcoming Tony Hawk HipTop a minute and key in on that image above — looks like Danger’s Sidekick LX may be getting video after all. After questioning whether this very device could indeed support video late last year, it looks like the answer could be just around the corner. Unfortunately, the shot above along with one other in the read link is about it for details; we’re still waiting to hear whether YouTube / H.264 will be supported, and beyond that, when the update will be made available. Still worried sick over Mr. Hawk? Yeah, we reckoned not.

Tags: gadgets, Mobile Phones, tmobile, tmobile sidekick lx, video support

As we all know Orkut is Google’s little friendly social networking app that trys to compete with Myspace and Facebook. Well, now you can go mobile with Orkut. Head on over to Google in your web browser and you will see a list of apps such as Gmail, Google maps and now the new addition of Orkut.

From what I have see is it is very limited. There’s “My updates” “Home” “Scrapbook” and a few others. Nothing like the Myspace or Facebook mobile sites. Google: if you really want to throw Orkut out there with the big boys you’re going to have to make it a little more versatile. …And get a bigger user base. We’d ask you to not screw up your site with the flash and ugly of MySpace and the bandwidth-choking insanity of Facebook apps, but apparently there’s no accounting for taste these days.

Tags: india, orkut, orkut mobile, social networking