Verizon Wireless is selling the new HTC Trophy Windows Phone 7 smartphone for $199 with a two-year contract; a $50 mail-in rebate brings the final price (once you get your rebate) to $149.

But Amazon.com, Wirefly and LetsTalk.com each have the newest CDMA Windows Phone for $99, no rebate required.  All three also offer free shipping.  The $99 price tag is good for both new Verizon accounts with a two-year contract and those eligible for upgrades.

Learn more about the Verizon Wireless HTC Trophy Windows Phone…

Whatever your feelings about Lady Gaga, you might want to consider adding her latest album to your collection.  For a limited time, Amazon MP3 is offering Lady Gaga’s Born This Way for just $0.99, a purchase that gets you not only the fourteen tracks from the artist’s brand new album, but also an additional 20GB of music storage for Amazon Cloud Drive.

Amazon offers 5GB of Cloud Drive storage for free to all of its account holders, but you qualify for an additional 20GB of storage when when you purchase an album from Amazon MP3.  This $1 purchase qualifies, bumping total cloud storage to 25GB.  Music stored in the Cloud Drive can then be played on compatible devices (PCs, Macs, Android phones) via Amazon’s Cloud Player.

And, of course, if you’re already gaga for Gaga, you can save yourself about $11 by purchasing the album from Amazon rather than iTunes, where Born This Way sells for $11.99.

Up to now, the list of phones running Android 2.3 Gingerbread has been a sadly short one.  But at least one Android phone maker seems to be stepping up to the plate to take a bite: Motorola.

According to Moto employee Moto_Calvin, the Droid X will be the first to receive the update followed by the Droid 2 and Droid Pro.  There were also loose dates in the post: the Droid X Android 2.3 update will be ready to roll by the end of next month, while the other handsets mentioned will be updated “"before the end of the third quarter…”  Not exactly speedy, but at least it’s something.

Update: The forum post by Moto_Calvin has been edited and most of the interesting information above is now gone.  We’re not sure if this means the information was incorrect or if ol’ Cal just posted out of turn. 

via ComputerWorld

T-Mobile has just announced it has increased the speed of its ‘4G’ wireless data network to a theoretical 42 megabits per second (Mbps) in 55 U.S. markets.  While this doesn’t mean much for smartphone users just yet, it is great news for laptop users who want faster internet access on their mobile PCs. 

To go with the new data transfer speeds, T-Mobile is also launching a new 4G USB modem, the ZTE Rocket 3.0, which will go on sale tomorrow for $99 with a two-year contract (after a $50 mail-in rebate), $199 sans contract. 

Smartphones with support for the new network speeds are certainly coming, though we don’t know anything definite on that point just yet.  Stay tuned.  It also should be noted that a “theoretical speed” is just that; real-world speeds will be slower, but we’ll have to wait to see just how much slower once the devices launch.

We’ve posted a list of the locations where the new data speeds are available after the jump.

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Reuters is reporting that sometime this summer Verizon Wireless will join AT&T in killing off unlimited data plans for all smartphones, including Windows Phone, Android, the iPhone 4 and upcoming iPhone 4S / 5. 

If true, the transition could go one of two ways:

Verizon could, like AT&T, offer two options, one relatively inexpensive with a ridiculously low data cap, and one basically the same cost as the previous unlimited plan but with a new 2GB monthly limit.  Or, they could do something truly competitive and offer say 200MB for $5 per month with several tiered options up to a maximum limit of, say 4GB, that still costs less than the current $30 unlimited plan. 

We’ll let you guess which they’ll choose.  In any case, it looks like with this move by Verizon and AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile, unlimited smartphone data will soon be a thing of the past.