Today, the Federal Communications Commission launched Reboot.FCC.gov (pdf).

The Web site is dedicated to soliciting public input on ways to improve citizen interaction with the FCC. The launch also includes the first official FCC blog, which will feature posts from FCC employees and each of the five Commission members.

“With the launch of Reboot.FCC.gov, our goal is to get input from all corners of the country on ways to improve usability, accessibility, and transparency across the agency,” said Chairman Julius Genachowski.

Reboot.FCC.gov highlights five key elements of FCC reform for public discussion and feedback:

• Redesign of FCC.gov: The FCC is asking for ideas on how best to streamline and improve the experience for all site visitors.
• Data: The FCC is launching FCC.gov/data, an online clearinghouse for the Commission’s public data and public oversight.
• Engagement: The FCC is reevaluating how citizens engage in government and exploring new ways to increase public participation.
• Systems: The FCC is overhauling and reforming the systems available at FCC.gov, from the Electronic Comment Filing System to creating a Consolidated Licensing System and wants feedback.
• Rules and Processes: The FCC aims to modernize and grow the efficiency of agency proceedings, and seeks input on ways to improve the quality of agency decision-making.

Canon’s 5D Mark II, 7D, and the new 1D Mark IV high end SLRs are getting a wireless upgrade. Canon’s new Wireless File Transmitter units cost around $700 and enable the wireless beaming of pictures from camera to computer.

The latest generation adds 802.11a, along with the b/g modes on earlier models. Once connected, the camera can act as an FTP site, and can beam a realtime preview image to a connected computer.

The WiFi adapters can also connect to a Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) compatible televisions, photo frames and servers. A DLNA compliant TV, for example, will interoperate with a DLNA compliant PC or camera to play music, photos or videos. DLNA is supported by more than 5,500 different devices.

Canon’s wireless accessory can also synch itself with up to 10 “slave” cameras that all fire at the same time. The 5D’s WFT-E4 II A and 7D’s WFT-E5A cost $699 (no price yet for the 1D Mark IV’s WFT-E2 II A). Unfortunately, none of these SLR WiFi adapters are compatible with each other.

Image Resource has a CES 2010 Roundup and DP Review has a CES 2010 compact camera round-up. HD video has become de rigueur this season – 29 cameras offer at least 720p resolution, with a couple of Sony’s latest models stretching all the way to 1080i, says DP Review. More efficient compression algorithms, such as H.264 and AVCHD, are also starting to creep in alongside the card-space-consuming Motion JPEG format.

Samsung’s CL80 (ST5500) connects to both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 and uses DLNA for photoframes and tvs. The ST5500 allows users to send a digital image to any email address using the camera’s touch screen QWERTY keypad or by selecting those stored the camera’s address book. The ST5500’s Wi-Fi connection also allows users to upload their images directly to popular websites such as Facebook, Picasa and YouTube, as well as SamsungImaging.com.

Meanwhile, Eye-Fi has unveiled its 8GB Eye-Fi Pro X2 memory card ($149). It has Class 6 performance for faster read/write speeds and wirelessly uploads JPEG and RAW images and videos from the camera to computer and one of 25 online photo and video sharing sites, such as Flickr, Picasa or Facebook.

The new Endless Memory mode enables the Eye-Fi card to automatically make space available after photos and videos are uploaded.

It’s hard to beat Kodak’s Zi8 Pocket Video Camera ($179) with external mic jack; HD resolution; good low light performance; SD card slot; removable, rechargeable battery; bundled composite and HDMI cables; electronic image stabilization and 5-megapixel still capture. Pop in a Eye-Fi card and go.

A battery powered Mobile Router might let your wireless camera go live anywhere.

Sprint’s Personal Hot Spot PHS300S is $139.99, runs on batteries and uses Clear’s 4G USB dongle for the backbone. Sprint’s new Overdrive 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot by Sierra Wireless will automatically fallback to a 3G backbone.

The AC powered CradlePoint CBA750 ($249.99) features 3G/4G wireless backhaul and Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) while Netgear has two new access points using 3G, 4G and WiMax cellular networks and D-Link’s new products include the DIR-412 a small WiFi router that hooks to 4G USB adapters.

For live video on-the-go, PortaBella makes a wireless broadband bonding appliance. You can attach up to four USB broadband backhaul dongles, combining both 3G and 4G network services for faster uploading. TWIT Live is using it for live webcasting around CES 2010.

But for connecting the camera’s video output to a laptop, you might be more mobile with something like “wireless HDMI”.

Perhaps the WHDI 5 GHz standard, with chips from Aminon could deliver the last 100 feet in high resolution.

Might be handy for newspapers and television stations who could go live anywhere. Anytime. Television stations are stuck with a schedule. Newspapers are not.

Think about it. Put the newspaper (and real journalists) where people are.

Phone Arena has the new phones announced at CES while PhoneScoop has hands-on reviews of the Motorola Backflip, Lenovo Lephone, Samsung TV and projector phones, Palm Pre Plus, new LG phones, and more.

Here’s Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3

Phone Scoop talked with Clear this week and talked future strategy and direction of their WiMAX service.

Clear says it is on track to cover 120 million points of presence by the end of 2010 and already covers some 30 million people in 27 markets across the U.S., with New York City, Boston, Houston and other large markets scheduled to go live later this year.

Clear said embedded laptops, dongles and MIDs will be the primary WiMax devices available throughout 2010. A WiMax-equipped smartphone isn’t expected to launch until the end of 2010, with deeper adoption of WiMax smartphones coming in 2011.

Clear didn’t say which smartphone platforms nor hardware vendors it is speaking to, although LG, Samsung and HTC have been mentioned before. Clear indicated that it will rely on VoIP applications and fallback on Sprint’s existing CDMA network.

Apparently Clear’s partners have held back from making their own investments in WiMax technology, equipment and services until they were sure that Clear had the capital to continue operations. Now that Clear has secured the capital, more companies will begin to make and sell WiMax devices.

Clear thinks that its time-to-market gives it a leg up on the competition — notably Verizon and AT&T — which won’t have LTE networks up and running for quite some time. AT&T won’t complete their backhaul for their current HSPA upgrade until 2011 while Verizon says they’ll have coverage of some 100 million subs by 2011, using their new 700 MHz band.

Clearwire has also launched a mobile WiMax service in Malaga, Spain, covering a metropolitan population of almost 600,000. The service, called Instanet, offers average downlink speeds of 3Mbit/s to 6Mbit/s, with service plans starting at €29.90 (US$42.85) per month. It plans to launch in another Spanish city, Seville, in 2010, and also holds spectrum licenses in Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Romania, and Denmark.

The WiMax Forum announced that in 2010 it will finalize its WiMax Release 2 specification in parallel with IEEE 802.16m and IMT-Advanced, ensuring that WiMax 2 (IEEE 802.16m) will remain backward compatible with legacy WiMax Release 1 (IEEE 802.16e). It will provide 100Mbps mobile.

Samsung Electronics is seeking to take the lead in WiMAX 2.0 which uses 20 Mhz channels and 4×4 MIMO. It may be deployed in 2011-2012.

In other news, T-Mobile will stop selling its landline replacement Hotspot@Home. The service allowed users to connect a home phone to a T-Mobile router. T-Mobile@Home allowed corded and cordless phones to connect to T-Mobile’s router. It also allowed you to use a Wi-Fi enabled phone around your home. It won’t impact the Wi-Fi calling (Unlimited HotSpot Calling) service, says T-Mobile. The operator introduced unlimited WiFi calling with the launch of its Hotspot@Home service in 2007.

Another mobile phone got its share of the limelight at the ongoing CES 2010. This time the phone is a smart one, aptly called the HTC Smart. The HTC Smart is an easy-to-use, connected smartphone with friendly compact touch design and intuitive user experience, courtesy of the HTC Sense. The HTC Smart will be available in Europe and Asia this Spring.

HTC Smart is powered by HTC’s proprietary technology called HTC Sense – focusin gon three mobile core areas – Make it Mine, Stay Close and Discover the Unexpected.  It allows you to fully personalized the phone and gives quick and easy access to your friends activities on various social networks or through text messaging and email.

This new smartphone from HTC features the Qualcomm Brew MP, enabling the HTC Smart to offer the phone to a more affordable price point.

HTC Smart also comes with Scenes which is actually different configurations for the phones to represent the mood you are currently having. Scenes allows you to personalize the HTC Smart depending ont he current situation. For example there is a Scene that you can use on weekdays as well as Scenes during special occasion.

Technical specs of the HTC Smart include – 300MHz processor, Brew Mobile Platform OS, 256MB of RAM, 2.8-inch TFT-LCD touch sensitive screen with QVGA resolution, HSDPA/WCDMA, Bluetooth 2.0 with enhanced data rate and A2DP for Wireless stereo headsets, 3.0 MP camera with fixed focus and flashlight, audio and video playback capability for various formats, microSD memory card slot.

The HTC Smart allows 370 minutes talk time for WCDMA and up to 450 minutes for GSM. Stand by time is up to 600 hours WCDMA and 450 hours GSM.

Following the success of the DROID, Motorola is releasing its latest Android phone – the BACKFLIP with MOTOBLUR. The Motorola BackFlip is said to combine the social and personalization features of the MotoBlur and the multitasking features of a smartphone. To be released in the U.S., Latin America, Europe and Asia in Q1 2010, The Motorola BackFlip features a unique reverse flip design and a QWERTY keyboard which is most useful for reading e-mails, texts, news feeds, social network messages.

The Motorola BackFlip’s MotoBlur content delivery service enables you to make your phone more personalized and social. It allows you to sync contacts, posts, messages, photos and other information from your social networking accounts. Motoblur supports Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Gmail, personal email accounts and LastFM.

Aside from a high-resolution 3.1-inch HVGA screen, the Motorola BackFlip also features the BackTrack technology which makes it easy for you to navigate quickly and easily through the phone’s menus and features. The BackTrack can be accessed from the side of the phone, making it easy for you to scroll through photos, music and other media content.

The Motorola BackFlip can also used in the reverse-flip, tabletop mode – perfect when you are listening to music or watching videos.

Other features of the Motorola BackFlip include – full HTML browser, 3G connectivity, WiFi access, access to Android Market, 5MP camera with flash, access to photo sharing site for directly uploading your photos, aGPS, and stereo Bluetooth. Talk and Standby Time are pegged at 6 hours and 350 hours respectively.

The Motorola BACKFLIP with MOTOBLUR is a WCDMA 850/1900/2100, GSM 850/900/1800/1900 phone.

Motorola Media Center

Samsung has finally brought it’s cool mobile phone, the Samsung Corby to the U.S. via an official launch during the CES 2010. Sporting a chic and trendy design with touchscreen display, the Samsung Corby is a nice mobile phone that will most likely appeal to the younger mobile phone users.

The Samsung Corby features simple and easy to use user interface via Samsung’s Touchwiz. It also has a haptic feedback system that allows you to customize the Corby phone with applications and widgets available at the Samsung widgets store.

For controls and menu navigation, the Samsung Corby has a nice “one finger zoom” feature that allows you to zoom in-and-out using your finger. It also lets you unlock the phone by drawing a letter on the screen. Since this phone is geared for the younger crowd, the Samsung Corby features the simple Pop-up SNS (Social Networking Service) notification feature that lets you update your status as well as access your friends’ updates on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. The Samsung Corby also supports YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket and other SNS sites.

The Samsung Corby comes in several funky colored covers – yellow, orange, pink, white as well as fashion jackets with patter design cover and standard black cover. These covers are interchangeable so you can mix and match it with what you are wearing at the moment.

For specs, the Samsung Corby features the following:

• 2.8-inch QVGA TFT LCD Full Touch Screen
• 2MP CMOS camera
• H.263, MP#G4, WMV video support
• FM Radio with RDS
• USB 2.0, Bluetooth Connectivity
• 50MB Internal Memory + microSD slot

Darpa has launched 10 balloons around the country as part of its “Network Challenge” contest. The first person or team to locate all of them will win $40,000.

Challenge winner will be the first individual to submit the locations of 10 8-foot balloons moored at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads. You can follow the news on Twitter,

Darpa says that the contest is meant to look at how “information spreads and propagates and becomes viral.”The contest will test how people organize themselves and how they validate information.

The balloons will only be visible during daylight hours beginning on Saturday, December 5. Collaborators will have approximately 9 days, until 12:00 PM (ET) on December 14, 2009, to collect the locations of any balloons not spotted, and submit their entry.

Teams from all over the United States have registered for this event. Some teams have developed iPhone apps while others are going to scour Twitter for clues. Even if you don’t belong to a group, you can still send out a tweet with the GPS coordinates if you happen to come across a balloon.

Internet entrepeneur Jon Cannell has launched www.red-balloons.com (above), one of the many websites dedicated to building the nationwide team to find DARPA’s red balloons.

The contest is meant to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the original Internet, Arpanet, which was developed by Darpa. Darpa hopes to discover “new, collaborative ways to approach problems that were not dreamt of 40 years ago.”

The Oregon Health Network (pdf), one of the largest projects funded by the FCC’s Rural Health Care Pilot Program, launched its network operations center today in Beaverton, Oregon.

OHN has a stated goal of bringing low-cost, high speed broadband to primary healthcare stakeholders in Oregon, potentially linking over 300 non-profit health care facilities, both urban and rural. Oregon Health Network seeks to be one tenant in infrastructure that also could be used for a wide variety of other governmental, educational or business applications (rfp).

The data capacity between each OHN user location and OHN exchange locations will be a minimum of 10 Megabits per second with an upgrade capacity in increments of 10 Megabits or 100 Megabits, up to 1 Gigabit, with future expansion to 10 Gigabits.

The Pilot Program will provide up to $20.2 million in funding for the project. The launch of the network operations center (NOC) will pull together multiple service providers into a single, consistent network to quickly resolve any network problems with a single call to the NOC.

“These critical improvements in the Oregon Health Network will further broadband’s role in delivering the best possible health care to Oregonians, no matter where they live,” said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski (pdf).

The FCC established the $417 million Pilot Program to increase patient access to care via telemedicine and support the transfer of electronic medical records. Nationwide, 62 projects are eligible to receive Pilot Program funding for telehealth networks serving approximately 6,000 health care facilities in 42 states and three U.S. territories, using broadband technologys.

At this time, 41 of these projects have either received funding commitments or developed requests for proposals to select vendors to build out their broadband networks.

Don’t tell me that you’re innocent. Because it insults my intelligence.
– The Godfather

The FCC has asked Verizon for more details about their increased Early Termination Fees (pdf), reports PC Magazine. Verizon increased their ETF from $175 to $350 on some smartphones. A customer who cancels their two-year contract after 23 months still owes Verizon $120.

The FCC asked, “If the ETF is meant to recoup the wholesale cost of the phone over the life of the contract, why does a $120 ETF apply?”

The move comes after Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, asked that the FCC examine the issue. On Thursday, Klobuchar also introduced a bill that would limit the amount a mobile provider could charge for ETFs and require that they pro-rate the fees. Klobuchar’s bill would prevent wireless carriers from charging an ETF that is higher than the cell phone discount. If, for example, you received a $150 phone for free on a 2 year contract, then the termination fee cannot be more than $150.

The FCC wants carriers like Verizon to pro-rate their ETFs, provide more clear and conspicuous information about ETFs, and put the current ETF balance on monthly bills. Verizon currently pro-rates the $350 ETF by only $10 a month, which would require 35 months on a contract.

The FCC also requested more data about $1.99 data charges, which were referenced in a recent New York Times article.

“The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data. NOT COOL. I’ve had phones for years, and I sometimes do that mistake to this day, as I’m sure you have. Legal, yes; ethical, NO.

“Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!

“Our marketing, billing, and technical departments are all aware of this. But they have failed to do anything about it—and why? Because if you get 87 million customers to pay $1.99, why stop this revenue?

Verizon must respond by Dec. 17.

The CTIA says the Klobuchar bill is pointless:

“This legislation is unnecessary simply because wireless carriers already pro-rate ETFs,” CTIA president and CEO Steve Largent said in a statement. “That was the response of a highly competitive industry to consumer demand, and this type of prescriptive mandate runs the very real risk of limiting consumer options in the future.”

Verizon has allowed pro-rated ETFs since 2006, Sprint and T-Mobile followed suit in late 2007, and AT&T implemented the same policy in 2008. Discounting the ETF balance monthly was only provided after the threat of legislation. Consumer complaints about Early Termination Fees prompted the the Cell Phone Empowerment Act of 2007.

Without too much noise and buzz, LG has announced a nice new mobile phone called the – LG Expo GW820.  Bringing a powerful computing and multimedia features, the LG GW820 boasts versatile and innovative design, engaging and intuitive user interface and a neat sliding QWERTY keyboard.

There are probably six main reasons why you would want to consider getting the LG GW820. First it has a large external QWERTY keyboard that slides out when you compose messages, emails and work on the phone’s contact list. Then its Wi-Fi features gives you access to thousands of AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots for internet access at broadband speeds. It also has biometric security feature giving you security and simplicity in preserving your personal mobile data.

The LG GW820 also features a 5.0 megapixel camera with built-in flash, autofocus and 3x digitial zoom. It’s preloaded with Microsoft Office applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, email and calendar. And finally, the LG GW820 has personal presentation station feature that allows you to project images, video and web pages to a screen up to 40 inches in size via a Pico Projector.

Other specs and features of the LG GW820 include – Windows Media Player, touch screen display, Bluetooth, Internet Explorer Mobile, GPRS/EDGE Quad Band feature, and full compact QWERTY keyboard.

The LG GW820 is a Quad-badn (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) UMTS/HSDPA Tri-band (850/1900/2100 MHz) phone.