Republic Wireless is now issuing the cellphone equivalent of Willy Wonka’s golden tickets: an invite to its forthcoming beta . When you’ve been assigned a wave, you’ll then be placed on a wait list, only told a week before you have to place cash on the barrel for a handset. Our tipsters have told us that the company is pitching (via a survey, of course) to hit three price points for customers, each fee buying a smartphone and the first month’s service
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Republic Wireless now issuing invites for summer beta program: is your name on the list?
Microsoft China has finally christened its first Windows Phone. The HTC Triumph (or Titan, or even Eternity, according to the official Windows Phone Blog ) is out, brandishing a 4.7-inch display and double camera setup. 
RIM’s handsets won’t be getting BlackBerry 10 until later this year , but once they do, the PlayBook will be next in line. That’s according to Rob Orr, RIM’s VP of product management, who confirmed the news to TechRadar . 
The Magenta carrier’s pumped out its fair share of myTouch handsets in the past months, and we can’t blame you if you’re confused by the fact that different OEMs have had their turn making the devices. Now, if a report by PocketNow is to be believed, the next phone maker in line is the same one that brought you that T-Mobile Springboard . And, if we take into consideration Huawei’s recent push towards the US market, it wouldn’t surprise us to see T-Mo’s future myTouch lineup coming from the Chinese outfit. 
Months of rumors about the HTC Endeavor (aka the One X, Edge , Ville ) have layered up to provide a pretty complete (if not totally reliable) picture of the forthcoming Tegra 3 -powered Android handset. There’s room for a few more brush-strokes, however, and one of MoDaCo ‘s tipsters is happy to paint them. We’re told the new handset will have a Super LCD display, despite earlier rumors of HTC flirting with AMOLED ( again ). 
Fresh off the publication of its latest tablet report , Strategy Analytics has come out with a new batch of statistics on the global mobile market. In a report published yesterday, the research firm crowned Apple as the world’s largest smartphone vendor by volume, on the strength of the 37 million iPhones it shipped during Q4 2011 — good for 23.9 percent of the market. 
Freshly anointed RIM CEO Thorsten Heins sat down with Crackberry this week to discuss his vision for the future of BlackBerry, his thoughts on Android and, most strikingly, his recent comments about maintaining the status quo. Shortly after his appointment, Heins issued a video address in which he implicitly claimed that RIM doesn’t need an overhaul. 
Nokia released its latest quarterly earnings report today, following up on a somewhat disappointing Q3 with a similarly bleak Q4. The Finnish manufacturer finished 2011 with a little more than €10 billion ($13.1 billion) in net sales — 11 percent higher than Q3, but 21 percent lower than 2010, when Nokia raked in about €12.7 billion (approximately $16.7 billion). Operating profit, meanwhile, rose by 90 percent over Q3, but is still down on the year by a whopping 56 percent; this quarter, in fact, saw an operating loss of €954 million (about $1.3 billion)
Verizon has just come out with its Q4 results this morning, ending the fiscal year with yet another solid revenue report, and a decidedly less rosy net loss. 
