The BlackBerry Torch 9800 is the third touch-operated Berry, and the very first slider. It launched a week ago for 199 US dollars, but now goes for only 99 USD. You still have to sign a contract, but a 100 dollar reduction in price is not a bad deal at all.

When the Nokia N8 was announced its suggested retail price was 370 euro (475 USD). Right now it’s available on the Nokia USA site for pre-order with a $550 price tag (430 euro). That’s 60 euro over (still better than the 470 euro price tag from Amazon Germany), but not quite what Nokia promised. Let’s hope that the price will fall when the phone is finally available.

Speaking of availability, it’s listed as “End of September”, which is on track with some of the rumors, though we’ve heard August 26 too.

Gresso is known for its incredibly expensive handsets but today the company reached a whole new level by announcing the Luxor Las Vegas Jackpot. And it is a jackpot alright: the phone is priced at 1 000 000 US dollars and only three units of it will be produced (each with a number engraved on its back). Just like Le Million which was announced several years ago.

Gresso Luxor Las Vegas Jackpot • Gresso Luxor Las Vegas • GoldVish Le Million Piece Unique

What makes it so expensive are the black diamonds (totaling the whooping 45.5 K) covering its front while and the 200-year old African blackwood used for its back. And that 12-mm thin frame is made of 180 grams of gold.

The Gresso Luxor Las Vegas Jackpot keypad consists of 17 manually polished and laser etched sapphires weighing 32 K.

If you can’t afford the Las Vegas Jackpot (and let’s face it – you can’t) there is a cheaper alternative that you might want to consider. Enter the second Gresso announcement for today – the Gresso Luxor Las Vegas. Made of solid gold and some 200-year old African blackwood, it gets rid of all the diamonds and brings the price down to “only” 20 000 US dollars.

The Gresso Las Vegas collection will become available by the end of the month.

Heavy texters will be glad to see the Samsung A927 Flight II hardware four-row side-slide QWERTY keyboard. In addition, the newbie also packs a 3-inch touchscreen of WQVGA resolution (240 x 400 pixels).

Samsung A927 Flight II

Also on board there is a 2-megapixel fixed-focus snapper which is capable of taking videos as well and a standard 3.5mm audio jack ready to accommodate your favorite headphones’ plug. Thanks to the microSD card slot you can expand the inbuilt memory (of 512MB) with up to 16GB.

The phone is said to support AT&T’s Mobile TV service and on top of that you get quick access to some of the most popular social networking services (such as Facebook and Twitter).

The unannounced Samsung A927 Flight II was spotted on both Samsung USA’s (overview and specs sheet) AT&T’s websites, however, there is still no word on the QWERTY-fied phone’s official launch date or price.

The first country to get an unlocked Aria will be the HTC homeland, Taiwan. The handset should hit the shelves tomorrow but we couldn’t quite see what the pricing will be. The machine-translated press release mentions 14900 yuan but considering that this is about 1700 euro, a price of 1490 seems much more likely.

Update: One of our readers tipped us that the quoted price is 14900 Taiwanese dollars, which equals just over 400 euro. Ouch!

Technically HTC haven’t mentioned a word about the Aria hitting other countries, but once the exclusivity chains are broken, this should be inevitable. It’s not like we can’t put to good use a nice little midrange Android handset with sleek design and sensible price tag around here in Europe.

You heard that right, the Android 2.2 Froyo update for the HTC Desire will enable the 720p video recording rumored from the very beginning. The HTC Sync software will also enable iTunes syncing.

The updated software for the Euro HTC Desire will of course keep the signature HTC Sense UI and bring the App Share widget and HTC’s enhanced Caller ID and a better multi-language keyboard.

The update process is simple – users will be notified when the update is available and the update won’t wipe the data from the phone. HTC suggests you hook up your Desire to a Wi-Fi network before you download the update to avoid data charges.

Unlocked HTC Desire phones will be the first to score Froyo, but owners of carrier-branded phones should be getting the update “in several weeks time”.

This piece of news comes hot on the heels of the announcement that the HTC Evo 4G phones on Sprint will be getting Froyo next week.

The user agent XML profile is a pretty common source of info for rumored phones. In the case of the BlackBerry 9780, it reveals a HVGA screen (480×320), BlackBerryOS 6, GSM with 2G and 3G connectivity as well as Wi-Fi b/g.

Aside from the new OS, the BlackBerry 9780 (dubbed Onyx II for now, though that will certainly change) is pretty much the same as the BlackBerry 9700 Bold (which was initially rumoured as Onyx). The live photo adds another similarity between the two – the phones look almost the same.

But along with the photo came another nugget of information – the BlackBerry 9780 packs 512MB RAM (double than its predecessor) and will likely have a 5MP camera.

That’s all we have on the BlackBerry 9780 (be it Bold2 or not) for now. Of course, these are all preliminary specs and might change.

The recently announced Samsung I5800 Galaxy 3 paid us a short visit a little while ago. The device is based on the Android platform (Android OS v2.1 a.k.a. Eclair) and packs a 3.2″ capacitive touchscreen of WQVGA resolution.

Samsung I5800 Galaxy 3

Also on board there is a 3.2MP autofocus sharpshooter as well as support for Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth 3.0 and HSDPA. The phone features a GPS receiver and a microSD card slot ready to accommodate cards with up to 32GB of inbuilt memory.

The Galaxy 3 (which is a twin bro of the Galaxy Apollo i5801, which is already available in the UK) is among the few Android-powered smartphones with support for DivX/XviD video right out of the box.

The Samsung I5800 Galaxy 3 is said to start selling in Germany before the end of July for an estimated price of 300 euro.

Opera Mobile 10 beta for Symbian S60 devices showed up last November and now you can get to enjoy its successor, the 10.1 beta. Along with familiar features, such as Speed Dial, tabbed browsing, password manager, Opera Link and Opera Turbo, you now get the most recent version of the Presto rendering engine, the Vega graphics library and Opera’s own Carakan JavaScript engine.

Opera Mobile 10.1 beta for Symbian S60

On top of that the latest Opera Mobile for S60 smartphones packs geolocation support (which will help diverse web services to offer you more relevant content depending on your current location) as well as improved kinetic scrolling, screen auto-rotation (from portrait to landscape mode) and virtual keyboard.

If you own a S60-based smartphone (either 3rd or 5th edition) and feel like going for the Opera Mobile 10.1 beta for Symbian S60, you can download it right away by visiting the following link.

BlackBerry Slider 9800 • BlackBerry Curve 9300 • BlackBerry 9670

The BlackBerry 9800 slider has been around for some time, but here it is again. The unit shot below is AT&T branded and runs BlackBerry OS 6.0.

Nokia N9 compared to the iPhone 4 and the HTC Evo 4G

As the following video reveals, the Nokia N9 (or whatever the prototype’s name turns out to be in the end) multi-touch capacitive screen is considerably larger than iPhone’s 3.5-incher and only a tad smaller than HTC Evo 4G 4-inch display. So, the upcoming QWERTY-enabled N9 will be the first Nokia phone to sport such a big screen.

There are no news concerning the display resolution, though – it’s said to be nHD (360 x 640 pixels) which seems rather low for a 4-inch screen.

As for the rest of the rumored features, those remain unchanged as well – the Nokia N9 should pack an 8MP shooter with dual LED flash, 3G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support and an HDMI port. Once again, there is no information on the launch date and price tag of the highly rumored smartphone.