Verizon users are grinning. There’s finally a new phone in the pipes that people will actually want to buy. It’s the Blackberry Tour and it costs as much as an iPhone 3GS and drops July 12th.

What’s that magic $199 price tag net you? The Tour of course can do 3G but it also has a nice 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus, a 480×360 display, Bluetooth and GPS. While the lack of WiFi is disappointing, it’s hardly surprising for a Verizon phone. Hell, consider yourselves lucky enough to have Bluetooth! Overall, looks like a decent phone for the business crowd.

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While amateur photographers have long enjoyed the luxury of the WiFi-enabled Eye-Fi SD card, pros will be happy to know that there’s finally a solution available for them. For $150, you’ll cop a 4GB SD card that supports WiFi uploading, the ability to choose which pictures go where and RAW imaging support. Gizmodo reviewed it and says it’s great, so if you spent over $2000 on a digital camera, it may be worth a look.

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AT&T is cleverely upgrading their HSPA data speed later this year to their new 7.2 wireless networking technology, creating potential speeds of 7.2 MB per second.

AT&T notes that the new speed boost will be released in time for new notebook cards and smartphone devices. Can you say third-gen iPhone?

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Having trouble losing weight? This little patch is about to change all that. It’s being produced by a company called PhiloMetron and here’s how it works: slap it on your arm and sensors will measure your energy and calorie intake. From there, the data is beamed to your phone via Bluetooth where you can measure how much you’ve eaten in a day. Afterwards, you can cry and commiserate over a box of Girl Scout Cookies. Enjoy.

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Alright. Stick with me on this one. You crazy Europeans love to created weird names for products, like The Mirror by Violet. That being said, The Mirror’ is one of the neatest gadgets I’ve seen in a long time. Hook the $60 plate up to your Mac or PC and get ready to read some RFID tags. The set includes Ztamps (glorified RFID tags) that you can stick in objects and assign actions. For instance, say you shove one inside a sandwich. When you put the sandwich on top of the The Mirror by Violet, it could open up Firefox and surf to the Scanwiches blog.

Sounds like a creative tool. I’d like to know how you’d use this cheap RFID reader. I’d probably shove some in empty CD cases so that the songs would automatically play in iTunes when activated.

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The Arduino continues to power innovation and creation well into 2009. This blender, created by Matti Niinimaki, is rigged to create beats. No smoothies here, folks, just pounding techno full of cheesy sound FX. The Beat Blender prototype reads fruit embedded with RFID tags that are dropped into it. Hitting different blending speeds (Puree, Liquify, Blend, Grind, etc.) will add different effects and filters to the music, allowing for a unique style of making new music.

Matti’s setup makes use of a combination of hardware and software, including Max/MSP, Ableton Live, an RFID reader and of course, the Arduino. What gives Matti? Max/MSP? You know Pure Data would work just as well and we’d all be able to play around with your code.

I guess when God gives you lemons, you make music.

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Customers who are leaving Verizon Wireless are being asked to conduct an exit survey so VZW can find out why they left. The standard questions apply but one of the answers is raising some eyebrows. Can you guess? I’ll give you a hint: it rhymes with iClone.

Yes, Verizon Wireless is gauging how badly the iPhone is hurting its subscriber base. It’s simply dying to know if it could have kept you around if VZW offered the iPhone. Chances are, a lot of people with cellphones are catching on to how popular that silly iPhone 3G is and want one - badly. I guess we’ll have to wait and see if Apple and VZW are going to play ball one day.

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While I’m not a fan of Twitter, I can understand some of its potential uses. Take for instance, a burglar alarm. By using an Arduino + XBee radio module hooked up to a home alarm system, Kelvin was able to have his alarm system send an SMS to his phone when someone breaks into his home. It will also update his Twitter status to let others know he’s being robbed. Genius.

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The New York Times tends to be a pretty reputable news source. So when I read last night that XM-Sirius Satellite Radio is probably going to file for bankruptcy, I felt like absolute shit. Why? Because I recently bought some shares of the company hoping it’d recover by 2011. Apparently CEO Mel Karmazin just can’t get the company to turn a profit and the debt is piling up. Combined with pissed off shareholders like myself who are fuming over a botched EchoStar sale, XM-Sirius is probably going to go under in the next two years.

The company is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy soon. R.I.P. XM-Sirius.

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So you’ve got the debt-riddled satellite radio monopoly known as Sirius-XM and you’ve got veteran satellite pioneer EchoStar. EchoStar is trying to buy Sirius-XM but the company keeps rebuffing its offer. As a shareholder, I believe this is not in our best interests. Sirius-XM has yet to turn a profit and while its subscriber base is increasing, short-term money solutions are becoming a key issue. Some people, like the blog Orbitcast, seem to think that the solution is a Democrat-run FCC. I think we just need more lax anti-trust laws.

Do you use Sirius-XM? Worried about losing your Howard Stern? Chip in and let us know what you think is the right thing for Sirius-XM to do.

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