Usually worn on your feet or body, Puma will now make an appearance in your ear. The sportslifestyle company teamed up with Sagem Wireless to present a phone that “reflects the DNA of the PUMA’s brand”. We’re not usually particularly impressed with cross-industry phones like this, but the Puma Phone boasts just enough features and appeal to garner our interest.

The phone features a 2.8-inch QVGA capacitive touchscreen; 3.2 MP camera with 6x zoom and LED flash; Bluetooth photo sharing, video calling, recording and playback; FM radio and GPS. Other interesting features include a back-panel solar cell good for charging the phone and a number of features built to support the Puma active lifestyle including pedometer, stopwatch and GPS tracker. It also has some kind of “spin and scratch” music player. It weighs just 115 grams and measures 102mm x 56mm x 13mm. Not a bad little package overall.

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Yet another big announcement coming out of Mobile World Congress–Verizon will enable Skype calls over its 3G network beginning next month. Verizon subscribers with data plans will now be able to enjoy unlimited Skype-to-Skype voice calls to users worldwide, call international numbers at Skype One rates and send/receive IMs to other Skype users. All on “America’s most reliable wireless network”. This should be a great boost to consumers who now have the option of free Skype calls and low international rates. The Skype for mobile app will offer calling without eating up your Verizon minutes.

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All of your favorite smartphone makers are getting in on the Mobile World Congress festivities, and RIM isn’t an exception. Long known for offering inferior browsers that can’t quite compete with other top phones on the market, the minds behind the Blackberry introduced a new WebKit-based browser today in Barcelona. To keep pace with its competitors, RIM solicited help from browser design firm Torch Mobile. Their joint effort has created a browser that provides faster page loading and should prove to be a better overall Web experience for Blackberry users. Scrolling and zooming are reportedly smoother than before.

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If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Or, join another player in the market that also can’t beat ‘em and needs you as much as you need it, hoping that your combined efforts will indeed beat ‘em. That about sums up the recent Nokia/Intel cooperative effort to bring a new mobile phone OS to the market. MeeGo is a combination of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin. We would have preferred Momaemo, but MeeGo it is.

MeeGo keeps the open-source, Linux roots of its parent OSs and provides a rich, new operating system positioned for high-end smartphones, netbooks, tablets and connected televisions. MeeGo supports both ARM and Intel chips. The OS is a divergence from other operating systems, which tend to be purpose-built for smartphones or netbooks, but not both.

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There’s an army of new Android handsets coming out of Mobile World Congress and Acer has its very own battalion (not to mention some Windows Mobile handsets). Here’s some details on their latest devices.

Liquid e–The first mobile Acer announced today, the Liquid e makes some slight updates to the Liquid with the bump up to Android 2.1. The phone features a 3.5-inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen, 768 MHz Snapdragon processor, 5MP camera, GPS, 802.11 b/g Wi Fi and Bluetooth 2.0. The price and release date were not issued in the press release.

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Most companies presenting at Mobile World Congress are squarely focused on shiny, high-tech new software and hardware like Windows Phone 7, but at least one is taking a decidedly different direction in one of its newly announced products. Aimed at bringing the convenience (and bane) of cellular technology to the developing masses, the Vodafone 150 is being dubbed as the world’s cheapest handset. It will retail for under $15 when it hits the market in India, Turkey and African nations.

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Apple’s success with the App Store is no secret. The company has dominated the app market despite attempts by others to get up to speed in the app world. Well, those other players won’t be content to sit idly by and watch Apple own the market any longer. Today, a group of 24 global carriers announced plans to offer an open joint app platform called Wholesale Applications Community. It’s not the sexiest name, but it will help to compete with Apple while improving the available apps for a variety of mobile users.

Among the forces behind the new venture are AT&T, LG, Orange, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Sprint, Verizon and Vodafone.

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The next Android 2.1 phone has risen into the spotlight today. The HTC Desire has been speculated for a while and some new pictures and specs that appear to be the official line have surfaced. The Desire will earn its name with a 1 GHz Snapdragon powering the show, a 3.7-inch AMOLED touchscreen with 480 x 800 res, 512 MB ROM and 576 MB RAM. The phone will get Android 2.1 with HTC’s Sense over top. Other features include 5 MP camera,  GPS, digital compass, Wi Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, optional trackball and microSD expansion.

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Phone 7 may not roll off the tongue quite as nicely as Mobile 7, but it indicates a totally new and fresh direction for Microsoft’s mobile OS, which is a good thing. Rather than just a new version, Phone 7 is positioned as an entirely new product from the code up to the user experience. As expected, Phone 7 borrows heavily from Zune HD in its look and feel.

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