After a whole lot of speculation about it last week, we have official confirmation - Splinter Cell: Conviction is going to be coming to the iPhone. A number of reports have flowed in saying that Gameloft is showing off the game at GDC. The game seems to be based on the Terminator Salvation game engine and like the original Splinter Cell, will give you a third-person view of the main protagonist, Sam Fisher, as he sneaks his way in and out of different situations. The game is expected in the App Store by the end of the month.

In case you have come from a planet where gaming is banned, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell series is one of the most popular gaming series of all times. It lets you slip into the shoes (and other sundry dress material) of secret agent Sam Fisher as he takes on different terrorist organisations and makes the world a safer place by getting rid of them with a mixture of stealth and action.

HTC is betting big on emerging markets like India for its first non-smartphone device - the Smart. Based on Qualcomm's BREW platform, HTC hopes to bridge the gap between smartphones and touch-enabled feature phones by usinga version of its Sense UI on the Smart, the same UI that it uses on Android and WinMo devices.

"For India, we are focusing on products in the range of Rs 10,000-15,000. We spent a lot of time to create the HTC Sense like UI on the HTC Smart. It will act as a smartphone but (will be) easy to use. Peter (Chou, HTC’s CEO) personally championed this product," said Jack Tong, vice president for APAC, HTC during an interaction at MWC in Barcelona last month. He added, "This is a new line of product and brings new opportunities for HTC in a huge market like India. We are investing $1 million upfront for the launch of Smart in India."

With the Smart, HTC will now compete with the likes of Samsung's Corby series as well as LG's new Cookie lineup. This will be a completely new ball game for HTC, which has never sold a sub-Rs 10,000 device and usually competes in the high-end smartphone space. Probably, this is where the $1 million marketing budget will come in handy. The HTC Smart launch is expected in the last week of March in India.

At a time when every handset vendor has launched or is planning to launch an application store of its own, carriers around the world were feeling left out. So at MWC earlier last month,  24 International carriers announced their plans to create a wholesale platform called ‘Wholesale Applications Community’ for launching mobile application stores. Even Indian service providers such as Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Vodafone Essar and RCom have joined the league, with each one of them launching their respective app stores almost at the same time.

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RCom has launched a 3G social application, ‘Socially’, that updates its users with latest feed of their buddies. Status updates, tweets and any activity of your friends on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will be delivered to you as alerts on your 3G-enabled smartphones. Also, whenever someone calls you, it will show you the updated information of the caller across social networks.

With this application, your phone address-book will be linked to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and the social information of your friends will be automatically embedded in your address book. The address-book will become a storehouse of social details of your contacts.

‘Socially’ is downloadable from RWorld and users can subscribe to the service at Rs 10 for 30 days without having to pay any additional browsing charges.

LG Pop GD510 has finally hit Indian shores. The handheld is given a new name “Cookie Pep” for the Indian market. Though it was known as LG Pop in the European markets, we wonder why they have associated world famous ‘Cookie’ with its name. The fact that LG KP500 a.k.a ‘Cookie’ sold 7 million units worldwide and was also a huge hit in India gives a big enough reason to LG to christine it as ‘Cookie Pep’.

LG Cookie Pep is a 3-inch full-touchscreen device with a 3.0 MP camera, pre-embedded with social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and support for others. The device is available at a price tag of Rs 7,500.

To remind you, LG Cookie Plus which was announced earlier this year is also waiting for its launch. Seems like LG is raising an entire army of affordable devices with popular social networking applications against the famous Samsung Corby range of devices. Gun-shots heard, Bang Bang!

Gresso, a Swiss manufacturer of luxury mobile phones has introduced its limited collection of ‘Gresso Grand Monaco’ phones for ladies. Other than Grand Monaco, the company is also known for its ‘Avantgarde’ collection of phones (combination of high-tech and delicate handwork provided with WinMo 5.0) and ‘Individual’ range of phones (strictly made-to order).

This limited edition Grand Monaco collection has got all what it takes to woo a lady. The device’s casing is furnished by Titanium alloy coated with layers of ceramics to give that glossy finish and shine. The display of the handheld is covered with hand-polished sapphire crystal glass frame. It boasts a scratch-proof keyboard surface with keys made of steel. Technical features of the device include a VGA camera, support for WAP, GPRS, Bluetooth, SMS, MMS, e-mails, EDGE, Java and a personal organiser.

And most importantly, alligator skin has also been used to stylise this phone. What? PETA are you listening? Price of the phone – $2,800.

Tata Teleservices has launched its GSM brand, Tata DoCoMo in Gujarat, which marks the 16th circle for the carrier. The company is aiming to have pan-India presence by the end of this year.

Tata DoCoMo will offer per-second billing model for voice calls, VAS services and IVR interactions to its users in Gujarat. Customers will also enjoy special ISD tariffs of 3 paise/second on all international calls to US, Canada and to UK land-lines (without a pack). The company has also launched its BuddyNet community in Gujarat.   

Our darling character Archie who usually oscillates between two of his girlfriends Veronica and Betty will make an appearance into every hamlet and state of India. Nazara Technologies is introducing Archie comic strips on mobile phones in regional Indian languages.

Archie comic strips can be downloaded on mobiles through a GPRS connection at different prices depending upon the operator - Rs 1 per day or Rs 10 per week or Rs 30 per month.

Since millions of Archie comic strips are sold every month, maybe this is a good idea to provide it on the mobile phones within an affordable price point and save our exhaustible resource, paper. And if this’s truly the motive behind this launch, we give you folks a high-five.

And before we finish this, we want to remind our readers what other carriers are offering on the comic-front. And for this, a bit of history is required here: Tata DoCoMo already has a whole line of offerings on popular comic strips such as Marvel and Manga, while RCom, offers Cartoon Network Comics including Archie.

With its eyes set firmly on conquering the iPhone and Android platforms, Opera today announced a native version of Opera Mini for smartphones running on WinMo 5.0 and 6.0. Opera already has the full browser that it calls Opera Mobile for WinMo devices.

Opera Mini scores over Opera Mobile by compressing Web pages by up to 90 per cent and hence, provides a faster browsing experience. Prior to today's announcement, Opera Mini was available as a Java application that could be installed on any phone that supported Java. The native version can be expected to be faster as it will be able to utilise system resources of the device better than its Java version.

The native version of Opera Mini 5 Beta includes some of the popular features of the former Java-based version such as tabbed browsing, password manager, bookmarks and speed dial. WinMo users can head over to m.opera.com from their handsets to download the native version of Opera Mini 5 Beta.