Nokia’s aging Symbian S60 OS isn’t maturing so well, as seen on their N97 handset, and though they’ve made some positive strides with Maemo, it sounds like they might be limiting themselves to those two OSes — at least until the market forces them elsewhere.

The Moment is a fairly slick-looking device, quite thin for a full QWERTY slider and with an inoffensive black and silver design with a nice silver grille accent on the top. It’s certainly a step up from the other major Android QWERTY slider around, the T-Mobile G1: For one, it’s got a 3.5-mm headphone jack and SDHC expansion (compared to an awkward mini-USB combo and a microSDHC), but it’s also significantly thinner and loses the G1’s chin.

The QWERTY keyboard feels okay — it’s solid and nicely clicky, but the keys are a little flush for me, making it harder than I’d like to differentiate between keys. But the layout is easy to learn and it’s overall very easy to use. The Moment also has an array of buttons around the side: A volume rocker on the left; 3.5mm headphone jack under a protective flap on the top; and a microUSB jack, speakerphone toggle and camera button on the right. It’s got a 3.2MP camera on the back, which isn’t as good as the Hero’s and Cliq’s 5MP lens.

The front of the device houses the main buttons (Home, Menu, Back, Call and Call End, the latter two of which are tactile) as well as the optical trackpad, which I found a little confusing: It’s harder to use than simply touching the screen, and I’m not really sure what exact purpose it’s supposed to serve. To its credit, it’s very responsive and has nice tactile feedback on the click, but I’d always rather touch the screen.

Unlike the Motorola Cliq or HTC Hero, Samsung hasn’t messed with the stock Android interface very much at all, merely sprinkling in some carrier-specific widgets like Nascar, Sprint Navigation and Sprint TV, which actually works quite well.

Compared to the Cliq, which is really the Moment’s main competitor, I’d have to say I prefer the Cliq. The Moment’s stock Android OS seems so last year, and even though the Cliq is sort of frenetic and sometimes cluttered, at least it has a philosophy. The Moment seems totally serviceable, but Android can be exciting — hell, Sprint even has one of the most exciting Android handsets already in its lineup, the HTC Hero. All in all, the Moment is a solid, if unremarkable, addition to the Android lineup.

Samsung had a good thing going, but then they blew it by sticking the following slogan on the placard beside it: “meaningful innovation, wow experience.”

Seriously? Sounds like a move by the same committee who commissioned this beautiful AMOLED screen to begin with, then saddled it with a tired build of Windows Mobile instead of Android, or even WinMo 6.5.

The Synergy functionality on the Palm Pre really kick-started this craze back in January, when Palm debuted the system of integrating all your web services into their native UI. This week, at the CTIA phone show in Vegas, it seems like everyone wants a piece of this action. Lets look at some of the contenders.

Yahoo Mobile Apps
Yahoo released a torrent of apps on the public this week, which aim to reinvent how you access their services on a mobile basis. Yahoo’s Mobile Apps and Portals allow you to:
• Look up your Yahoo contacts
• Check statuses of those contacts and look up your own
• Access yahoo mail and messenger
• Sign into your Oneconnect account for social media updates
• Import RSS feeds and Yahoo content modules for news, sports scores, weather and all that crap

All of this comes together in one place so you don’t have to launch 10 different mobile apps to manage this stuff. Good if you’re a heavy user of Yahoo services. This service is available via mobile browser, plus there’s a standalone app for the iPhone and a Yahoo Go app for the other major platforms (WinMo, Blackberry, Symbian, etc…) which gather all the services into a navigable UI.

3deep
3deep was one of the most impressive mobile apps at CTIA. The idea behind it is that you can manage your calendar, contacts, social media and mail all from a single app, with location-aware integration. It’s coming out for Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone, Symbian and Android in the coming weeks, if all goes according to plan. Some of the features include:
• The ability to track location, availablilty and presence—meaning it knows where you’re going, what your doing there, how long you’ll be there and who you want to meet with most
• “Tell Me When” functionality gives you alerts when selected contacts arrive at a specific location, when they’re available to talk/meet, or conversely, will send a shout out when you do the same
• Informatilon on whether it’s best to call, SMS, email or IM a selected contact
• Updates from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc….
• Calendar and mail management. Plus auto-integration from your computer and phone cals
• Open API so any developer can make their service compatible with 3deep

While a live demo wasn’t available, 3deep reiterated this app would be available as a free download sometime in the next couple weeks. This is some serious Stalker 2.0 right here. Facebook has nothing on 3deep.

HTC TouchFlo 3D
HTC’s updated (and upcoming) TouchFlo 3D continues to streamline its design so that it’s easier to get pertinent contact info from a single screen. Now using their new tabbed contact screen, you can quickly get up to speed with your friends, including the ability to:
• Check call, email and SMS history.
• Check updates and activity to social media services (Facebook, Skype, etc…)
• Easily send emails, text messages and place calls from the same screen.
• Check upcoming calendar events for a selected contact (if you have their shared cal)

TouchFlo 3D will be available on the Touch Pro 2 and Touch Diamond 2 when they launch in the second half of 2009.

The emerging trend is making sure you can communicate and collaborate with your contacts through a variety of mediums and services, all through one control panel. For the most part, it’s done with a degree of visual polish. This is good, because if Web 2.0 can’t move to the mobile space gracefully, we’re all in for some headaches.

When they’re open, the two phones are hard to distinguish. On your left, up top, is the EnV3, with the smaller 4:3 screen. On the right, there’s the widescreen Voyager 2.

Closed, it’s a different matter. Sticking with the formula that’s made them hot sellers (without being in any way innovative), LG kept the touchscreen on the Voyager 2 (below, now on the left) and the full number pad on the EnV3 (below, right). Can I say we’re excited? No. But will someone buy these, and even brag about them to their friends? Signs point to “yes.” [Boy Genius, Electronista]

Everything I said about the software on the Touch Pro 2 holds true with the Touch Diamond 2. It’s all a great implementation of the WinMo platform and looks pretty.

But the TD2 hardware doesn’t blow me away. For one, it lacks the angled backside of the original Touch Diamond, though some may have considered that excessive design. But I loved the way that design tapered the Touch Diamond. With the TD2, the phone is much more boxy and straight forward, lacking the same chic feel as its predecessor. The metallic silver body feels somewhat sterile, and the only real design flourish is a silver patch on the back. It’s also slightly thicker than the original (11.5mm vs 11.3mm)

Obviously the TD2’s screen is bigger and better, the guts are a little more powerful and the battery life is improved from the original TD, but I can’t help but want more from this follow-up.

Still, if you don’t need the keyboard—or the extra heft—and want this new HTC UI, pay attention to the Touch Diamond 2 when it finally launches in the second half of this year. It may be worthwhile.

This T707 is essentially a repackaging of core Sony Ericsson phone tech over the last couple years, but in a flashy new shell. Utilizing the rear camera, you can do things like silence a call or alarm by waving your hand over the camera. And one thing I have to give SE credit for is that they always make sure the UI design is fresh looking. the backend programming may essentially be the same, but they keep updating the visuals so as not to look stale.

Other than that, the T707 has eye-catching colours, sleek design and is otherwise a wholly ordinary dumbphone.

Like the iPhone, Palm gives developers a set of recommended UI design elements in the SDK, to promote a cohesive look in WebOS. While use of these buttons and menus aren’t mandatory, these early developers have embraced them. I also happen to think the design DNA of WebOS looks better than any platform on the market, even Mobile OSX.

Google Maps
Google Maps is tightly integrated with the Pre’s universal search function, so when you start typing something in search, you can launch straight to Maps, and it will zero-in on the points of interest. You can pan and zoom around the app using your fingers, and pretty much behaves like any other touch-enabled version of Google Maps.

Pandora
Pandora’s integration with WebOS will make it the best available mobile version of this music service. When you start Pandora and exit to another app a little Pandora logo remains in the bottom right corner of the screen. When you tap it, a quick launch UI pops up that lets you control the app without exiting whatever else you were doing. Serious, serious multitasking. And in general, the UI seems much more intuitive and usable than most the other versions of Pandora, with plenty of UI navigation options that make it less labyrinth, more music app.

PalmOS Emulator
PalmOS Emulator lets the phone UI look and act like the Garnet OS, and even has virtual, on screen buttons to give you full functionality. If you have old PalmOS apps you can’t bear to part with, or just really hate WebOS (but love the Pre?), you can go back in time 10 years. Also worth noting is that Palm says they will roll out a solution for migrating data from old PalmOS phones to new WebOS ones, including support at the Sprint store. But Palm says they’ll divulge details closer to release.

TeleNav GPS
The TeleNav demo wasn’t fully up and running, since the demo was indoors, but it essentially looks like the version available on the T-Mobile G1. Not much else unique going on there, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, either.

Sprint TV
Sprint TV was probably the least spectacular of the bunch, but even that looked like a pretty nice app. There’s a main menu for Viewing options (Live, Premium, On Demand TV), and then secondary menus that let you choose channels or content. Once you hit that, it launches into the TV service, which pulls up video. Video quality wasn’t that great, and there was some artifacting/glitching going on, but it was certainly viewable. And there didn’t seem to be any sort of on-screen guide or controls for Sprint TV. Not a dealbreaker, but it would sweeten the package.

There were also other apps, like FlightView, which lets you track planes and schedules in real time, among other things, and a NASCAR app, which will let you appreciate America’s fastest growing sport (which is heavily sponsored by Sprint!). But if this is what we have to expect for future Pre Apps, I’m pretty excited.

The 7205 Intrigue comes packed with a pretty basic feature set, but includes Nokia’s Habitat UI, which is a pretty beautiful design. But the one techie feature of note is the aforementioned MP3 controls and display, which remain invisible until you start using them. The screen can display song info such as artist/album/song title/time, plus it serves as a clock and shows the signal strength as a secondary function. Plus it just looks nice. The touch controls on the outside work pretty well, letting you play/pause/switch tracks in easy fashion. But the 2.5mm headphone jack is bluuuuurrrrrrrrggggg-inducing.

And budget-minded bros, fret not. The 7205 is also available in silver and sans flower petal d-pad, so people don’t think you’re into dudes…and stuff (not that there’s anything wrong with that).