Research firm Gartner says that one in three people will have a cell phone by 2009. That’s only if the prices for cell phones drops from $175 to $161.=20

Normally, we don’t write about Groucho Marx in the course of our regular editorial. But film buff, man-about-town, and our own Technical Editor Theo Durst turned up this fabulous story. What’s sad is that the studios and legal departments are behaving the same way now. Some things never change.

MobileVoice, powered by One Voice’s patented voice technology, is a carrier-grade voice solution for voice-dialing, sending and receiving email, voice-to-text messages, mobile conferencing, and voice portal. MobileVoice’s services also contact management synchronization and importing tools for Outlook, Outlook Express, and Lotus Notes.

Vivendi Universal Games announced that its newly formed wireless division will launch five new mobile games. The games that will become mobile are Sierra Entertainment’s SWAT Force and Larry’s Sexy Pinball. Additional details will be announced at a later date.=20

VERIZON Wireless and Sprint have announced plans to offer their customers video games from Electronic Arts. Verizon Wireless plans to offer games such as Madden NFL 06 and NBA Live 06 through its VCast high-speed service in the coming weeks. Sprint said it would soon offer popular Electronic Arts games including Tiger Woods PGA Tour 06.=20

There are thousands of Internet hot spots around the United States for those who use wireless laptops. Most are in coffee shops or airports. While that makes wireless technology convenient, it also sets the consumers up for cyber thievery. According to this article, where there are WiFi hot spots, there also could be evil twin hot spots, where hackers can set up twins that look like legitimate hot spots.

America Online released a new trial version of its AOL Instant Messenger software. Dubbed AIM Triton, the software lets people manage all their contact information from within the IM window, as well as place calls to any phone, send text messages to cell phones, watch Internet TV and listen to online radio. AOL hopes to boost usage even more by adding contact management capabilities, such as automatically retrieving names, email addresses and phone numbers from Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express.

Sandisk and M-Systems set up a company called U3 last year to develop U3 technology and promote it as a standard. A U3-enabled drive would let you use a single version of Adobe’s Photoshop, for instance, on any number of machines. Co-operation of software developers is vital because U3 requires special editions of their products to get round the fact that Windows expects configuration data to be in the host system’s Registry.

Sproqit Technologies will announce a workgroup version of its Sproqit email tool that gives users remote access to their Outlook inboxes from smartphones and wireless handhelds. Sproqit Workgroup Edition will be available from the end of July and will support up to 50 users. Sproqit currently supports only Microsoft Exchange Server, but the firm plans to add support for Lotus Domino mail systems when it ships Sproqit Enterprise Edition later this year.

Cingular and BIO-key International have launched a service that lets police officials check vehicle information, stolen vehicle reports, weapon registrations and outstanding warrants through RIM’s Blackberry device or through Pocket PC-powered PDAs. They also can send text messages and email for inconspicuous communications with dispatchers.