It appears that the Nokia Ace will be the first phone which will come with 4G and Windows Phone 7 on it. This is one of the three phones which will be released at AT&T in the beginning of 2012, according to Paul Thurrott, a Windows blogger. The launch date for the Nokia Ace is expected to be on March 18th. The other two phones launched at AT&T with support for LTE will be HTC Radiant and Samsung Mendel.

The first rumors of the Nokia Ace appeared in October 2011 and they speak of a phone with an AMOLED screen of 4.3 inches, a camera of 8MP, a single core CPU at 1.4 GHz and internal storage of 16GB.

According to an announcement from Microsoft, its marketplace of apps for Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 now have over 50,000 apps. That’s obviously a small amount when you compare it with the 500,000 found on the App Store from Apple or the 300,000 available for Android. The 50,000 number counts both games and apps.

It appears that every single day there is an average of 265 apps being added to the market. During the last month, over 8,000 apps were added to the market. During the first year, the market had 40,000 apps added to it, but the last 10,000 were added in just 40 days.

Some other interesting figures are the free vs paid apps available. 58% of all apps available on the marketplace are free, 14% come with a trial period and the other 29% are paid.

The LG Optimus U1 is a smartphone which will be released in 2012. Its major feature right now, for us at least, is that it will come with the new operating system from Google, the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, making it the first LG phone with this OS on it. The LG Optimus U1 will have a dual core CPU, a 720p HD display and a front facing camera. That’s pretty much all we known right now about this phone. [GSM Arena]

Citizenside has existed for sometime now as the social network for over 50,000 amateur and professional photographers, freelance reporters and citizen journalists. Now the news agency/social network wants to encourage more individuals to actively submit newsworthy content primed for publication. They’re doing this via an app for Android phones and the iPhone that will position Citizenside to act as more of a middleman for would-be citizen journalists to submit content to. Those working for the social network will then attempt to sell these videos and images to news organizations. In return, Citizenside tells you they will keep roughly 25% of the purchase price of the media and give you the majority. The act of submitting is free and seamless, which creates all the incentive in the world for smartphone users to snap and send off imagery and footage they think could be sold to a news organization.

But according to users, the promised three-quarters of the selling price is more like between one-half and three-quarters. Still, 65% of the price of a bought picture or video is pretty good considering you aren’t taking the time to submit it to various news organizations. It’s especially good when you think about how much more adept those working for Citizenside likely are when it comes to avoiding being ripped off by big news sites. You could be getting more through Citizenside despite their fee due to the fact that otherwise you’d be most likely forced to haggle in unfamiliar territory, which is certain to leave you the loser.

The true value of something like Citizenside is that it encourages individuals to be more news-minded, even if it’s through the power of the purse. The ease in which individuals can now snap photos or record video and subsequently send them off for possible publication is sure to result in a more updated form of real-time journalism. With that said, the efficiency of this middle man should be more specifically uncovered. Once thousands upon thousands of people are submitting photos and videos through a free app, how will those at Citizenside sort through the clutter? Will it work if it takes twice as long for relevant content to reach news sites?

There’s only one way to find out: download Citizenside for free via the Android Market or iTunes App Store to see if you’re a natural born citizen journalist.

Sprint HTC Arrive is the carrier’s version of the HTC 7 Pro, which is a Windows Phone 7 model that is CDMA enabled and also has a QWERTY keyboard, as well as a 3.6 inch touch screen with a 480×800 resolution. The processor on it is a Snapdragon 1Ghz, it has 16GB of internal storage and a 5MP camera which can film at 720p HD quality.

The regular price of the phone is $199.99 with a new contract, but Amazon has it for just $0.01, with the same two year new contract. If you’re looking for a new phone, this one offers the best of both worlds, a touch screen and a keyboard. [Learn more]

With this tool, Microsoft is trying to make it easy for iPhone developers to also create versions for the WP7 OS. One other strategy used by Microsoft in the past was to pay iPhone devs to port their apps to the WP7 platform by giving them revenue guarantees among other things.

Microsoft’s strategy is slowly paying off and they already have around 15,000 apps in their marketplace, which might not sound like much, but it’s enough when you consider their current market share.

The touchscreen is a 3.8 inch and the phone also has 3G, a 5MP camera, GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi and as its OS it will have Android 2.2. The HTC Merge will appear in the US during the spring of 2011, probably at more than one carrier.

The question is what will Nokia do until then, since they’re discontinuing support for the Symbian OS. What phones will they launch until the winter season if they’re not launching Symbian and they’re not launching Windows Phone 7 smartphones? [Guardian.co.uk]

Key features includes:

• Font size can be adjusted
• Contains 3 bestseller excerpts, 3 classic titles
• Bookmarks and highlights can be made
• the reading position can be synchronized
• can download new releases and bestsellers from Reader Store

However, you would be extremely wrong if you do the same with the new Samsung Wave 525. The phone has a large 3.2-inch TFT LCD that can rival most high-end phones, with its resolution and the detail that it delivers. That is also the case with the 3 megapixel camera. The camera takes stunning pictures, which can then be stored in your phone’s 80MB internal memory. However, you can also store movies in this phone thanks to the microSD support, which allows you to expand the memory capacity to a whopping 16GB using the right memory cards.

The phone has Wi-Fi connectivity that ensures that you stay connected with your friends on twitter and Facebook even if you are in an airport. The only downside of this phone is that it will support only GPRS/EDGE bands and not 3G. Connectivity with other devices is taken care of by the Bluetooth 2.1. The phone comes with GPS to aid you with navigation and also has an accelerometer to take care of the switching between portrait and landscape mode. It has a powerful 1200mAh battery that provides more than sufficient talk time and also standby time for running all these applications. The phone runs on the TouchWiz 3.0 interface.

The phone is expected to be launched pre-Christmas in the UK markets along with the other Wave phones with some fantastic mobile phone offers.