CES Day 1 Round-Up: T-Mo, Moto, And HTCCES Day 1 Round-Up: T-Mo, Moto, And HTC

It has been a fairly busy day at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, with the event officially kicking off this morning. Here's a quick snapshot of a bunch of different stories that broke throughout the day, including news from T-Mobile, Motorola and HTC.T-Mo Kills Off @Home Service

T-Mobile has officially indicated that it will no longer offer its @Home landline replacement calling service to new customers. This is a little sad. @Home allowed users to connect a home phone to T-Mobile via broadband. T-Mobile will continue to support the service, but will not sell it once the current supply of routers is sold. T-Mobile will still sell its HotSpot @Home service, which uses UMA to allow voice calls to seamlessly transition between cellular and Wi-Fi networks.

Moto Flips Out

Motorola announced its latest Android phone, the Backflip. The phone is a second and more interesting take on the CLIQ. It has the same front, but instead of having a slide-out keyboard, the Backflip features a novel QWERTY keyboard that's on the back of the device. It also has a mousepad behind the screen that lets users navigate through menus and such. Overall, it feels better than the CLIQ did, and will run MOTOBLUR. It's not as sexy as the Droid, but it's a solid third effort for Motorola.

HTC's Smart Dumbphone

Today HTC -- traditional maker of Windows Mobile and Android smartphones -- debuted a new dumbphone. Why call it a dumbphone? Well, it uses what has traditionally been a feature phone OS -- Qualcomm's BREW Mobile Platform -- instead of a smartphone OS. Despite the BREW backbone, HTC has endowed the Smart (which is the name of this device) with its Sense UI. That means it will act and feel a lot like HTC's Android phones, only Android won't be the underlying platform. Why is this interesting? Well, BREW runs on lower-cost equipment and can be sold at a lower price point than most smartphones can. It also has a built-in apps store ready and waiting to deliver content to users. The Smart will go on sale in Europe and Asia first.