CTIA: Cell phones get more social

There's a new adjective in the cellphone world: "socially inclined." The term showed up in a news release this week announcing the Motorola Evoke, a phone that will launch this spring.

The Evoke is among a number of phones announced at CTIA, the trade show for the wireless world, that aim at enhancing use of social media. Among the Evoke's features, according to Motorola (who did not announce a carrier for the phone), are "integrated widgets to access social-networking sites."

Other newly announced phones that emphasize social media include Garmin's elusive nuviphones, the G60 and M20, which will be available from either AT&T or T-Mobile. Their social-networking application, called Ciao!, is another of those applications, like Loopt for the iPhone, that use GPS technology to help physically locate the friends in your network.

Even the Windows Mobile operating system, traditionally business-focused, is evolving to acknowledge rising interest in networking. The upcoming WM upgrade, version 6.5, lets you access your contacts (which can now have pictures with them), e-mails, texts, missed calls, and calendar appointments via a new, dashboard-like interface. Its browser will also be more robust, similar to the Internet Explorer browser found on computers.

The trend to making mobile devices more sympatico with social-networking tools like Twitter and Facebook are among the leading trends at this year's CTIA, which has otherwise been fairly modest in terms of announced products and services. We'll follow up soon with more on sociable phones and other news from this year's show, which wraps up today. —Mike Gikas