Hold the presses! Apparently a new proposal is under review in the U.S. by the House of Representatives that may just be the people's ticket to purchasing unlocked iPhones from Apple and AT&T. The proposal is supposedly adopting the case observed when European service carrier T-Mobile was forced to sell iPhones without a T-Mobile-tied contract, though at more than twice the price of the MSRP. Read on to know more.

At the MECCA for Games subconference at CTIA earlier this week, a panel of experts talked about the future of mobile gaming. The "Pessimists vs. Optimists" discussion was something worth listening to because the following people have a right to insist that they're right:

• Mike Yuen, Senior Director, Gaming Group, QUALCOMM
• Robert Tercek, Multimedia Networks, GDC's Mobile Symposium
• Matthew Bellows, GM and VP of Marketing, Floodgate Entertainment
• Jason Ford, VP of Strategy and Planning, Namco Networks and formerly from Sprint
• Justin Hall, New Media Research Specialist, Creative Artists Agency
• Douglas Soltys, Editor-in-Chief, QuicklyBored.com

A lot was said, and the article we found on it was really long. Since this is QJ and not Oprah, we'll keep it short and cut through the drama:

• Pessimism: The American mobile game industry has been around for 5 years. About 15 million subscribers have played a mobile game, 4.8 million have downloaded a game, and 3.9 million have bought a game. Those sound like big numbers, but when you consider how many American phone subscribers there are, the fact that 3.9 have bought a game looks real puny. Is the market really that limited?
  
• Optimism: Those gamers paid 2 billion dollars, baby. That's not too bad. And there's plenty of room for growth.

And that's basically what the debate was all about. Untapped potential. So we leave you with one more thing from the debate: "Concepts like presence, constant connection, and constant global positioning are currently not available to game developers because of limitations of technology and issues of privacy and security." Is the technology really limited? Or is it simply that no company is willing to invest in this yet?

Losing your cellphone or it suddenly malfunctioning has got to be one of the most neurotic things that could happen to anyone. Aside from the financial hassle it entails, there is the longer-term damage of trying to build up and restore the contacts that have been lost along with your phone.

The Backup-Pal will try to solve that problem for you. With just a three-second touch of its button, it would be able to save 1000 contacts with its 128 megs of flash memory. Its supported brands include Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Siemens, Samsung, Motorola, Audiovox, Kyocera, and Sanyo among many others. Basically, it plugs into your phone's proprietary connector and transfers data from the phone to the unit or vice versa.

This contraption has been awarded third place in the Hardware and Mobile Accesory section by CTIA. Depending on your phone model (which affects the type of adapter you need), Backup-Pal costs between $40 and $50. If you want to transfer data to a computer, you need to buy the USB adapter with synching software for an extra $15. It will be available in July.