Dan Rosenbaum

Even by the new standards of cell phone advertising, the run-up to the HTC ThunderBolt -- Verizon's first 4G LTE smartphone -- was elaborate and expensive. Gatefold ads in mass-market magazines and high-profile TV spots on the Oscars, NASCAR and college basketball all proclaimed that there was a new 4G phone coming from Verizon, but not much else. Inquiries made of HTC and Verizon were met with official shrugs. The company spent many millions of dollars advertising a phone and didn't tell anyone when it would be on the shelves.

The ThunderBolt finally dropped onto the market on March 17, with only a day or so warning, just as Verizon's iPhone hubbub was subsiding. When a movie gets this much hype but is snuck out into the market, it's usually a very bad sign. Not so with the ThunderBolt, which is a hefty but nifty piece of technology.

Because of the way the U.S. mobile phone market is structured, it's next to impossible to find an unlocked phone that isn't loaded with bloatware. For those who want a carrier-independent smartphone, an enticing option is the Nexus S, a very nice successor to Google's Nexus One, which did so much to popularize the Android operating system.

The Nexus S, based on Samsung's excellent Galaxy S platform and co-developed with Google, will be available at Best Buy (currently the only retailer to carry the phone in the U.S.) on Thursday for $199 with a two-year T-Mobile contract, or for $529 without a contract. In either case, the phone is unlocked; you can put whatever SIM card you want into it.

As the Smartphone Summer of 2010 lurches to a close, Verizon Wireless and Motorola have refreshed their product lines with the Droid 2 ($200 with a two-year contract), an update to the 10-month-old popular Droid slider phone.

It's a nice update -- the first phone to ship with Android 2.2 (a.k.a. Froyo) -- with some good tweaks. However, after spending a few days with one, I've concluded that it's unlikely to make your heart go pit-a-pat.