Let’s face it, whether you’re down at the laundromat or feeding the meter on a busy street, you can never find enough quarters when you need’em. Know what effectively sidesteps that lack of foresight?

Sprint’s had text-to-speech services on devices like the Samsung Epic 4G for quite some time, and now, looking to build up on that, the company’s introducing its My Wireless STS feature. The new speech-to-speech service aims to help people with speech disabilities by giving them access to an operator-assisted line every day of the week and all year round.

Despite there being so many smartphones nowadays, finding cases for certain handsets can be tricky — unless you’re toting the likes of an iPhone or the latest Android flagship device, that is.

Ah, Japan. That far east country what begot Mario most always gets to profit from the industry’s more delightful excesses. This time, however, the spoils have less to do with gaming flash and more to do with smartphone specs.

Be still your beating heart, Samsung has announced that several customers who have already fallen for its incoming flagship ‘s charms will get their pre-orders honored a day early. Unfortunately, it will be limited to those that ordered through its own brand store in Westfield Stratford City in London, but those lucky few will get their very own Galaxy S III at 6pm on May 29th — half a day before the rest of the UK. We’re planning to get our hands on a review model before then, so expect to see our fully-fleshed musings before the end of May

That new Baidu Cloud phone we told you about last week? You’re looking right at it! Following the flagship Dell Streak Pro D43 (which was branded with what was then known as Baidu Yi aka version 1.0 of the platform), this Foxconn-built Changhong H5018 is the second smartphone to have its Android Gingerbread system enhanced by Baidu, meaning it’ll come with 300GB of cloud storage space (instead of the old 100GB), voice search, voice control and a set of other online services offered by the Chinese search giant. As for the hardware itself, we’re looking at a 10.3mm-thick matte chassis housing a 650MHz MTK6573 processor, a 3.5-inch 480 x 320 display, a three-megapixel camera and a non-removable 1,400mAh battery, all of which would explain that highly affordable CN?899 (US$140) off-contract price tag.

It’s that time of the season again, as Japan’s mobile carriers unveil more alternate-universe models that we’ll probably never see elsewhere. Leading the pack is the final version of Fujitsu’s long-time-coming quad-core Android phone, arriving as the Arrows Z ISW13F

The slow rollout of Android 4.0 to Samsung’s recent Galaxy devices continues , and the latest variation to receive Ice Cream Sandwich is the Galaxy S II LTE . We should all be familiar with the ICS feature set by now, as well as Samsung’s TouchWiz alterations . The news was spotted on Samsung’s Korean site, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see the new software popping up on devices elsewhere shortly (AT&T’s Skyrocket already saw a leaked update in March ).

According to a recent leak on Chinese site PConline , Lenovo’s reportedly working on an Ice Cream Sandwich slab with China Mobile said to be on the receiving end of the delivery. Currently known as the LePhone S899t, this handset’s allegedly friendly with the carrier’s TD-SDCMA 3G network, while it’s also said to feature a dual-core, NovaThor U8500 CPU, a 4.5-inch, IPS display for all viewing pleasures and, as stated earlier, it runs flavor of Google’s latest OS.

Competition among US cellular carriers is about to get a bit fiercer with a fresh national network that will actively encourage using your phone rather than setting hard limits . Newcomer (and MVNO on Sprint’s network) Voyager Mobile is teasing a “frequent talker program” that will give all kinds of perks for the more talkative among us: call your Aunt Ruth a lot and you’ll get phone upgrades, free months of service and smaller nice-to-haves like air mileage and gift cards