Color us fairly skeptical friends, but the word from the web is that Moto’s new line of multimedia handsets are going to be dubbed Motorola ZiNE — yeah, we thought the same. We’d heard rumors that new and wildly unoriginal ideas would be rolling out of the labs and design studios at Motorola in the near future and (fingers crossed) hopefully these’ll bring a change of fortune. Apparently the “ZiNE” line will feature a Z10 successor with a big touchscreen, WiFI, and GPS and an 8 megapixel monster with optical zoom purportedly created in conjunction with Kodak. Of course, all of this is fluff and smoke ’til we see the real deal, but know we’ll be posting the dodgy and blurry pics if and when we get our hands on ‘em.

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A new version of Google Maps introduced this week includes a beta feature dubbed My Location that was designed to simulate the GPS experience on mobile phones and handheld devices that do not include GPS hardware, like Apple’s iPhone.Essentially, the My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near non-GPS equipped mobile phones to approximate the device’s current location on the map down to about 10 city blocks.”It’s not GPS, but it comes pretty close (approximately 1000m close, on average),” the Mountain View, Calif.-based search giant explained on its website. “We’re still in beta, but we’re excited to launch this feature and are constantly working to improve our coverage and accuracy.”The My Location feature is currently available for most web-enabled mobile phones, including Java, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices. However, it is not yet compatible with Apple’s iPhone.

Still, Apple has promised to continuously update and improve upon the feature set of its inaugural mobile handset, making it more than likely that the feature will turn up once it emerges from the beta stage.

For a more detailed explanation of My Location and a visual demonstration, please see the video below.

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LG’s Shine has just landed on American soil (at least in fully-subsidized carrier-branded form), but the product line has been enjoying significant success on the international scene. LG announced that over 5 million Shines have been sold since the handset’s October 2006 debut. That’s a lot of phones, people! It’s easy to get worked up about 1 million iPhones here, and another million HTC Touch’s there, but 5 million handsets in just over a year is no joke. Congrats, LG. The better news, at least for those of us here in the US, is that AT&T is now pushing their very own HSDPA-capable Shine. Life’s Good, right? Right.

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