The HTC Evo 4G LTE Android smartphone is being treated like an expatriate fugitive, held at the U.S. border by officials while they investigate whether HTC complied with a court order from December.

A note from Best Buy to customers who pre-ordered the HTC Evo 4G LTE reportedly confirmed that they won’t be getting the phone any time soon.

HTC lost a patent dispute with Apple last year, and in December the International Trade Commission issued a limited exclusion order against HTC and two of its subsidiaries.

The company was ordered to alter minor functionality in some of its phones, including the Evo 4G LTE and One X, by April 19 of this year.

HTC was presumed to have complied, but earlier this week the HTC Evo 4G LTE and HTC One X were delayed indefinitely at U.S. Customs.

The HTC Evo 4G LTE’s troubled release

The HTC Evo 4G LTE was slated to be released this week, but Best Buy previously moved the date up to next week.

Now the retailer announced to pre-order customers that Nokia has officially notified them of delayed, confirming the news from earlier this week.

"The U.S. availability of the HTC One X and HTC Evo 4G LTE has been delayed due to a standard U.S. Customs review of shipments that is required after an ITC exclusion order," HTC said in a previous statement.

"We believe we are in compliance with the ruling and HTC is working closely with Customs to secure approval. The HTC One X and HTC Evo 4G LTE have been received enthusiastically by customers and we appreciate their patience as we work to get these products into their hands as soon as possible."

The patent dispute

The patent in question has to do with the way the phone interprets phone numbers and email address within emails, websites and other text, allowing users to simply tap them to dial the number or send an email to the address.

The functionality in HTC’s phones was deemed to be infringing on Apple’s patent, and HTC was ordered to alter it.

Hopefully HTC’s claims of compliance are accurate, as further delays due to this patent dispute could potentially cause a major chilling effect for Android.

iPhone prices have been dropping like flies this month, with Best Buy the latest retailer to join in with its own deal on the iPhone 4.

Starting this week, Best Buy is offering its stock of 8GB iPhone 4 handsets for $ 50.

The deal is good on both black and white models of the iPhone 4 bought along with a two-year contract through either AT&T, Verizon Wireless, or Sprint.

Target and Radio Shack started similar sales last week, offering the same discounted price on the iPhone 4 with additional deals for the iPhone 4S as well.

Like last week’s deals, the $ 50 iPhone 4 is only available at brick and mortar Best Buy stores, which are becoming increasingly hard to find as the retailer closes locations.

Dealing in June

Best Buy is offering the discounted iPhone 4 through the end of June, ending the same day as other third-party retailer deals.

The sale’s timing makes speculation very tempting. Rumors have already pointed to June for the much anticipated iPhone 5 launch, making each retailer that jumps on the discount bandwagon look like an attempt to clear out old stock in preparation.

Best Buy’s sale is somewhat disappointing in that regard, since the retailer isn’t budging on the price of the iPhone 4S yet.

Of course, each Apple iteration is accompanied by its own price cuts on last year’s model, so a June iPhone 5 wouldn’t give Best Buy much choice for long.

The Samsung Omnia M has had its first price leak online and the new Windows Phone handset looks to be dearer than expected.

We were a little bit puzzled when we saw Samsung unveiled the Omnia M on Monday, with it sporting similar specs to its predecessor the Omnia 7.

The Samsung Omnia M offers up a 4-inch Super AMOLED display, 4GB of internal memory, 5MP rear camera, a single-core 1GHz processor and 384MB of RAM, which runs Windows Phone 7.5 Mango.

How much!?

Italian retailer ePrice has revealed the Omnia M on its website, flaunting a price tag of €294 – equating to around £235/$ 374.

Considering the Huawei Ascend G300 is just £100 on PAYG and the Nokia Lumia 710 can be picked up for about £175 ($ 250), the Omnia M feels overpriced, as it fails to offer anything extra over these two devices.

That being said, there’s been no official word from Samsung yet on pricing, so we could well see the cost of the Omnia M tumble before it hit shelves later this year.

Flexible OLED displays could be making their way to our gadgets sooner rather than later as Samsung has seen "huge" orders for the bendy screens.

Samsung Electronics’ vice chairman Kwon Oh-hyun told Korea Times that demand is high for the futuristic OLEDs, with mass production beginning in late 2012:

"We will be mass producing flexible OLED displays from the latter half of this year as the demand from our clients is significant," he said.

"OLEDs will replace LCDs as the main mobile displays from around 2015 as the screens are thinner and brighter. Samsung has massively invested in OLED-related technologies and will continue to do so."

Flex that screen

The flexi-tech, which Samsung showed off in December, lends itself to smaller mobile devices like tablets and smartphones, rather than TVs (although we are looking forward to the day we can afford Samsung’s delicious 55-inch OLED TV which is getting a release in the second half of the year).

Some analysts have taken the attention-grabbing stance that Samsung’s faith in the flexible OLED displays must surely come from some interest from Apple, mooting that we could see bendable, posable iPhones and iPads in the years to come.

But, to be fair, you don’t really need Apple to put a vote of confidence behind the idea of a foldable, near-indestructible mobile display. That sounds cool enough on its own.

Sony has confirmed that the Xperia S will receive the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update in the coming weeks.

Sony has been slow off the mark to push the ICS update out to its users, after initially claiming the update would be available for the Xperia S in April.

Users have seen that April time-frame slip back, but it looks like Sony has finally sorted itself out, after it posted an update on one of its support forums.

Any other date is just speculation

The post reads: "Xperia S is planned to get ICS somewhere around late May/early June. That’s what’s been said and that’s still what we’re sticking to.

"Any other date (such as June/July) is just speculation.

"The roll out is, as always, gradual and will not happen over night for all phones. Some phones might get the update in late May while other[s] will get it in mid June etc."

This update seems to tie in nicely with the Ice Cream Sandwich roll out for other Xperia handsets including the Xperia Arc S, Xperia Neo V and Xperia Ray.

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