Check out what's new and interesting this week: 

• Samsung to Release Trio of Android Phones Samsung is set to release three Android phones this year, two stateside and one abroad, as rivals gun for position in the smartphone market with rollouts planned for this year by Palm, HTC, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, and, it's rumored, Apple.
• Space: The final frontier for cell phones? The vast, thinly populated expanses of the country that still lack cell phone coverage could be getting an interesting option next year: ordinary-looking cell phones that connect to a satellite when there's no cell tower around.
  
• Review: iPhone Apps for Nearly Every Waking Minute I didn't see it coming. I bought the iPhone because it is the Swiss Army knife of gadgets – a video iPod, phone and Web browser and more. But then I discovered what would become the source of many bleary-eyed nights: the iPhone applications store.
  
• Russia to Allow Parliamentary Voting by Mobile Phone The Russian Parliamentary elections due in 2011 could use mobile phones for voting, the Central Elections Commission has announced.
  
• Palm, RIM not hindering iPhone popularity Two surveys released yesterday show that interest in Apple's iPhone is holding steady, despite competition from BlackBerry vendor Research in Motion and Palm, maker of the Treo and forthcoming Pre smartphones. In its biannual survey on teens, Piper Jaffray found that the iPhone remains popular with U.S. teens, although it's [not] as [hot] as it was when the iPhone 3G launched last summer amid nationwide hoopla.
  
• Who's King of the iPhone App Store? Web research firm comScore has released its first in-depth look at the most-installed iPhone applications -- providing some surprises and some guidance for application developers seeking direction and marketers seeking ways to better reach iPhone users.
• Visa Makes NFC Mobile Point-of-Sale Payments Commercially Available Credit card merchant, Visa has announced the launch of the world’s first commercial Visa mobile payments service for point-of-sale transactions using Near Field Communications (NFC) technology. The service marks the first time consumers can purchase an NFC-enabled mobile device off the shelf and use that device to make Visa payWave-enabled transactions at the point-of-sale instead of using their payment card.
• Right time, right price for mobile phone applications There is a buzz about emerging business opportunities in the growing market for downloadable mobile phone applications.