As usual, the hottest new handsets are hitting the Asian market, but for once the U.S. releases aren't lagging that far behind Chinese smartphone enthusiasts are counting the days until the oPhone hits, a slick Lenovo 3G handset said to be close to launch. China Mobile is poised to clean up this quarter as the oPhone’s provider; gray-market G1 sales have already indicated that the excitement over Android is rising, and the company has been clear in its desire to develop a top-notch Chinese version. The oPhone will be the first Android-powered handset to work hand in hand with China’s TD-SCDMA 3G network.Meanwhile, Japan’s KDDI au revealed its Spring 2009, candy-colorful line of handsets. One of the more notable offerings is the Hitachi H001 Wooo, which in addition to a silly name features a 3-D display. The Wooo is a clamshell phone that has the ability to swivel into portrait and landscape modes. It has a 5-megapixel camera and a 3.1-inch TFT LCD (with 854-by-480 resolution).The uber-pink Sony Ericsson Walkman Premier3 is also piquing interest with its ability to rip tracks directly from a CD player, while the Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot S001 breaks ranks by being the first GSM- and CDMA-capable KDDI phone. Overall, the collection has produced more than one reader comment of “I’m moving to Japan!” Who can blame them? With features such as 8-megapixel cameras, 3.1-inch OLED displays, TV options, a touchscreen that allows you to play musical instruments, English–to-Japanese translation, and 10MB of internal storage, KDDI has pushed the smartphone into new territory. Stateside, a crop of new offerings from LG, Toshiba, Nokia, Samsung, and HTC are fighting for our attention. Leaked photos of the upcoming LG VX9600 Versa appeared with a prominently displayed soft keyboard on the 3-inch touchscreen. Additional details are still pretty hard to come by, but so far we’ve heard that the Versa will also have a QWERTY keyboard, a stylus, and detachable modules such as a keyboard, speakers, and game pad.Nokia fans are hoping that the company will officially announce the E75 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of the month. The E75 has a sliding QWERTY keypad in addition to the numeric keypad, Wi-Fi, a 2.4-inch display, a 3.2-megapixel camera, GPS, a 3.5mm audio jack, microSD support, and HSDPA; it also runs S60.Samsung is wooing photo fans with the Memoir, which T-Mobile has announced it will be carrying. An 8-megapixel giant, the Memoir also has autofocus, a 16X digital zoom, and Xenon flash; on the phone side expect a QWERTY keypad, Samsung’s TouchWiz interface, a full HTML browser, and GPS. While the Memoir is designed to make uploading photos easy, the absence of Wi-Fi may hurt its chances. Toshiba’s TG01 is likely to steal the show at MWC this year. The company’s 4.1-inch touchscreen phone has an 800-by-480 screen, GPS, and Wi-Fi, and it will be the first phone to run on a Snapdragon chip set. The quirk here is that the phone uses its accelerometers to answer -– so you shake the phone to pick up or hang up a call.HTC’s S743 (which was announced at CES) has just cleared the FCC hurdle and will likely be offered up unbranded and soon. A video of it being unboxed is available, so you can see what this classy slide-out QWERTY and 2.4-inch QVGA display has to offer.There seems to be plenty of handset love going around, no matter which shore you call home. Technology IndustrySmall and Medium Business