InformationWeek's W. David Gardner looks at Alltel's introduction this week of Celltop, a "user friendly feature that enables subscribers to call up menus with a click or two of handset keypads."

"Leave it to the fifth-largest mobile phone operator, alltel, to show how to solve the subscriber hell of accessing data on wireless phones," Gardner writes.

"Cells representing applications like call logs, text messaging, ringtones, news, weather, stocks, and sports scores can be ordered up to appear on a handset's mail screen," Gardner explains. "The free service features 10 pre-installed cells that can be prioritized by subscribers, who place them in a queue in descending order of importance. The cells are displayed side-by-side, two at a time. The cells appear in similar fashion to the widgets that already are familiar to PC users."

The solution was developed with frog design using Motricity content, and is based on Qualcomm's Brew uiOne platform.

More here from MobileBurn... more here from Gizmodo... more here from Phone Scoop... and Alltel's press release is here.