Hasta La Gadget!

AT&T’s first quarter results posted this morning look generally quite positive for the company — it saw its highest first-quarter net wireless adds in history (1.9 million) and both postpaid and total churn are at their lowest levels ever, suggesting that subscribers are happier with their service than they have been in recent months, the thought of tantalizing hardware is keeping them around, they’re too worn down to bother switching, or some combination of the above. Net income of $2.4 billion was down a bit year over year — $600 million, to be exact — thanks to a one-time charge related to some tax craziness that only accountants would fully comprehend, but had it not been for that, they’d be looking at having banked $3.5 billion. In other words, the numbers are looking good.

At least the financial numbers are looking good, but what about those dropped calls? AT&T claims that Manhattan — one of the hardest-hit areas in the country, if not the hardest — saw a 6 percent improvement in the first quarter, with the New York metro area improving 9 percent overall. The promised third carrier rollout is claimed to be well underway, and as proof of all this noise, AT&T helpfully provides a pair of graphs — graphs with no perceptible Y-axis units, mind you — showing bigger bars and higher lines in the first quarter than in last. Of course, we still don’t appreciate AT&T bringing its extensive WiFi network into the equation here; it’s still totally non sequitur to the matter at hand, as far as we’re concerned, since even the most extensive WiFi coverage is a drop in the bucket against WWAN footprint. Besides, if these guys can actually meet their proclaimed goal of offering both the fastest and the most reliable 3G data around, it’s a moot point, right?

AT&T’s Q1 results: earnings down thanks to one-time charge, NYC seeing ‘solid improvements’ originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  AT&T  | Email this | Comments

Google’s latest map app for Irish and British Android phones now includes turn-by-turn directions with voice navigation. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-20003092-251.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Android Atlas/a/p

On Earth Day, Denver, will be one of the few U.S. cities to boast a bicycle-sharing program, giving commuters access to hundreds of bikes at B-cycle stations throughout the city.

Archos sent us an updated version of its 9 PC tablet, this time with a Intel Atom Z515 CPU. See how the new version fared in our benchmark tests.

HP’s clearly been updating its website with new products over the past few days, but our guess is that the Envy 17 that was just added to the domain slipped through a bit early. We wish there were more details thrown up there, but unfortunately the spec and data sheet pages come up blank. One of our eagle-eyed editors did spot some fine print indicating that the laptop “may require” a separate DVD drive to upgrade Windows 7, so our guess is that the 17-incher — like its Envy 13 and Envy 15 brethren — lacks an integrated optical drive. We assume it shouldn’t be all that long before HP officially comes clean about this multimedia system, but we’re just hoping they plan on cramming some NVIDIA Optimus and Core i7 in there to sweeten the deal.

[Thanks, Ali]

Envy 17 pops up on HP.com begging to be officially launched originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  HP  | Email this | Comments