A flurry of rumors circulated today about HTC launching Facebook-branded phones. Let’s talk about this! Updated. More »
There’s a story going around today about an alleged problem in the power management unit affecting Motorola’s first two dual-core smartphones — AT&T’s Atrix 4G and Verizon’s Droid Bionic — that leads to a hodgepodge of issues: overheating, weird RF fluctuation, the list goes on. Sounds like a tragedy in the making, doesn’t it? Worst yet, the PMU problem is said to be a “major unfixable flaw that will plaque [sic] it forever.” Bummer!
But let’s back up and consider the facts here. First, as best we can tell, the sources are two posters in a HowardForums thread, one of which doesn’t even have the information firsthand — he was allegedly given the news “by someone who is testing the devices.” Furthermore, there’s really no such thing as an “unfixable” bug; you might need to peel away several layers of software and hardware to fix an issue depending on how fundamental the flaw turns out to be, but engineers have proven time and time again that “unfixable” isn’t really in their vocabulary (white paint aside, of course).
Editorial: bugs on unreleased phones don’t matter (update: Motorola says phones will ‘ship as scheduled’) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
Electronista | 
HowardForums | Email this | Comments
Updated: We changed the speed data to reflect carrier-reported speeds for all four carriers, on January 26, 2010 at 1 p.m. Eastern.
In 2011, wireless carriers are banking on you going 4G with your next smartphone purchase.
Verizon says it will release 10 different 4G-enabled handsets in the next year. AT&T says it will double that number, with 15 of its own offerings being Android OS-based devices. And T-Mobile, which offers a handful of 4G phones, claims its network is “America’s largest 4G network.”
But with all the wireless industry jargon being thrown around in marketing campaigns these days, it’s still unclear just what each carrier means when it touts its network as “4G.”
Let’s take a look behind the fog of marketing jargon that U.S. customers face today.
Loosely defined, 4G stands for the the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards. In the narrow terms originally defined by International Telecommunication Union standards, it doesn’t count as 4G unless it offers download speeds of 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps. That’s about 100 times faster than any speeds we’re seeing on networks now.
If we were to judge the networks available to us now by this standard, none of them would be considered 4G.
Luckily for the carriers, we aren’t judging that way — at least, not anymore. In December at the ITU World Radiocommunication Seminar in Geneva, the ITU allowed the term “4G” to “also be applied to the forerunners of these technologies, LTE and WiMax, and to other evolved 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement” compared to current 3G networks.
AT&T wasted no time embracing the new nomenclature, relabeling its network overnight.
And well it might, as rival T-Mobile has been using the same nomenclature for the same technology since early 2010.
Before we delve into each carrier’s offerings, let’s review the competing technologies being used today.
WiMax
Developed by the IEEE, WiMax is one of two competing technologies to blaze the 4G trail. WiMAX, also known as 802.16, is in the same family of standards as Wi-Fi. Sprint and Clearwire own the biggest share of the 2.5-GHz spectrum — “the most readily usable licensed spectrum in the United States,” according to information site WiMax.com – across which WiMax is carried.
LTE
LTE stands for long-term evolution, the leading competitor to WiMax for next-generation wireless data. Instead of expending efforts deploying a new network infrastructure — like Sprint has done and continues to do with WiMAX — LTE proponents like AT&T update existing 3G networks. While the WiMax network is more fully developed at the moment, LTE won’t be widely available until 2013, according to forecasts from both AT&T and Verizon.
HSPA+
This is where it gets a bit tricky. High-speed packet access, or HSPA, is a third-generation (3G) data technology that’s widely used today. A faster version, HSPA+, has been widely considered 3.5G, until the ITU decision in December opened up those terms to a more liberal interpretation. Sprint, Verizon and AT&T weren’t happy. The technology is an incremental approach to upgrading existing HSPA networks, not a whole new generation of technology.
Still, the ITU decision means carriers can start referring to their HSPA+ networks as 4G.
RIM’s been hyping AIR apps and web apps for the PlayBook for a while now, but there’s a chance much bigger things are in the works: BGR says the company wants to add in Java compatibility for legacy BlackBerry apps, and that among other options it’s considering using the Dalvik virtual machine found in Android to get there. That makes a lot of sense — Dalvik is one of the most advanced Java(ish) virtual machines out there, and it’s open-source, so RIM could conceivably take it and tweak it to work with existing BlackBerry apps, which are built in Java. Clever, clever.
But that’s not all: BGR goes on to speculate that using Dalvik will also allow the PlayBook and future QNX devices to straight-up run regular Android apps, which is obviously a much bigger deal than simply using the same virtual machine. Exactly how or why BGR’s making that leap is unclear, since running Android apps on the PlayBook would require porting much more than just Dalvik, but it’s out there. In fact, it’s been out there since December 7, when Fortune picked up a note from Gleacher & Company analyst Mark McKechnie suggesting that RIM was planning to offer Android compatibility, so we’re curious if this rumor’s just taking another trip through the internet meat grinder. Honestly, our bet is that RIM is far too proud to offer Android compatibility and that it’s just investigating Dalvik as a Java environment, but we’d love to be proven wrong — we’ll see what happens.
BGR: BlackBerry PlayBook to possibly use Android’s Dalvik virtual machine, might run Android apps originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | BGR, Fortune | Email this | Comments
We, like you, have looked longingly at the Parrot AR.Drone. We’ve had a lot of fun experimenting with its augmented reality gaming ways and spent a lot of time sighing at its $299 price. Thankfully there’s now a much cheaper option — much less sophisticated, but one that is nevertheless cheaper. It’s the AppToyz helicopter, coming to retail soon and costing a (relatively) affordable £50, or about $80. It looks to be evolved from the standard, tiny, IR-controlled helicopters that are everywhere now, but this one’s controlled by your iPhone or iPod touch courtesy of an attachment that clips into the headphone port, much like the suite of universal remote iPhone dongles we’ve seen over the years. There’s also an RC car coming, somewhat more affordable at £30, though only the copter is demonstrated in the video embedded below. Go ahead and watch, and then start eagerly awaiting their release, currently slated for April.
AppToyz iPhone-controlled RC car and copter are more reasons to have fun with your phone (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Say you’re Research in Motion and you’re looking to up the app offering on your platform. There are a couple of ways to go about this. You could attempt to convince more developers of the validity of your operating system, getting them to develop applications for your devices as they develop for more popular operating systems like iOS and Android.
This article was written on March 21, 2006 by CyberNet.
Microsoft has made the decision that Windows Vista won’t be ready in time for the holiday season! They almost make it sound like no one was expecting it. The release was originally scheduled for 2005 and then it got pushed back to 2006 AND WinFX was removed. Apparently they think that this 10-week push-back (release now scheduled for January 2007) will be enough time for them to recover, but I am sure we will still get another delay. Hopefully we will get this within a year from now but in reality it probably won’t be until the summer of 2007!
News Source: Yahoo News
Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox
Related Posts:
Microsoft just dropped a few tidbits of knowledge on us regarding Windows Phone 7’s performance in the marketplace so far. Here’s what we’ve got:
What does that tell us? Well, let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: the iPhone 4 sold 3 million units in a little under a month after its launch, so Microsoft clearly has plenty of room to catch up — but that comes as no surprise to us, analysts, or Microsoft itself. Furthermore, selling a license to an OEM isn’t the same as selling a phone to a customer, since many of these manufactured devices are sitting on store shelves; it’s unclear exactly how many WP7 devices are actually in users’ pockets right now, but the number is certainly less than “over 2 million.”
Microsoft’s earnings call is tomorrow where we expect to get more detail on the platform’s performance, but the company is saying today that it sees plenty of reasons to be “bullish about the foundation for long-term success” here — and considering that they simply can’t afford to fail in the mobile game, we hope they’re right.
Microsoft: ‘over 2 million’ Windows Phone 7 licenses sold to manufacturers so far originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink | | Email this | Comments
Company’s fourth-quarter growth leaves competitors in its dust, according to a new report. However, the numbers do include iPads, which buoyed sales figures.
Originally posted at The Digital Home
We’re just giddy like kids on the way to Disney World at the prospect of LTE and WiMAX sweeping like wildfire across the country, yet someone always has to come along and be a downer by showing off something even cooler. Those kids are the players at Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, the same folks who brought us a Body Area Network back in 2006 and this creepy looking koala. Now they’re working on LTE-Advanced, the real true 4G that delivers 600Mbps downloads. That’s six times what you can ever hope to expect from LTE and 40 times faster than 3G — enough to download a 700MB file in 9.3 seconds or stream 3D HD footage on the go, a feat those crazy cats did in their rolling man cave shown above. Sadly we have no pictures of the thing on the outside, but we’re seeing antennas. Lots of antennas.
[Thanks, Andy]
Korean researchers demonstrate LTE-Advanced in a custom RV, score 600Mbps downloads originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
