Hasta La Gadget!

Now that the tidal wave of Bionic hype has crashed upon Verizon’s shore, it’s time to focus our anticipation on Moto’s other beast phone — the Atrix 2. Leaked shots of the AT&T-branded update came to light this past July, giving us a glimpse of its Blur-ified UI and some tentative specs. Well, we still don’t have any official confirmation that these new images over on BGR are the real sequel, but the details are lining up with what we know. Purportedly, this handset refresh will not be a member of AT&T’s new LTE brigade, although that could very well change. Expect a dual-core setup, 8 megapixel camera with 1080p video capture and Gingerbread 2.3.5 baked-in. Rumor has it the orange-colored carrier intends to ship this before year’s end, but will it be enough to sway you from this?

Motorola Atrix 2 peeks out (again) from the wild, destined for AT&T faux G? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 20 Sep 2011 13:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Game on: Sony Ericsson Xperia Play 4G ready at AT&T for $50 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Adding to Verizon’s ever-expanding selection of LTE phones, Pantech’s Breakout will be its first sub-$100 LTE handset, sneaking into the mix at $99.99 on a two-year contract and after a $50 mail-in rebate. After an in-the-wild spot, the Breakout finally looks set to arrive on September 22nd — a date that may sound pretty familiar. For the price, it still packs that LTE punch, and the ability to act as a mobile hotspot for up to ten devices. Compared to its pricier Verizon stablemates, the Thunderbolt and the Droid Bionic, the Breakout has a smaller 4-inch screen, but runs on a respectable 1GHz processor. There’s also a 5 megapixel camera at the back capable of 720 HD video capture, and a VGA cam up front. LTE for less — it’s here.

Continue reading Pantech Breakout finally does just that, available from Verizon starting September 22nd

Pantech Breakout finally does just that, available from Verizon starting September 22nd originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Sep 2011 10:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This week was packed with news on the mobile front, so it was easy to miss a few stories here and there. Here’s some of the other stuff that happened in the wide world of wireless for the week of September 12, 2011:

• Vodacom South Africa has joined the data throttling club, though this carrier is taking a slightly different spin: BlackBerry users consuming more than 100MB of data each month will find their download speeds downgraded to GPRS or EDGE. The company claims this will only affect less than five percent of its BlackBerry customers. [via N4BB]
• Bada fans: the Samsung Wave 578 is featured on Orange’s site as “coming soon.” [via The Inquirer]
• Motorola announced the availability of the Fire and Fire XT in India this week. [via Motorola]
• The Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray is now being sold at Vodafone UK. [via Vodafone]
• Parrot announced the most recent addition to its lineup of Bluetooth products, called the Minikit+, a refresh of its popular hands-free speakerphone. The new model offers simultaneous pairing and voice commands. [via Parrot]
• Research in Motion is hoping to put the NFC functionality in OS 7 to good use, as it announced that the BlackBerry Bold 9900 / 9330 as well as the Curve 9350 / 9360 will support HID’s iCLASS digital keys, which means corporate folks will able to use their smartphone as an access card. [via PhoneScoop]
• While digging through the Droid Bionic’s webtop app, the names of two unknown Motorola phones were discovered: the Edison and the Common. Little is known about the Common, but a recent FCC filing mentioned the Edison and is speculated to be the follow-up to the Atrix, albeit sans LTE as originally hoped. [via Droid-Life]
• The manager of the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, Matt Bencke, wrote a post pleading developers to submit their Mango-compatible apps as soon as possible, as the new update is coming to existing phones soon and it’s obviously very important to have Windows Phone 7.5 run as smooth as possible. [via WMPowerUser]
• A leaked Radio Shack roadmap indicates the HTC Vigor should be available in stores by October 20th, and the QWERTY-packing Samsung Stratosphere will be up for online ordering as early as October 6th. As this is a third-party retailer, we can’t say with surety that these dates reflect the carrier’s official release. [via Droid-Life]

Mobile Miscellany: week of September 12, 2011 originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 17 Sep 2011 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We can’t say we weren’t warned, since Verizon updated its data policy way back in February, but it’s still a punch in the gut to hear its “network optimization” plan went into effect yesterday. A new policy page pointed out by Droid-Life explains how the policy will affect only the “top 5 percent of data users with 3G devices on unlimited data plans” (LTE and tiered data users are in the clear) by managing their speeds when connected to towers it has deemed are congested. Those conditions, termed network intelligence by Big Red, are what it feels separates this scheme from mere data throttling since it will only affect a few users (those consuming 2GB or more of data per month) at certain times and places, but it’s hard to see it any other way. If you’re one of those affected, expect a message on your bill or My Verizon account, although you may go into and out of the affected group depending on your usage. Hit the source link below for all the details — anyone else think it’s not a coincidence this policy popped up just before the iPhone 4 came to Verizon and is being implemented only weeks before the next iThing is expected to arrive?

Verizon starts ‘optimizing’ (read: throttling) network for the most data hungry users originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Sep 2011 23:35:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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