Hasta La Gadget!

The Samsung Galaxy S III has launched on every major carrier in the United States, with two color options: white or blue. Back when AT&T announced its plan to carry the phone, it revealed that it would also sell a red version of the phone. AT&T has now announced that the red version will be available to pre-order starting from this Sunday, July 15th. It’ll cost the same as the regular Galaxy S III, so $199.99 for the 16GB version on a two-year contract.

The red Galaxy S III will be sent out for delivery and be available in stores starting from July 29th. If you’re hoping to get the red model on another carrier, you’ll have no such luck: it’s an exclusive to AT&T. Other than the color, the device will be identical to existing Galaxy S III models, with a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED 720p screen, Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core 1.5Ghz processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and an eight megapixel camera with 1080p video recording.

If you’re a little bummed about the storage space, fear not: there’s also a microSD card slot onboard for cards up to 64GB in size, and USB OTG functionality works out of the box. NFC is also present and accounted for, and the handset can also take advantage of AT&T’s LTE network. If red is your color, make sure to pre-order on Sunday.

[via MobileBurn]

Red AT&T Samsung Galaxy S III goes on sale July 29th is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Carrier O2 is beginning to recover from its embarrassing network failure, after suffering more than seventeen hours of voice and data downtime in some areas of the UK. Faults first began registering around midday on Wednesday, with O2 phones unable to connect; as of 8am BST today, O2 has confirmed that its 2G service is back online for those customers affected, which means incoming and outgoing calls should be functional.

However, 3G will take a little longer to address. “Our 3G service is starting to restore” O2 said in a statement today, “and customers should expect to see a gradual return of data services as the day progresses. Customers affected may wish to try switching their mobile phones off and on as service returns.”

The exact cause of the fault has not been explained, and nor has O2 confirmed exactly how many of its subscribers have been impacted by the downtime. “We are sorry again for the inconvenience this has caused some customers” O2 apologized today, “and can provide reassurance that we continue to deploy all possible resources, and will do so until full service is restored.”

As expected, the outage has caused no shortage of frustration among O2 subscribers. In SlashGear’s own testing on Wednesday, we not only could not make outgoing calls, but incoming calls to O2 numbers would not be routed to voicemail.

You can keep up with the latest state of the network at O2′s status page.

O2 claws back 2G after nearly a day of downtime; 3G work-in-progress is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This photo of aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman is incredible—and it looks like a lot of fun too. I imagine the helmsman pushing the rudder and whispering “wowwheeeee!” More »

The Nokia Lumia 900 won’t be getting Windows Phone 8, but AT&T is hoping that a special, limited edition pink version will distract you from the OS version. Priced at the same $99.99 (with a new, two-year agreement) as the existing color options, the pink Lumia isn’t a slapdash paint-job but involves Nokia creating an all-new colored casing. That means, even if you scratch it, there’s still pink underneath.

Otherwise, this is the same phone we know and – with a few reservations – love. Up front is a 4.3-inch WVGA display, with a 1.4GHz single-core processor inside and an 8-megapixel cameron the back with 720p HD video recording. It’ll also come loaded with a number of exclusive apps, including Nokia Music and Nokia Drive, and the new camera functionality released as part of the Camera Extras pack.

Later this year, meanwhile, Microsoft will release Windows Phone 7.8 for the Lumia 900, bringing the refreshed Metro homescreen and some other aesthetic tweaks to the handset. What it won’t get is the true WP8 upgrade, like all other current-gen Windows Phones.

The pink (aka magenta) AT&T Nokia Lumia 900 will go on sale in the carrier’s stores from July 15. It’ll also be sold online.

AT&T pink Lumia 900 drops July 15 is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

RIM’s financial struggles to make it through until BlackBerry 10 hits the market early next year are set to increase, with carriers pressuring the Canadian company to slim its monthly server fees. Operators like AT&T and Verizon have each demanded a reduction in the fees RIM charges for subscribers to access BlackBerry servers, Bloomberg reports, something the company is understandably reluctant to do as they account for more than a third of annual revenue.

RIM confirmed the ongoing negotiations in its financial results last week, though the company would not comment on any specific details from its talks with carriers. “RIM intends to continue generating a revenue stream from the services we offer” is all spokesperson Nick Manning would say, while neither AT&T nor Verizon would comment.

Still, that the potential for those fees to be shaved away is a threat to RIM is unmistakable. While the carrier has seen drooping demand for its handsets – leading to a $518m quarterly loss most recently – the revenue from fees actually rose 4.1-percent year-on-year. Fees currently contribute 36-percent of RIM’s total revenue, but analysts predict they will drop to $2.7bn in the 2014 fiscal year, and $2.3bn the year following.

CEO Thorsten Heins insists RIM is not in a “death spiral”, citing rising subscriber numbers and the company’s $2bn+ in cash reserves. ‘The facts about RIM’s business provide reason to believe that we can succeed,” he wrote, “even as we take painful but necessary steps to focus our resources and build a lean, nimble organization focused intently on bringing BlackBerry 10 to market.”

However, while the first BlackBerry 10 devices were previously expected to reach store shelves before 2012 is out, RIM admitted that it had underestimated the issues in rebuilding the QNX-based platform for smartphones. Instead, the first phones will arrive early next year, with both all-touch and QWERTY models in the pipeline.

[via Electronista]

RIM cash reserves threatened by carrier fee cut demands is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.