Hasta La Gadget!

AT&T’s 2013 second quarter results are in, with the telco reporting $3.8 billion in net profits, a slight decrease from the $3.9 billion earned the same quarter last year. Total revenues for Q2 came in at $32.1 billion, representing a 1.6-percent increase year-over-year. AT&T’s attributing much of this gain to a 2 million-plus increase in subscribers — both on the wireless and wired broadband end — and an uptick in mobile data plans. Wireless revenue for the quarter, which includes mobile phone and tablet sales, came in at $17.3 billion and accounts for a 5.7-percent boost versus Q2 2012, while revenue for wireless service totaled $15.4 billion. On the data front, the carrier saw significant growth as its revenue jumped nearly 20 percent compared to the same period last year, settling in at $5.4 billion.

Of its new subscriber load, 1.2 million can be attributed to AT&T’s wireless business, while its U-Verse broadband and TV service gains — which now totals 9.4 million subs overall — account for the remainder of that figure. According to AT&T’s estimates, almost three-quarters (73 percent) of its 49.5 million postpaid wireless subscribers are smartphone users, of which nearly 35 percent have active LTE plans. Coverage for that high-speed data service currently reaches over 225 million households, with the carrier targeting a total of 270 million covered by year-end. AT&T anticipates that LTE rollout will be almost entirely complete by summer 2014.

Update: In the investor call, AT&T executives hammered home the commitment to high-speed data and the willingness of its customers to opt for larger data buckets, especially when it comes to its Mobile Share plans. About 13 million subscribers are on a Mobile Share plan, and more than 25 percent of those are opting for 10GB or more per month. Interestingly, more than 15 percent of customers on Mobile Share moved over from grandfathered unlimited plans — over 70 percent of postpaid customers are on some kind of tiered data plan.

AT&T also said on the call that it sold more iPhones this quarter compared to Q2 2012, though it would not provide specific numbers. Further, CEO Ralph de la Vega said that T-Mobile’s recent offering of the iPhone had a significantly less impact on churn than when the iPhone went to Sprint and Verizon. Not to leave others out, he said that this quarter saw its best-ever Android sales and that it hopes the Lumia 1020 will drive sales of the company’s Windows Phone devices as well.

As for the carrier’s recent purchase of Leap, de la Vega said that the acquisition will accelerate AT&T’s entry into the prepaid segment. Combined with the official launch of LTE in AT&T’s goPhone lineup, he hopes that Leap will give the carrier a better position in the prepaid market than before.

Nicole Lee contributed to this report.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, HD, Mobile, AT&T

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Source: AT&T

The Oculus Rift sure is super, super neat, but outside of mods to existing games, it’s still a bit light in the custom-made software department. And that’s exactly why Oculus is ponying up $50K in prizes and teaming up with IndieCade this October for a game jam competition specifically meant to bolster that software support. One lucky dev / team will snag the grand prize of $10K and a chance to debut their game at this October’s IndieCade Festival in Los Angeles — they’ll also head out to Orange County to meet with the team at Oculus, including wunderkind Palmer Luckey.

Should you wish to get in on the VR-centric action, you’ve got the following three weeks to get things going (starting August 2nd and ending on August 25th). And if you don’t have one of Oculus’ Rift dev kits just yet, you’ll have access to playtesting at various “playtest hubs” set up worldwide (NYC and LA locations are the only two confirmed thus far, with “more locations to be announced soon”). For the full stipulations on the contest, head below.

Filed under: Gaming, Software, HD

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At some point, competition and catch-up should iron out many of the differences between rival cloud storage platforms. For now though, each option focuses on slightly different things, and Stream Nation’s main specialism is private video streaming, which it has just made accessible to users in the US, UK and elsewhere. Unlike Flickr Pro or Dropbox, for example, there’s no limit to the length or file size of a video clip that can be streamed to someone else’s browser. The service’s founder, Jonathan Benassaya, who also co-founded Deezer, says he originally designed it to help him share vacation videos with his family.

Then again, there are few hold-ups to consider: you need to install an uploader application to store photos and videos, unless you’re grabbing them from Dropbox or elsewhere on the web, and from our experience the whole process is rather slow — it took a good 20 minutes to encode a 90MB clip we brought over from Dropbox. Furthermore, you can only share a video with people who are also registered on Stream Nation, and you have to pay for anything over 2GB (or suffer the indignity of inviting all your Google contacts, which nets you a bonus 8GB). So yeah, this won’t suit everyone, especially if they need unlimited space or if their friends and family are savvy enough to know what to do with a Dropbox link, but it might just come in handy.

Filed under: Misc, Storage, Internet, HD, Mobile

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Via: LA Times, The Verge

Source: Stream Nation

It seems like everywhere we look, a Redbox is there. If you could use a helping hand to find one, though, there’s now a Windows 8 app for that. Available today, the app assists in tracking down the nearest kiosk (our guess: outside your neighborhood’s gas station), lets you reserve movies and games at the cardinal cabinets as well as watch trailers. An instant streaming app for the OS still hasn’t surfaced, but we’d even settle for an update that reminds us to return discs on time.

Filed under: HD

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Via: Windows Phone Central

Source: Windows Store

Unfortunately there’s no Syfy B-movie of the week to look forward to over the next few days, but we do have the recently returned Whose Line Is It Anyway. John Oliver is also back with another round of stand-up comics from NYC, while the Spell-mageddon game show sates our craving for a spelling bee hosted by Alfonso Ribeiro where contestants are distracted by spraying water and electric shocks Look after the break by our weekly listing of what to look out for in TV, Blu-ray and videogames.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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