Hasta La Gadget!

While Apple had its preorders primed since 8am BST, British carriers have only just unveiled their monthly prices for the newest iPhone. Vodafone will offer it on contracts from £25 per month — with an initial £249 outlay) or free on £47 per month for two years. That free deal will net you a 16GB iPhone 5, with 2GB of data, unlimited texts and voice minutes. On Orange, a 24-month contract at £46 will nab you the same 16GB model for free, with 3GB of data and unlimited calls and texts. If you drop down to the £20 rate, you’ll have to pay £320 upfront and pick up a lightweight bundle of 100MB of data, 50 texts and 50 minutes. EE stablemate T-Mobile isn’t offering any free iPhones on its carrier plans, but you’ll be able to glean unlimited internet (alongside 2000 voice minutes) on a 16GB iPhone 5 for £109 and £36 per month on contract.

Confusingly, anyone looking to grab the UK’s first LTE network on the iPhone 5 will have to sign up to a “4GEE from EE” plan — which still hasn’t revealed its pricing. We’re checking with EE whether customers that decide to grab a new contract with Orange or T-Mobile will still be able to migrate across — we’d hold off on that pre-order until we hear back from the new 4G network. (Edit: See update below for clarification.) Meanwhile, Three UK currently has the 16GB iPhone on its unlimited data One Plan at £79 upfront, on a £36 per month deal. We’ll update again once we hear O2’s plans.

Update: EE has been in touch to clarify matters:

“Customers can either wait for EE to launch (we will be announcing the date in the coming weeks) or they can sign up to a contract with T-Mobile or Orange and upgrade to EE free of charge once it has launched, as long as they move to an equivalent priced and length plan
on EE.”

Update 2: Phones4U is taking its own pre-orders for those who want to enlist with Orange, T-Mobile or Vodafone. O2 has also chipped in with its details and is offering the iPhone 5 on plans starting from £26 per month; like Orange, you’ll have to opt for at least a £46 monthly outlay to get one for free. The O2 plans offer the same unlimited voice and texts, but just 1GB of data. Lastly, Carphone Warehouse has chipped in with its own advance order campaign, although it’s only taking online orders for the 16GB black iPhone at this stage: you’ll need to call in for everything else.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

iPhone 5 contract prices for UK phone networks revealed (updated with O2, Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Sep 2012 04:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re still struggling to decide which carrier to use for your iPhone 5, you may have had some of the decision made for you. Following statements by Verizon that hinted simultaneous voice and data still wouldn’t be an option despite the inclusion of LTE, which theoretically frees up CDMA for calls, we’ve confirmed with Apple spokesperson Natalie Harrison that this is indeed the case. It’s “not yet possible” to do side-by-side CDMA voice and LTE data on a “single-radio” design like the iPhone 5, she says. That’s technically true, although it may be a case of Apple wanting to keep hardware differences to a minimum between CDMA and GSM users. AnandTech founder Anand Lal Shimpi tells the New York Times that Verizon phones like the Galaxy S III, which don’t have this limit, follow a different approach: where Apple uses a second antenna to improve overall reception for a single connection, Samsung and other phone makers use theirs to keep both data and voice flowing in harmony. While it’s a tradeoff with its own benefits, the choice means that iPhone 5 units for Verizon, Sprint, and every other CDMA carrier still won’t let you check your e-mail in mid-call without WiFi. If that’s an issue, you’ll have to turn to AT&T (or T-Mobile with an unlocked phone) to get your fix.

Filed under: Cellphones

Apple confirms iPhone 5 won’t do simultaneous voice and LTE data on CDMA networks originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Sep 2012 20:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As things stand, empty voids at the top and bottom of an iPhone or iPad display come as standard with every widescreen video you might care to watch — a problem that almost persists with the iPhone 5, since that phone’s elongated panel is still a few pixels off 16:9. However, judging from paperwork recently filed with the USPTO, which mentions both mobile and TV displays, Cupertino thinks it has a general workaround: using a Photoshop-style technique to copy colors from each frame of video and use them to sympathetically fill in the letterbox bars, mimicking the appearance of full-screen footage.

The latest application — filed in January of this year — actually builds on an earlier one that Apple first submitted in 2006, when the original iPhone was in development. Since then, various other companies have had success with similar display-extending ideas, such as Ambilight on Philips TVs and the illuminated strip on an Xperia U smartphone, but nothing exactly like this smart-fill concept has so far taken off. Ultimately, the question is whether messing with the borders of a video clip in this manner would look better or just plain awkward. As yet, thorough testing in our mind’s eye remains inconclusive, but it’s almost easier to imagine this curing letterboxed apps (of which we’ll soon see plenty on iOS) rather than video.

Filed under: Cellphones, Displays, Home Entertainment, Mobile

Could this be Apple’s solution to the iPhone letterboxing issue? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Sep 2012 16:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Don’t worry about Cricket hogging the spotlight during the second wave of the iPhone 5’s US launch. C Spire, Appalachian Wireless and Alaska’s GCI have also promised to carry Apple’s taller smartphone on the same September 28th date. Details of the arrival will have to wait, although they’re not likely to veer sharply from the prices and rates that carriers were setting back in the iPhone 4S days. There are a few gaps in the narrative versus the earlier releases: we have yet to see news from GCI’s Alaskan neighbors as well as Cellcom or nTelos, for example. The plan is nonetheless a sign that Apple wants to blanket the American landscape with new iPhones as quickly as possible.

[Thanks, Colby]

Update: Not surprisingly, nTelos has also confirmed (PDF) that it’s hopping aboard the September 28th iPhone 5 train.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

C Spire, regional carriers join the iPhone 5 deluge on September 28th originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Brits ready to stake their preorder claim this Friday might have a harder time deciding between the myriad of networks offering the device. While all of the major UK carriers will be ready to offer you the iPhone 5, that LTE radio will only be working on the newly-christened EE from the start, with Three likely to use that purchased spectrum (after getting the okay from Ofcom) to similar effect in the near-future. Unfortunately for Vodafone and O2, the forthcoming Ofcom spectrum auction is gearing up to sell off the 800MHz (Band 20) and 2.6GHz (Band 7) frequencies — neither of which are found on Apple’s multiple iPhone 5 models, and the latter being a bigger problem in Europe and Asia, where LTE networks already make use of the 2.6GHz frequency. However, Apple have followed up an initial phone launch with additional network-specific models before — so there’s a slim chance we could see another model at a later date. All the UK carriers are keeping their contract prices a tightly-guarded secret at the moment, but we’ll update as soon as we hear more. Meanwhile, those on that little European isle can expect to pay £529 for the entry-level iPhone 5 from the source when pre-orders start this Friday.

Update: Pocket-lint‘s been told that those looking to grab the EE iteration will need to initially register with either Orange or T-Mobile, with your service bizarrely migrating across on a later, as-yet unconfirmed, date. This is because its new 4G network won’t be ready when the iPhone 5 first hits shops on September 21st. Before that, you’ll have to make do with HSPA+ speeds.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

LTE iPhone 5 coming to EE and Three in UK, but not O2 and Vodafone originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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