Hasta La Gadget!

During Intel’s press conference today, we got a brief glimpse into how Intel’s smartphones are fairing globally. The noticeable gap, however, was the US. Answering questions during a Q&A session following the Computex keynote, Tom Kilroy, Executive Vice President of Sales said that there was a major reason why it was lacking US carrier support: LTE.

“Absence of LTE is the reason. We can’t get ranged by US carriers without LTE, so once we have multi-mode LTE coming to market later this year, we’ll have an opportunity to compete in that business.”

While we’ve seen Intel add 4G radios to its Atom processors for global-roaming tablets, there’s no news yet of the capability launching on its smartphone designs. Last year, Intel launched a Medfield-powered version of Verizon’s RAZR M in Europe and Asia, under the RAZR i branding and with only 3G radios.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Intel

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At last, Intel finally has its very own LTE modem chip! Intel’s Computex 2013 press conference is going on right now, and a company press release states we’ll see a 4G LTE multimode solution paired with its 22nm quad-core Atom SoC for tablets. The XMM 7160 will bring Bay Trail tablets (demonstrated on stage running graphically intense games and streaming 4K video over the integrated LTE) with global roaming capability “towards the end of the back to school season.” While it’s not clear when consumers can get their hands on this technology, hopefully we’ll see something pop up on our end before the end of the year. The talk is still ongoing and we should have more details shortly, check out the press release after the break for now.

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, Intel

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Source: Intel

It’s no surprise, really. Offline devices just don’t carry the allure that they once did, and in fact, yours truly would argue that they simply lack the requisite functionality to become runaway hits in the modern era. It’s genuinely difficult to think of a flagship consumer electronics product, with a display of any kind, being engineered in the year 2013 without at least some level of internet connectivity in mind. Even a Kickstarter dream dubbed Pebble would be borderline useless without an online link, and as consumer demands shift dramatically towards expecting more for less, it’s the carriers who have found themselves positioned to take advantage.

Verizon has joined a host of other megacorps in launching so-called innovation centers across the world. Earlier this year, Samsung committed $1.1 billion to create a pair of Open Innovation Centers — temporary homes for upstarts looking to woo Sammy’s check writers into believing in their technology. In 2011, AT&T’s Palo Alto, Calif.-based Foundry innovation center joined similar entities already running in Texas and Israel. In a nutshell, these facilities exist solely to ensure that pretty much everything with a circuit board also ships with an AT&T radio. Microsoft, Intel and Vodafone have all done likewise in the past three years.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Verizon’s first Innovation Center — a sprawling facility located squarely in Massachusetts’ famed Route 128 technology corridor. The center opened in Waltham in the middle of 2011, and now enables roughly 25 employees to “largely operate outside” of what you probably associate with the word “Verizon.” What I found was the world’s greatest case against the existence of a “dumb pipe” — a phrase often used to describe carriers that do little more than provide access to a network. No structured technical support, no humans on the other side, no bloatware on the devices they sell. Companies who show up looking for aid in the art of interconnectedness face no fees, no risk of surrendering intellectual property and no requirements of exclusivity. This is the future of the wireless carrier: an increasingly vital component in making tomorrow’s whiz-bang gadget one that this generation will actually crave.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Verizon

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If you didn’t get enough mobile news during the week, not to worry, because we’ve opened the firehose for the truly hardcore. This week, a new addition to the LG L-Series surfaced in Russia, a Lumia 920 was sighted that’d make Oscar the Grouch flip, and TalkTalk added three new devices from Huawei to its roster. These stories and more await after the break. So buy the ticket and take the ride as we explore all that’s happening in the mobile world for this week of May 27th, 2013.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Software, Mobile

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Samsung’s new Galaxy S4 Mini, announced earlier today, will be offered in LTE form in the UK, it’s been confirmed. The new, smaller iteration of the flagship Galaxy S 4 would be offered in three forms depending on market, Samsung had said today, with 3G, dual-SIM 3G, and 4G variants; now, the UK’s only current 4G carrier, EE, has weighed in with confirmation that it will be offering the smartphone.

“We can confirm we plan to stock the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini from launch” an EE spokesperson told us today. “It will be available on our superfast 4GEE service.” Meanwhile, the phone will also be available on 3G-only networks Orange and T-Mobile, which are part of the combined EE network.

Although it shares the name of the Galaxy S 4, the Mini version does make some significant departures from that handset’s flagship specifications. For instance, the 4.3-inch display runs at just qHD resolution – 960 x 540 – rather than the 1920 x 1080 of the full-sized phone. Inside, too, there’s a compromise to be made, with the Galaxy S4 Mini running a 1.7GHz dualcore chip rather than the quadcore of its bigger brother.

The camera also sees a compromise, mustering 8-megapixels rather than 13-megapixels. A single storage option has been confirmed at this stage – just 8GB, of which around 5GB is available to the user – though there’s still a microSD slot to add to that. It’s worth remembering that apps can’t be installed to microSD, however.

What none of the networks are saying is how much the Galaxy S4 Mini will cost, nor indeed when exactly it will hit their shelves. Those details may have to wait until Samsung’s “Premiere 2013″ event in late June, when the Mini will be one of a number of new devices – running both Android and Windows – we’re expecting to see.

Galaxy S4 Mini will support UK LTE confirms EE is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
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