Hasta La Gadget!

Verizon was the first US carrier to launch (and famously fumble) its LTE rollout back in 2010, but its long road to 4G nationwide coverage has finally come to a near close. As of today, the operator’s LTE footprint now blankets more than 298 million people in 500 markets across the US, with Parkersburg, West Virginia claiming that 500th market distinction. It’s a milestone Verizon managed to achieve in a little over two years’ time, as the company’s Chief Network Officer Nicola Palmer was quick to point out. The completion of this initial LTE rollout also brings Alaska into Verizon’s coverage map as early as next month — a territory that, before today, didn’t even have 3G — marking the carrier’s network as available in all 50 states.

With a full LTE expansion, however, comes network congestion problems, as subscribers in major cities like New York are already starting to experience. Palmer assured us that solutions are currently underway to shore up capacity in these LTE markets. Verizon’s AWS holdings, in particular, should serve to augment LTE reception in select areas starting in the second half of this year. The same goes for small cell site deployment, which Palmer stressed is an LTE-only initiative. News on the carrier’s plans for LTE-Advanced remain just as vague as ever, with Palmer positioning the standard as yet another tool to enhance current LTE capacity. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t commit to a timeframe for LTE-A nor address concerns about the potential for new pricing tiers when it does eventually launch. Still, Verizon subs will at least have VoLTE (voice over LTE) to look forward to next year — that is, when it eventually clears the company’s rigorous lab and field testing.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, Verizon

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Source: Verizon Wireless

Folks, this isn’t your ordinary, average Friday. Why, you ask? Well, we’ve got a birthday to celebrate, and it’s quite a milestone at that. Today marks the 20th anniversary of the Pentium processor, which was introduced on March 22, 1993. If you’re old enough to recall, the chip ran circles around its 486DX2 predecessor, and thanks to a heavy dose of marketing from Intel, the brand quickly became synonymous with the PC. For you trivia types, the original Pentium P5 was available in 60MHz and 66MHz variants, and was manufactured with an 800-nanometer fabrication process, which is quite the contrast to the 22nm chips on the market today. Rather than burden your mind with specs, though, we’d rather celebrate — and we’re sure that you would, too. So join us past the break, where you’ll find some of the more whimsical moments in the Pentium’s storied history.

Filed under: Desktops, Intel

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Via: Slashdot

Source: V3.co.uk

Considering that China 3G network trials only started in anger in 2009, and that the figure stood at 100 million users just last year, a new report from Sina Tech that the number now stands at 202.6 million is fairly mind boggling. The launch was delayed to begin with, as operators used an alphabet soup of different wireless technology and early results were mixed at best. But the popularity of certain devices along with the advent of microblogging sites like Weibo helped the service quickly gain traction after that, and now more people there use cellphones to surf the web than computers. We’ll have to wait and see if 4G goes as well — after some early waffling, the government seems to have some newfound enthusiasm for it.

[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile

China goes from zero to 200 million 3G users in only three years originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Oct 2012 08:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Nintendo has reached a milestone today announcing that it has sold 5 million 3DS handsets since its debut in March of 2011. They’ve also announced milestone sale figures for some games including The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D(1 million), Super Mario 3D land(2.1 million) and Mario Kart 7(1.75 million).
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The BlackBerry App World is probably the least talked about app store out of the four major ones (Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Windows Marketplace), so it’s refreshing to hear some news about it. Today, RIM announced that its BlackBerry App World finally crossed the 3 billion app download milestone. The app store also now has over 90,000 apps for download which is a pretty small figure when you take into account the Windows Marketplace which hit 100,000 apps last month and it’s been around for a shorter time period.

And of course the 3 billion downloads is nothing compared to Apple’s 25 billion or Google’s 20 billion – but it does show that there are enough apps on the BlackBerry App World to generate that many downloads so it’s not too bad. However, if RIM doesn’t bring its A-game to the table (especially in the US) with BlackBerry 10, you can be pretty sure that people aren’t going to stick around long enough to increase that download counter significantly.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: BlackBerry App World 3.0 officially released, BlackBerry App World updated to 2.1,