Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve been looking to get your hands on Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy Gear, boom, they’re here. The company has kicked off another of its world tours to announce availability of its 5.7-inch smartphone and new smartwatch in 58 countries. In the UK, an unlocked Galaxy Note 3 will set you back £649 but it’s also available on nearly all of the major carriers (we’re still waiting to hear from Three) — starting at around £30 on a traditional contract, or free if you decide to sign up to a new early-upgrader tariff. The Galaxy Gear retails at £299, but Samsung thinks you could use a £100 discount if you bundle it with an unlocked Galaxy Note 3, for a total cost of £848. Customers in the US, Canada and Japan, however, will have to wait ’til October — though pre-orders are already open.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Samsung

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Source: Phones4U, O2

Samsung and others have promised to deliver TV over 4G using the LTE Broadcast standard, and it looks like you can now also add AT&T to the list of those hoping to make it a reality. Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference today, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson confirmed that the carrier intends to use the slice 700MHz spectrum it acquired from Qualcomm back in 2011 for an LTE Broadcast network of its own designed to deliver video to LTE-enabled devices (and lighten the load on the rest of its wireless network in the process). Stephenson didn’t offer too many more details than that, however, saying only that the carrier is now almost “all about architecting networks to deliver video,” and that we can expect to see the technology “mature in scale within the three-year time horizon.” As Fierce Wireless notes, Verizon has also said that it hopes to deploy some type of LTE Broadcast service in time for the 2014 Super Bowl, although it, too, has remained light on specifics beyond that.

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

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Via: Electronista

Source: Fierce Wireless

It’s a small miracle that you can open up your laptop and surf the web while soaring through the air in a metal tube some seven miles above the ground, but the experience is inconsistent, and when it works, the connection is often frustratingly sluggish. That’s about to change.

Once focused on undercutting the competition, JetBlue is now best known for its in-flight product: complimentary snacks, 36 channels of free DirecTV and friendly flight attendants. This year, the airline is undergoing a service alteration of sorts. The traditionally all-coach carrier will soon cater to business travelers with a bed-equipped premium cabin, and by the end of next year, all customers will be able to surf the web from 36,000 feet with speeds that rival (or often exceed) what we’re used to on the ground. That new service, powered by ViaSat, is called Fly-Fi, and it’s hitting the skies this November.

We spent a day with JetBlue’s subsidiary, LiveTV, the company responsible for providing in-flight entertainment (IFE) on more than 600 aircraft, including 188 JetBlue planes and some 200 United 737s. If you’ve watched DirecTV while flying either of those airlines, it’s LiveTV that put it there, and soon, the Florida-based firm will be responsible for getting you online, too. Fly-Fi, and its to-be-named United equivalent, will deliver up to 12 Mbps of data — not to the aircraft, but to each and every passenger on board. Join us aboard JetBlue’s first Fly-Fi-equipped Airbus A320 after the break.%Gallery-slideshow90014%

Filed under: Transportation, Wireless, Internet

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In our review of the Moto X, we determined that while its ClearPixel camera was decent, its performance was hit or miss. Fortunately, Motorola has taken a lot of feedback and has cranked out a software update with improvements to the camera’s performance, specifically in the areas of exposure, color accuracy and focus speed. The refresh, which is so far getting pushed out to T-Mobile phones — we expect it to roll out to other carriers as soon as each one is done testing the new firmware, though nothing is currently confirmed — appears to make a rather substantial difference in several scenarios, such as reducing noise in low-light and eliminating haze in outdoor shots. Anandtech’s Brian Klug had the opportunity to take the updated shooter for a test run and declared it to be “nothing short of the biggest [improvement] I’ve ever seen come across in an OTA update.”

In addition to the camera improvements, Motorola also threw in a few other enhancements as well. Users who have downloaded the update should expect increased Touchless Control accuracy, a fix for the choppy audio issue some have experienced in voice calls and an improvement to Moto Assist as well.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, Google, T-Mobile

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Source: Anandtech

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 brought additional details of the upcoming Jolla smartphone, along with an unusual showing of cooperation between Verizon and T-Mobile. These stories and more await. So buy the ticket and take the ride as we explore all that’s happening in the mobile world for this week of September 16th, 2013.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile

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