Hasta La Gadget!

Most people will have some experience of lugging around a tired handset, knowing they’ve an eternity to wait before upgrading. UK carrier O2 has just announced its solution to phone fatigue called O2 Refresh, which splits overall costs into a “Phone Plan” and an “Airtime Plan.” Much like Phones4U’s JUMP plan or T-Mobile USA’s new UnCarrier model, you’re charged for the handset separately, so you can switch whenever you like as long as the current one’s paid off. That price will vary depending on how much you lay down upfront and the Airtime Plan you choose; also, if you’re done with the old one, you can get up to £260 towards the new one using O2’s Recycle option. Unlike the Magenta carrier’s new direction in the US, however, you will still be locked into a two-year contract, with a £12 monthly payment getting you 600 mins, unlimited texts and 750MB of data. Increase that to £17 for 1GB and unlimited calls / texts, or head for the £22 tier to increase that cap to 2GB.

So, you’ve decided on the Airtime Plan, but what about handsets? There’s a solid choice of flagships (and some less exciting models), including the HTC One, Xperia Z, BlackBerry Z10, Note II, Nexus 4 and iPhone 5, with the Galaxy S 4 and BlackBerry Q10 arriving later — hopefully in time for O2’s 4G launch this “summer.” To give you an example of what Phone Plans will be like, an HTC One will set you back £529.99 (around $815) in total with a £49.99 upfront payment and £20 each month. O2 Refresh is launching April 16th in stores, and will expand to online and phone orders “in the coming months.” Head to the source link below to check out the full list of phones available at launch, but don’t blame us if the loathing you have for your current pocket pal is subsequently increased.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile

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Via: Pocket-lint

Source: O2

Main Entry: purple [pur-puhl]
Part of Speech: noun, adjective
Definition: blue and red colors mixed together
Synonyms: amaranthine, amethyst, blue-violet, bluish red, color, heliotrope, lavender, lilac, magenta, mauve, mulberry, orchid, periwinkle, perse, plum, pomegranate, reddish blue, violaceous, violet, wine

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds, Wireless, Mobile, Samsung, Sprint

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WiFi is an unintentional bully in the wireless world: as it has to be powerful and respond quickly, it tends to drown out less demanding protocols like Bluetooth and ZigBee. The University of Michigan’s GapSense software could have the format finally learning to play well with others. By instituting a common set of alerts determined by pulses and gaps, researchers could have every wireless device giving a heads-up to others when data is on the way. The trick would force patience on WiFi devices and offer a higher priority to less aggressive standards. Along with giving every device a chance to breathe, GapSense could improve the performance of WiFi itself — the technology could lower WiFi’s power draw by as much as 44 percent through slowing down the receiver, which would sometimes only have to wait for notice from the transmitter. The university doesn’t have a timetable for practical use of GapSense, but it does want to produce a shipping product. We just might see considerably less wireless gridlock should that research translate to reality.

Filed under: Wireless, Networking, Science

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Source: University of Michigan

António Abreu, a PhD Student at the MIT Portugal Program who works at LNEG (Laboratório Nacional de Energia e Geologia I.P.), has been hard at work in developing a wireless charging system that will cater for implantable medical devices. This particular project that he has been sweating over makes plenty of sense. After all, if you were to have some sort of medical implant keeping you alive, it certainly needs to run on some sort of battery power, so charging it is going to be tricky especially when it remains embedded under bone and flesh. Wireless charging is the way to go, but doing so at high energy levels could prove challenging and disastrous to the receiving device or tissue around it.

Nice to know that Abreu’s work has refined the realm of wireless medical implant charging, where his system is now capable of sending just the right amount of juice to keep them important medical implants other than traditional pacemakers going, without causing any negative impact to the patient. This is made possible by optimizing the energy flow which was determined earlier. The Prototype, as it is called, has already been patented by António Abreu in the USA and in Europe.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: AT-AT Walker Created To Help 4-Year-Old Surgery Patient, Popular Surgical Robot Being Investigated By FDA As Incidents Increase,

While executives at T-Mobile and MetroPCS may be ready to close their merger, some shareholders aren’t — major advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services has been recommending that MetroPCS investors vote against the deal unless T-Mobile can sweeten the pot. Consider it sweetened. T-Mobile’s parent Deutsche Telekom has made a “final offer” that would slash the debt owed by the post-merger company by $3.8 billion (to $11.2 billion), reduce the interest rate on that debt by half a point and prevent Deutsche Telekom from selling its shares in the merged firm for 18 months, rather than the original six. The reshuffled finances may not sound very exciting on the surface, but they’re enough to put MetroPCS in a tizzy: the carrier is delaying a shareholder vote on the deal from April 12th to the 24th to allow for some reevaluations. There’s no guarantees that the new offer is enough to please the naysayers. Still, we’d venture that T-Mobile will get a warmer reaction than the last time it tried a corporate alliance.

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

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Via: Bloomberg

Source: Deutsche Telekom IR (Twitter)