AT&T bumps early-upgrade prices for all smartphones, reminds that patience is a virtue

AT&T bumps early-upgrade prices for all smartphones, reminds that patience is a virtue

The two year contract is a blessing and a curse, but looking at these updated prices from AT&T we’re thinking those upgrading early and doing so to a one year contract are quite simply doomed. AT&T has upped the price on all early-upgrade one year commitment smartphones by a whopping $150. That’s painful, but the early-upgrades are at least a little less painful. Smartphones like the iPhone are jumping by a relatively meager $50, meaning a new 32GB iPhone 4 will cost you $549 vs the previous $449. Or you could, you know, just suck it up for another 12 months.

Update: As it turns out the $150 premium is unrelated to upgrading — if you want a one year contract you’re stuck with the $150 premium, regardless.

AT&T bumps early-upgrade prices for all smartphones, reminds that patience is a virtue originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 05 Apr 2011 09:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Xperia X10 goes on sale for just a dollar on contract, Gingerbread-flavored future makes it appealing

Okay, so a couple of weeks back, we wouldn’t have cared if Best Buy was willing to give us money to carry the Xperia X10, we still would have steered clear of its flawed UI and outdated software. But Sony Ericsson did a funny thing last Friday by promising to slap Gingerbread on this 4-inch sucker, which makes its current $1 contract price an eminently more intriguing proposition. We scouted out Best Buy’s web outlet and couldn’t find the X10 listed at all, so this could very well be a final stock clearance of the handset available on a store-by-store basis. If you’re tempted to jump on what’s looking like one of the cheapest Gingerbread devices for a while, you should be aware that the Android 2.3 update won’t be dropping until the end of Q2 at the earliest, so there will be a modicum of patience required.

[Thanks, Adam]

Xperia X10 goes on sale for just a dollar on contract, Gingerbread-flavored future makes it appealing originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 Apr 2011 09:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gadget Lab Podcast: Fake ‘4G’ on AT&T Phones, Android Insecurity

          

Before the Gadget Lab crew dives into this week’s tech news, we raise our phones to celebrate the removal of Twitter’s god-awful QuickBar — that annoying black bar that appears at the top of your Twitter feed to show advertising and trending topics.

It was so putrid that people called it the “DickBar.” Fortunately, Twitter took the feedback to heart and abolished the QuickBar in its latest software update.

In other news, some customers have found that their brand-new “4G-capable” phones (such as the Motorola Atrix and the HTC Inspire) aren’t actually uploading data at 4G speeds. In fact, some of their speeds are even slower than existing 3G phones. The problem? AT&T just hasn’t flipped the switch yet to enable 4G speeds on these phones. Talk about lame.

We’re disappointed that there likely won’t be an iPhone 5 from Apple this summer, even though we’ve gotten a new iPhone every summer for the past four years. We’re guessing it’s because the white iPhone 4 still hasn’t shipped due to production problems, and Apple wants to give that model some shelf life before introducing an iPhone 5. Plus, a Verizon iPhone only just came out recently.

On the Android front, Amazon opened an Android Appstore last week, and many people probably don’t realize the security risks involved in shopping in Amazon’s store. Getting apps from a third-party app store such as Amazon’s requires checking off an option to enable installations from unknown sources, which can subject you to harmful malware, just like a Windows PC browsing the web.

Already this week, we’ve seen a trojan horse appear inside third-party app stores threatening to infect Android phones allowing installations from unknown sources.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast on iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our ugly mugs, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds. Thanks for listening and watching!

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast No. 110

http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0110.mp3


AT&T’s Fake 4G Phones May Actually Get Real 4G Soon [At&t]

It’s been well documented that AT&T’s 4G phones aren’t just slow—their upload speeds are often slower than its 3G network. So what happened to that extra G? Turns out it’s not the network itself that’s borked; it’s the phones. AT&T has intentionally crippled the Motorola Atrix and HTC Inspire—the carrier’s only fourth-gen network phones—by actively disabling the handsets’ HSUPA capability. Gross. But there may be sweet relief coming soon. More »

Crippled Phones Reveal AT&T Isn’t Ready for 4G

The Motorola Atrix is one of two phones with disabled HSUPA.

After Texas resident Keith Geissler noticed his new Motorola Atrix wasn’t offering the fast “4G” download and upload speeds that AT&T promised, he filed a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, asking the wireless company to “uncap” his data connection.

AT&T’s response was surprising. While the company assured Geissler it “has not capped the upload speeds on the Atrix,” it did admit that the phone’s HSUPA capability — a key feature in increasing upload speeds on the Atrix as well as the new HTC Inspire 4G smartphone — will not be enabled until a later date.

That means all upload speeds on the Atrix and the Inspire will max out at around 300 Kbps, far below that of the 5.5+ Mbps speeds that HSUPA is capable of uploading. (Geissler wasn’t happy to hear any of this, and posted the exchange to an online message board focused on smartphones.)

‘The concept of 4G is a joke. It’s nothing but marketing now.’

In other words, it’s not a hardware issue. It’s AT&T itself, which isn’t ready to flip the switch to turn on “4G” networks, even though it’s already selling 4G phones. Is anyone surprised?

“The concept of 4G is a joke now,” Gartner Research VP Phil Redman told Wired.com. “At the highest level, it’s supposed to be a technology standard, but it’s nothing but marketing now. If and when 4G-standardized technology is actually decided upon and released, we’ve been inundated with this jargon for so long we may not even recognize it.”

The term “4G speed” seems open to interpretation. Since the International Telecommunications Union — the global authority on telecommunications- and broadband-industry standardization – revised its ruling on what defines 4G network speeds in December 2010, carriers have jumped on the opportunity to market many new smartphones as 4G-enabled. Their definitions have been liberal, to say the least.

For AT&T, part of “4G” compatibility involves having HSUPA speeds. AT&T has been mostly evasive as to why HSUPA has been disabled in the Atrix and HTC Inspire 4G smartphones. The company claims it is performing “the testing and preparations necessary” for users to enjoy the HSUPA capabilities when the function is turned on by phone update.

To add insult to injury to Android users expecting 4G speeds, many iOS counterpart devices using AT&T’s 3G network are indeed HSUPA-enabled.

“Not to twist the dagger that’s already in our backs on this one,” said one forum user at XDA Developers, “as many know, the iPad 2 came out today and guess what … HSUPA enabled.”

Also HSUPA ready: the iPhone 4, a device using AT&T’s 3G network.

So when can we actually expect 4G upload speeds from these “4G” phones? AT&T gave Wired.com a rough street date of next month.

“We will be turning HSUPA upload speeds on via a software update to the Motorola ATRIX 4G and HTC Inspire 4G planned for April,” a spokesman said. He also added that “the Samsung Infuse 4G will launch with HSUPA.”

AT&T isn’t the first to fudge facts on its data practices. In the weeks before the iPhone’s release on the Verizon network in February, the carrier published a document that said the top 5 percent of data users on the network may have their data speeds reduced “to ensure high-quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand.”

As Wired.com’s Brian X. Chen reported, “One of Verizon’s selling points for its version of the iPhone is that it would come with an unlimited data plan — a marked contrast to AT&T, which eliminated its unlimited data plans last year.” But when a company’s shifty data-throttling practices are “disclosed” in unpublicized PDF files, Chen’s assertion that “you just can’t trust wireless carriers” proves accurate.

AT&T obviously hasn’t claimed the lack of HSUPA-enabling in the two phones to be a data-throttling technique. But until we hear reasons beyond “network testing and preparation,” we won’t be so quick to believe them.

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iPad 2 sliced up again, this time in the name of radio science

By now you’ve probably watched iFixit’s recent iPad 2 teardown video several times while drooling profusely, but we just know you’re itching to find out what’s different with the innards of the WiFi-only, GSM, and CDMA versions. Well once again, iFixit’s got you covered — via an “exceptionally cool” user-contributed post, this time. A grand total of three iPad 2s were sacrificed in this round, revealing variations in case design, antenna count, WWAN board layout, radio chipset choices, and headphone jack assemblies. Besides clearly visible changes like the black antenna window on the 3G models and the microSIM slot on the GSM version, it’s interesting to note that Apple made the same design choices with the iPad 2 and the iPhone 4. The CDMA model features an additional antenna over its GSM sibling, and uses a Qualcomm Gobi dual-mode radio which supports both CDMA and GSM — the latter being unused — along with an integrated GPS receiver, just like the iPhone 4 for Verizon. The GSM version, meanwhile, uses an Infineon chipset for GSM and a separate Broadcom module for GPS, just like the global iPhone 4. Follow the source link below for more sordid details plus high-resolution pictures.

iPad 2 sliced up again, this time in the name of radio science originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Mar 2011 03:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sprint Urges DoJ and FCC to Ban AT&T Takeover of T-Mobile

It almost goes without saying that Sprint has probably been opposed to AT&T’s recent proposed purchase of rival cell phone carrier T-Mobile.

Now it’s official.

On Monday afternoon, Sprint issued a press release publicly condemning the potential merger between the two carriers, asking the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission. In the release, the company claims a takeover of this proportion “would reverse nearly three decades of actions by the U.S. government and the courts that modernized and opened U.S. communications markets to competition.”

The argument cites an approval as very bad news for Sprint, which would rank in last place in U.S. wireless providers behind Verizon and AT&T if the deal went through:

AT&T and Verizon are already by far the largest wireless providers. If approved, the proposed acquisition would create a combined company that would be almost three times the size of Sprint in terms of wireless revenue and would entrench AT&T’s and Verizon’s duopoly control over the wireless market. The wireless industry moving forward would be dominated overwhelmingly by two vertically integrated companies with unprecedented control over the U.S. wireless post-paid market, as well as the availability and price of key inputs, such as backhaul and access needed by other wireless companies to compete.

But the statement reads as an appeal almost as much to the general public as it does to the government agencies monitoring the case. The company claims the “Ma Bell duopoly” created by the potential takeover will harm consumers “at a time when the country can least afford it.”

AT&T’s statement of intent, issued on March 20, defends the deal in a more attractive appeal to rural cellular subscriber, claiming the extension of coverage to “95% of the U.S. population,” or an “additional 46.5 million Americans, including [those] in rural, smaller communities.”

The deal is still being reviewed by the DoJ and the FCC.

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The Thinking Machines flashes back to 1968 for a lesson in computer logic, sideburns (video)

Another dusty gem’s emerged from the vintage gold mine that is AT&T’s Tech Channel archive, and this one’s packed full of useful information and some classic Jetsons-style animation. The Thinking Machines pits man against computer to explain how the things reason, and it does so with a soundtrack that’s straight out of, well, 1968. Unsurprisingly, the film’s populated by giant, button-laden switchboards, early computer graphics, ladies sporting beehives, and gents rocking unfortunate facial hair, but if that doesn’t do it for you, it also offers genuine pearls like this: “Best of all, they never get bored. Like other machines, they can do the same monotonous chores all day long without complaining.” Someone should tell that to the disgruntled Roomba residing in our hall closet. Check out the full video in all its dated glory after the break.

Continue reading The Thinking Machines flashes back to 1968 for a lesson in computer logic, sideburns (video)

The Thinking Machines flashes back to 1968 for a lesson in computer logic, sideburns (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 03:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Shocker! Sprint officially opposes AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile

Yes, you read that right. Sprint is actually going out on a limb and officially opposing AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile USA. Apparently, it thinks that the transaction would “reduce competition and harm consumers” if it’s allowed to go through, and it’s vowing to “fight this attempt by AT&T to undo the progress of the past 25 years and create a new Ma Bell duopoly.” It further goes on to note that the combined company would be almost three times the size of Sprint in terms of wireless revenue, and that it and Verizon would “overwhelmingly dominate” the US wireless industry and have “unprecedented control” over the post-paid market. Full press release is after the break.

Continue reading Shocker! Sprint officially opposes AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile

Shocker! Sprint officially opposes AT&T’s proposed acquisition of T-Mobile originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Mar 2011 16:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rumor: Google and LG to Team Up on Android Nexus Tablet

Korean electronics manufacturer LG may be working on a Google-branded "Nexus" tablet.

Google is preparing its own hardware entry into the Android tablet market in collaboration with device manufacturer LG, according to a report circulating Monday morning.

The device will be an LG-made “Nexus” tablet, Google’s signature product name for its collaborations with independent hardware manufacturers, the report says.

The tablet could be complete by mid-summer to early autumn, according to speculation from tech site Mobile Review. The site did not disclose any further details or hardware specifications on the speculated device. One caveat: the LG-produced device could just be a prototype used internally by Google for development, as noted by The Boy Genius Report.

Google did not respond to our request for comment on the matter.

If a Google-branded tablet hits market, this wouldn’t be Google’s first entry into branding devices from outside manufacturers. Google’s previous Nexus devices include the HTC-manufactured Nexus One smartphone, which was widely regarded as a failure after lackluster sales and a lukewarm reception from the general public. The Samsung-produced Nexus S followed in late 2010, a phone that garnered much hype upon its initial release, but has been passed over by the myriad 2011 smartphone releases, which boast beefier hardware profiles and heftier ad campaigns.

A Google-branded Nexus tablet may have a better chance at success than its smartphone Nexus predecessors, however. Among other reasons, the Nexus One’s difficulties lay in AT&T’s and Verizon’s unwillingness to subsidize the handset — only T-Mobile (the carrier in last place in the U.S. in terms of adoption) backed the release.

While carrier subsidies can help sales, a new tablet’s popularity isn’t necessarily contingent on whether or not the major carriers are willing to play ball. Wi-Fi only versions of tablets like Apple’s iPad and the Motorola Xoom are sold at significantly lower prices than their 3G network-enabled counterparts, which means more potential sales without the headache of carrier choosing for customers.

But any new entry into the already crowded tablet market must take into account other factors, including a healthy media ecosystem and competitive pricing. Currently, the Android Market hosts over 200,000 apps for download, with many more available on independent, unofficial markets. Apple’s app store is home to double that amount at over 400,000. Recent improvements to Android’s payment system such as the launch of its web-based Android Market in February, however, could give Google more traction in developing its app environment.

LG is already producing its own Android-based tablet in collaboration with Google, the brevity-lacking “T-Mobile G-Slate with Google by LG.” The G-Slate will run Android version 3.0 (Honeycomb), and will be capable of playing and recording 3D and full HD video content.

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