Hasta La Gadget!

Though it really came to a head with the recently-launched Inspire 4G, users have noticed that there really aren’t many phones in AT&T’s stable that deliver stellar upload speeds — the Atrix 4G is suffering the same sub-megabit performance, as are older devices that should seemingly support HSUPA like the Samsung Captivate.

We’ve chatted in the past few days with a source who offers an interesting explanation: AT&T currently requires that all handsets that it sells “handshake” with the network as 3GPP Release 5 devices, the last official set of 3G specifications that lacked support for HSUPA. That feature — also known as EDCH, or FDD Enhanced Uplink — was added in Release 6. Though AT&T is apparently working on permitting the bulk of its handsets to handshake Release 6, presently only the iPhone 4 (and presumably all of its recent data devices like USB modems, which may also use Release 7) are allowed. Neither we, nor our source, know why this is. Our source believes that the Release 6 certification may happen within a “month or two,” which would explain why some AT&T sales reps in live HSPA+ areas are telling customers that the “4G network” isn’t live yet.

You can form your own conclusions as to why AT&T might be imposing this arbitrary limitation, but we do know that “enhanced” backhaul figures prominently into the company’s 4G story; there may be concerns that flipping on HSUPA for everyone right now would overwhelm its legacy infrastructure. At any rate, it sounds like this could all be solved soon through a combination of network changes and possibly firmware updates for individual devices, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

AT&T’s brewing HSUPA-gate: the inside story originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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One false alarm is bad enough, but two would be positively evil, wouldn’t it? We’re cautiously optimistic that Samsung and AT&T are serious this time about posting the Captivate’s update to Android 2.2 starting tomorrow, another step in Sammy’s long, drawn-out road to getting all of its promised Galaxy S upgrades out the door. We’re sure owners are going to appreciate some of the simple pleasures in life that Froyo (and Gingerbread) owners have come to take for granted like being able to move apps to external storage… and it’s all just hours away. Can you feel the excitement?

Update: in an official Facebook video just posted, AT&T mentions that it’s already in the process of testing a Froyo upgrade for the HTC Aria as well — and it should be coming “very soon.”

Samsung Captivate update to Froyo pegged for tomorrow, February 24th (update: HTC Aria update coming ‘very soon’) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 11:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s a story going around the past couple days that HTC’s Inspire 4G for AT&T — a phone that you would assume to be wicked fast on both uploads and downloads in light of the name — doesn’t support HSUPA, a critical element to offering reasonable uplink speeds. Turns out it’s not quite that simple. Here’s what we’re hearing from trusted sources:

• Contrary to AT&T’s official line — which is flatly that the Inspire’s specs don’t include HSUPA — the hardware most certainly does support it.
• For some reason, HSUPA has been disabled in the current firmware, but could be easily enabled in a future update if HTC and AT&T were to agree to do so. For what it’s worth, we’re not even aware of an HSPA+ chipset that lacks support for HSUPA, so that definitely sounds right.
• We’ve also been told that AT&T’s network may simply have HSUPA disabled in 4G areas. That doesn’t necessarily make sense since other HSUPA-compliant devices on AT&T (like the iPhone 4, to name an obvious example) can regularly hit HSUPA uplink speeds, but we suppose it’s possible that there’s some specific incompatibility between the infrastructure and the chipset used by the Inspire. An eerily-similar incident has happened in the past, after all.

We’ll keep our ear to the ground as we get more on this situation, but the bottom line is that hope is not lost for heavy uploaders with Inspires — we just need to find out what it’s going to take to get HTC to push an update.

AT&T’s HTC Inspire 4G can do HSUPA, has it disabled for some mysterious reason originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 21 Feb 2011 13:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you thought the lack of root on the Atrix 4G was going to save you a couple hundred bucks next week… well, we hate to break the bad news, but you’re going to need to find another excuse not to buy it (more on that in a second). Long story short, the phone’s already been rooted by a gentleman over on the ever-resourceful xda-developers forums, which means you can do all the normal things that require root access like enabling the standard Froyo mobile hotspot feature, using root apps like Titanium Backup (pictured above), and generally looking 1337 compared to your friends locked up in their walled gardens. Now, the bad news: the bootloader remains firmly locked and presumably encrypted given Moto’s track record, so custom kernels are still just a dream — but hey, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Keep the faith!

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Motorola Atrix 4G already rooted, and it’s not even out yet originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 19 Feb 2011 13:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This week’s episode of Gadget Lab covers highlights coming from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which was packed with tablets and smartphones.

The Motorola Xoom, one of the first tablets to run Android Honeycomb, finally got an official price tag: $800. It has a dual-core processor, a high-resolution screen and 4G compatibility, but would you pay that price? We doubt it, and so do many of our readers, apparently.

Another headliner at the show was Samsung’s awkwardly named Galaxy Tab 10.1. Wired.com’s Charlie Sorrel had some hands-on time with it and said the display was gorgeous, but the case felt like a cheap plastic toy.

One of the lamest tablets at the show was LG’s Optimus Pad. Most of the features are cool — a dual-core processor, front- and rear-facing cameras, and a high-resolution display — but the “3-D” spec made us roll our eyes. The 3-D mode makes images display as red and blue anaglyphs (which any computer screen could technically do), to create the cheap 3-D that’s been around for decades.

Moving on to phones, the most interesting smartphone coming from the show was the Xperia Play, which probably should’ve been called the PlayStation Phone. It plays PlayStation Portable games and includes a slide-out D-pad for controls. Pretty neat.

We take another look at the Verizon iPhone compared with the AT&T iPhone. Thousands of customers have been running bandwidth tests with the Speedtest.net iPhone app, and it looks like AT&T comes out ahead in terms of data transfer speeds — although from my previous tests, Verizon’s iPhone has been the more reliable phone.

Dylan wraps up the podcast with his favorite iPhone app of the week, Infinity Blade [iTunes], a fun slice-to-destroy 3-D game.

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Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast via iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our unholy on-camera talent, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast #104

http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0104.mp3