Hasta La Gadget!

So yes, it’s looking about as confirmed as can be: thanks to a full-page ad in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, we’re finding out that the name of HTC’s first LTE phone for Verizon — and its first LTE phone regardless of carrier, actually — will definitely be “ThunderBolt.” This is the same phone that we’ve seen rumored and leaked over the last few months as the Mecha and the Droid Incredible HD, but we’ll admit — ThunderBolt seems like a pretty solid name for a phone that’s sporting a 4.3-inch display and some of the fastest data around.

Behind and to the right of the ThunderBolt, though, is another leak: the Inspire 4G for AT&T, though it’s unclear what “4G” means in this context exactly — AT&T’s in the same boat as T-Mobile right now where they’re topping out with HSPA+ and don’t have any LTE markets live, so it seems they might be borrowing a play from their smaller rival’s playbook and labeling the HSPA+ airwaves as straight-up 4G. We’re sad to see that trend start to snowball — but we’ll admit, T-Mobile kinda forced their hand on that one. At any rate, we’re pretty confident both of these suckers are going to get official here at CES this week, so keep your ear to the ground.

HTC ThunderBolt for Verizon and Inspire 4G for AT&T break cover courtesy of Rolling Stone ad originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Jan 2011 00:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’d have a hard time finding a car without power windows these days and, the way things are going, it won’t be long before you’ll have to look similarly hard for a disconnected car. The latest to push the trend is BMW, signing on with AT&T to enable the next-generation of Bimmers to have an always-on connection to pull down traffic information, weather conditions, and probably some less useful stuff too. No word on which cars this will first make an appearance in nor whether it’ll allow for Leaf-like remote car maintenance nor, indeed, how much it will cost. For those answers and more you’ll just have to wait for the future — or look for a secret clue hidden in the PR below.

Continue reading AT&T to get future BMWs online, marque in danger of becoming Ultimate Downloading Machine

AT&T to get future BMWs online, marque in danger of becoming Ultimate Downloading Machine originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AT&T has a New Year’s present for any customers planning on spending the evening in New York’s Times Square or San Francisco’s Embarcadero: Huge tracts of free Wi-Fi.

Maybe that will make up for the company’s famously spotty 3G coverage in these busy urban areas.

AT&T announced Tuesday that it planned to expand a “Wi-Fi hotzone” it created in Times Square in May of this year. The “hotzone” is an extra-large area of Wi-Fi coverage, served by multiple routers, which is free for AT&T customers to use with any 802.11b/g–compatible device. The new coverage area now includes the north central part of Times Square, extending along Seventh Avenue, east along 46th Street, and along Broadway.

The company will also add hotzones near New York’s Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the coming days. It also plans to create a hotzone in San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center, an office building complex near the city’s waterfront, although it’s unclear from the announcement when this service area will turn on.

You won’t be able to make calls using Wi-Fi unless you’re using a VoIP app like Skype — so if you’re an iPhone user, don’t expect these hotzones to solve your dropped-calls problem. However, you will be able to browse the web, check e-mail, post Twitter updates, and post increasingly blurry photos of your New Year’s Eve revelries via apps like Instagram.

AT&T customers can connect their phones to the new hotzones simply by selecting the “attwifi” network. For instructions, see AT&T’s Wi-Fi information page.

Photo credit: Will Hines/Flickr

We’re not sure how many more times it must be said, but seriously people — stop texting on your cellphone while operating a gigantic vehicle at high speeds. If you’re not already convinced that driving a car and trying to tap out a message on a tiny keyboard (or heaven forbid, no keyboard at all) is a poor match, perhaps the short documentary AT&T has just released will convince you otherwise. The carrier is launching a campaign geared towards teens over the holidays leading up to New Year’s Eve in the hopes that the youth of the world will be slightly less sure of their invincibility — at least where car driving and text messaging is concerned. Sure, the video (located after the break) borders on sentimentality at times, but we’ll take a little heavy-handedness over the injury or death of human beings simply because someone couldn’t wait to tell someone else that they’d be there soon. Trust us, your friends aren’t that worried about punctuality.

Continue reading AT&T releases dramatic anti-texting while driving documentary

AT&T releases dramatic anti-texting while driving documentary originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Dec 2010 12:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Having rolled out to T-Mobile just about a year ago, Google’s celebrating the anniversary of its Android Market carrier billing feature in the US by expanding the service to AT&T. Put simply, this means that if you’re using an Android device on an AT&T line, you’ll no longer need to use a credit card — you can just bill your purchases straight to your AT&T bill, which is painless… almost too painless, really, if you’re the compulsive type. And no, we’re not aware of a way to bill a Froyo update for your Captivate to your account — but believe us, we’ll keep on looking.

Google adds AT&T billing to Android Market payment options originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 20:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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