Hasta La Gadget!

Today is the PlayBook’s official launch day in the UK, but one of the island kingdom’s biggest mobile players won’t be taking part. O2 has apparently been reaching out to subscribers who’ve expressed an interest in acquiring RIM’s 7-inch tablet on the network with word that the company “will not be selling the device.” The communiqué to those users states that “unfortunately there are some issues with the end to end customer experience,” though O2 continues to work with RIM on future PlayBook products and releases and doesn’t rule out carrying this particular slate in the future. We reached out for an official statement and the company confirmed that it has no plans to sell the PlayBook at this time. Maybe once it gets a native email client, eh?

[Thanks, Stephan]

O2 UK spurns BlackBerry PlayBook, cites issues with ‘end to end customer experience’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Jun 2011 06:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Long before Google outed Samsung’s Series 5 and Acer’s Chromebook, we’d already heard that Verizon would provide unlimited 3G coverage to the Internet giant’s netbooks, but our friends across the Atlantic still didn’t have a data carrier until yesterday. We don’t have a lot in the way of details for now, but Three UK has stepped forward as the Chromebooks’ carrier of choice for 3G data in the United Kingdom. The company is decidedly tight-lipped otherwise, but says they’ll have more details in the “next few weeks.”

Update: Well, it looks like Three has already let the cat out of the bag on this one. According to the UK’s Chrome OS site, British Chromebook users will receive a free SIM card, offering 3GB of 3G coverage for three months — see what they did there? After that, users can choose to go contract-free with a number of different pay-as-you-go plans that range from a 500MB day pass for £3 to a 7GB one-month pass for £25. More details can be found at the Chrome link below.

[Thanks, Ross & Jamie W]

Chromebooks get 3G connectivity via Three UK (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 12 May 2011 20:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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AT&T has many strategies for trying to convince the US government to let it buy T-Mobile, but the one it emphasized was this — it would attempt to make remaining carriers Verizon, Sprint and even a handful of rural entities look like “intense competition.” Well, it seems that tack hasn’t quite had the impact that the board of directors was hoping for, because it just delivered a gigantic new document to the FCC, which portrays itself as the victim of its own success. AT&T says it had to deliver 8,000 times percent more mobile data in 2010 than it did three years prior — over 10 petabytes per month these days — and foresees that it will deliver that same amount of data “in just the first five to seven weeks of 2015.”

Meanwhile, T-Mobile is the knight in shining magenta armor to save AT&T from those “severe capacity constraints,” but since AT&T can’t let regulators think that T-Mobile’s departure from the arena will result in less competition, Ma Bell simultaneously bashes its prospective conquest for having a “diminished market role” in the telecom industry and “no clear path to deploy LTE” — even as it says that acquiring T-Mobile would result in the means to spread speedy Long Term Evolution across 97.3 percent of the general population. In case you’re keeping track, that’s up from the 95 percent the company last prognosticated. The seeming contradictions here are certainly amusing, but we have to admit the promised giant LTE network tempts us quite a bit. But is it worth building a GSM monopoly to do it? Envision the repercussions for yourself — both good and ill — by studying the following links.

Update: Fixed a few math errors — AT&T processed over 10 petabytes per month (not year) in 2010, and that was 8,000 percent (not times) the amount of mobile data it carried in 2007. For comparison’s sake, the entirety of YouTube was said to have streamed 31 petabytes per month in 2008, and Hulu did 17 petabytes per month over the same time period, according to a Cisco study.

Continue reading AT&T tells FCC just how important T-Mobile is, in 381-page redacted document

AT&T tells FCC just how important T-Mobile is, in 381-page redacted document originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Apr 2011 21:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Okay, so maybe you’ll care, but you’ll still opt for the two-year option once your contract is up. That’s according — more or less, anyway — to a Verizon Wireless spokesperson, confirming to our inquiry this afternoon that the carrier’s one-year contract option will be eliminated on April 17th. The reason, as you might expect, revolves around historical customer preference. That’s a fancy way of saying that most customers prefer the stout hardware discounts that are available with a lengthier two-year agreement, and barring that, they can still choose month-to-month, prepaid or a rival. Not that VZW would encourage the latter, but hey — America’s about options, man.

Verizon Wireless killing one-year contracts on April 17th, assumes you won’t even care originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 08 Apr 2011 16:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s always one. Back in the winter of 2009, Senator Kerry made public his request for Fox and Time Warner to keep the Bowl Games online, and one Chuck Schumer took to writing an open letter to Steve Jobs regarding the iPhone reception woes that eventually led to a dedicated press event (mostly) disputing the matter. Now, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar is urging the FCC and DOJ to “take a close look at the proposed AT&T and T-Mobile merger,” noting that the outcome would undoubtedly have a huge impact on consumer choice, price and service in the wireless industry.

Of course, it’s not like these two wouldn’t be doing just that in the coming months, but it’s good to see a fire starting early in Congress to make sure due diligence is done. Having a carrier that provides service to 42 percent of all US wireless subscribers has the potential to seriously shift the economics of things, and potentially more interesting are the implications of a rejection. In fact, many are suggesting that AT&T will likely have to sell off major assets and promise expansion to rural / poor areas in order to gain approval, which ties in nicely to Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead’s own comments regarding concessions. We’re also hearing that regulators could take as long as 18 months to fully investigate, and you can bet we’ll be following the play-by-play as it all unfolds.

Senator asks DOJ and FCC to do their jobs, provide friction for AT&T / T-Mobile tie-up originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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