Hasta La Gadget!

The media — yours truly included — has been trying to figure out why Sprint has booked an insane two-and-a-half hour slot at CTIA later this month. That’s not the kind of event you throw together just to rehash the devices you’ve introduced over the last half year — something’s up, and if our source is correct, they’re up to something big.

First, we’re hearing that the carrier will launch the Nexus S 4G from Samsung, and judging from the name, the phone should be something akin to a Nexus S with WiMAX. It seems this one could be either the SPH-D600 or SPH-D720, both of which have recently received certification from the Wi-Fi Alliance, though the SPH-D720 is more likely; the D600 shows WPS support, which is available in TouchWiz-skinned devices but not in stock Gingerbread. You might recall that Sprint came very, very close to launching its own version of the Nexus One before dropping it in favor of the EVO 4G last year, so maybe they’re ready to do the deed this time.

Next, a couple that we don’t have much detail on: the EVO 3D, which is… well, a 3D-capable EVO of some sort. 2011 is certainly shaping up to be the year of 3D phones and tablets, so that wouldn’t be much of a surprise. The other unit in the mix is the EVO View, a tablet that we’re guessing will shape up to be something of a CDMA-powered Flyer. If this all pans out, it’s looking like Sprint could own this show. CES was a bit of a dud for them, you might recall — the EVO Shift 4G was the only handset announcement there — so they’re overdue.

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

Sprint announcing Nexus S 4G, EVO 3D, and EVO View tablet at CTIA? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 06 Mar 2011 15:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung’s been waffling on Google TV for quite some time — prototypes aside — and now Bloomberg thinks it might know the reason why. According to an anonymous source, Mountain View’s been requiring that OEMs use Intel’s CE4100 chip in their television products, and as any self-respecting chipmaker might be expected to do, Samsung declined. Now, with Google TV’s efforts to break into the living room floundering, the search giant has allegedly lifted the restriction and allowed Samsung to use its own silicon, meaning we’ll likely see Google TV running on a certain dual-core ARM in the months to come. Anything to save us from Smart TV, right?

Samsung’s Google TV delayed by Intel exclusivity agreement? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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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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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Dell means business with its upcoming Windows 7 slate, if the whispers we’re hearing are true — we have it on good authority that the recently-leaked Rosemount will be a Latitude. An inside source says that the 10-inch tablet will not only sport Dell’s storied business brand but will be geared towards enterprise through and through, with features like serviceable components (including a removable battery), software encryption and the ability to perform a remote wipe, and that it’ll have a dual-digitizer to support both touch input and a stylus for fine details. We don’t know about performance or battery life quite yet, but the slate will reportedly use an Atom chip, specifically Intel’s Oak Trail, so we’ll let you imagine the possibilities.

[Thanks, Anonymous]

Dell Rosemount tablet will have Intel’s Oak Trail inside, stylus, removable battery and remote wipe originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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