Hasta La Gadget!

Sprint’s Dan Hesse told us point-blank back in July that he was penning a “great story around 4G” for this fall, and it looks as if October 7th will be the date that it “all becomes clear.” We just received an invitation to quite the atypical event — a “strategy update” for the press to cover in New York City. All we’re told is that presentations by senior management will be on tap, with a sure-to-be-lively Q&A session to follow. ‘Course, this may all be a ploy to waste our precious time on a precious Friday in autumn, but something tells us Sprint ain’t exactly in a position to be blowing cash on a Hot Air session. So, what’s on deck? Let’s count the possibilities: more details on its side regarding the iPhone 5? A full-on acquisition of Clearwire (plus a shift to LTE-Advanced)? More details on that elusive LightSquared arrangement? A merger with AT&T&T to create the largest telecommunications provider this side of Pluto? We’ll be there to find out, but for now, hypotheses are being accepted in comments below.

Sprint Strategy Update coming on October 7th, significant 4G plans likely to be unveiled originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The rumors were true, but given the long, torrid affair between these two it shouldn’t be a surprise. Sprint and LightSquared have confirmed their intentions to the world, stepping into a whopping 15 year agreement that will be worth $9 billion in cash for Sprint and will save LightSquared an estimated $13 billion. LightSquared will have the right to sell access to Sprint’s burgeoning LTE network, while Sprint can also piggy-back on the other’s existing capacity where needed. Additionally, LightSquared will be able to roam on Sprint’s current 3G network, opening new doors for one while helping the other accelerate its apparent transition to LTE. This is of course good news for Sprint and naturally for LightSquared, which is trying desperately to put the whole GPS fiasco behind it. The loser? Clearwire, we’d say — and WiMAX in general.

Continue reading Sprint and LightSquared confirm agreement, 15 years worth of LTE network sharing and more

Sprint and LightSquared confirm agreement, 15 years worth of LTE network sharing and more originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Jul 2011 07:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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And this, friends, is how you make the leap into the mainstream. Bigfoot Networks has been toiling away in an effort to get its gaming-optimized networking guts into just about everything — there’s also a VisionTek GPU with Killer innards, and a trifecta of mainboard makers announced that they too would be joining the bustling integration party earlier in the year. Now, however, the outfit’s really got something to hang its hat on: a handshake with Dell’s Alienware unit. The Killer Wireless-N 1103 networking adapter will now be listed as an option for the Alienware M18x, M17x, M14x and M11x, promising data rates as high as 450Mbps as well as its Advanced Stream Detect to intelligently classify and prioritize network traffic. Mum’s the word on how much the upgrade will be, but based on prior reviews, we’d say the premium will be well worth it for the hardcore among us.

Continue reading Alienware adds jitter-killing Killer Wireless-N technology to M18x, M17x, M14x and M11x

Alienware adds jitter-killing Killer Wireless-N technology to M18x, M17x, M14x and M11x originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jul 2011 08:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Facebook to launch in-browser video chat powered by Skype? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 02 Jul 2011 17:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Oh paper, ye olde guardian of human wisdom, culture, and history, why must you be so fragile and voluminous? Not a question we ask ourselves every day, admittedly, but when you’re talking about the British Library’s extensive collection of tomes from the 18th and 19th century, those books, pamphlets and periodicals do stack up pretty quickly. Thankfully, Google’s book digitization project has come to the rescue of bewildered researchers, with a new partnership with the British Library that will result in the availability of digital copies of works from that period — spanning the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions, the Crimean War, the invention of the telegraph, and the end of slavery. In total, some 250,000 such items, all of them long out of copyright, will find a home on Google Books and the British Library’s website, and Google has even been nice enough to bear the full cost of transforming them into web-accessible gems of knowledge. Jump past the break for the similarly digital press release.

Continue reading British Library and Google Books partner up to digitize 250,000 out-of-copyright works

British Library and Google Books partner up to digitize 250,000 out-of-copyright works originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Jun 2011 07:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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