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If these first in-the-wild shots of T-Mobile’s upcoming Android-powered Sidekick 4G turn out to be legit — and we’ve no reason to doubt them, especially considering TmoNews‘ track record — then we’d say the carrier has done a reasonably good job porting the classic Sidekick design and pulling it into the modern age off the strength of a big display… and, of course, a modern operating system. Interestingly, word on the street is that the new model is made by Samsung, not Sharp; historically, Sharp has made all of the Sidekicks with the exception of the forgettable Slide, which was a Motorola one-off. Looks like the swivel display has been replaced by a tilt-slide, but most importantly, the device looks the same when open and closed, which should put a warm, fuzzy feeling in the hearts of old-school Sidekick users. Who’s excited?
T-Mobile Sidekick 4G in the wild, made by Samsung? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 13:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Updated: We changed the speed data to reflect carrier-reported speeds for all four carriers, on January 26, 2010 at 1 p.m. Eastern.
In 2011, wireless carriers are banking on you going 4G with your next smartphone purchase.
Verizon says it will release 10 different 4G-enabled handsets in the next year. AT&T says it will double that number, with 15 of its own offerings being Android OS-based devices. And T-Mobile, which offers a handful of 4G phones, claims its network is “America’s largest 4G network.”
But with all the wireless industry jargon being thrown around in marketing campaigns these days, it’s still unclear just what each carrier means when it touts its network as “4G.”
Let’s take a look behind the fog of marketing jargon that U.S. customers face today.
Loosely defined, 4G stands for the the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards. In the narrow terms originally defined by International Telecommunication Union standards, it doesn’t count as 4G unless it offers download speeds of 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps. That’s about 100 times faster than any speeds we’re seeing on networks now.
If we were to judge the networks available to us now by this standard, none of them would be considered 4G.
Luckily for the carriers, we aren’t judging that way — at least, not anymore. In December at the ITU World Radiocommunication Seminar in Geneva, the ITU allowed the term “4G” to “also be applied to the forerunners of these technologies, LTE and WiMax, and to other evolved 3G technologies providing a substantial level of improvement” compared to current 3G networks.
AT&T wasted no time embracing the new nomenclature, relabeling its network overnight.
And well it might, as rival T-Mobile has been using the same nomenclature for the same technology since early 2010.
Before we delve into each carrier’s offerings, let’s review the competing technologies being used today.
WiMax
Developed by the IEEE, WiMax is one of two competing technologies to blaze the 4G trail. WiMAX, also known as 802.16, is in the same family of standards as Wi-Fi. Sprint and Clearwire own the biggest share of the 2.5-GHz spectrum — “the most readily usable licensed spectrum in the United States,” according to information site WiMax.com – across which WiMax is carried.
LTE
LTE stands for long-term evolution, the leading competitor to WiMax for next-generation wireless data. Instead of expending efforts deploying a new network infrastructure — like Sprint has done and continues to do with WiMAX — LTE proponents like AT&T update existing 3G networks. While the WiMax network is more fully developed at the moment, LTE won’t be widely available until 2013, according to forecasts from both AT&T and Verizon.
HSPA+
This is where it gets a bit tricky. High-speed packet access, or HSPA, is a third-generation (3G) data technology that’s widely used today. A faster version, HSPA+, has been widely considered 3.5G, until the ITU decision in December opened up those terms to a more liberal interpretation. Sprint, Verizon and AT&T weren’t happy. The technology is an incremental approach to upgrading existing HSPA networks, not a whole new generation of technology.
Still, the ITU decision means carriers can start referring to their HSPA+ networks as 4G.
After initiating the first on-contract Galaxy Tab price cascade back in December that quickly led Sprint to respond, T-Mobile may chop subsidy prices again today for the 7-inch tablet to just under $250 (after a pesky $50 mail-in rebate). Together, that’s only $62 more than the bargain bin CherryPad, which should infuriate early adopters who paid double that only a few months ago, not to mention sober up Samsung. However, when you consider that pseudo-4G tablets like the Dell Streak 7 and LG G-Slate will join Magenta’s lineup soon, it is a viable strategy for extending the Tab’s consumer appeal in this viciously competitive Android tablet world we live in. Then again, if the dual-core processors teased for the Tab’s successor actually pan out, we doubt Samsung will need any assistance getting back to its smug position on top of the Android heap. We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled on T-Mobile’s site today and be sure to update should the price change actually materialize.
Update: A recent peek at T-Mobile’s site shows the price drop is now official. If you’re in the UK and prefer buying the Tab unsubsidized, Amazon and Tesco have also chopped their prices to a palatable £341.24 ($542) and £359.20 ($571), respectively. Thanks, Raphael and Rupert!
T-Mobile expected to cut Galaxy Tab pricing to $249.99 (update: drop is official!) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 01:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Odds are you’ll have your first chance at Honeycomb with Motorola’s Xoom next month, but LG’s G-Slate for T-Mobile — which might very well be 3D-enabled — shouldn’t be too far behind. New intel coming out of TmoNews today pegs the G-Slate for a March 23rd launch with an unknown price tag, preceded by the Dell Streak 7 on February 2nd (which is being billed as the carrier’s “first 4G tablet” thanks to its HSPA+ support) at $299.99 on contract after rebate. Turning to non-tablet news, the Galaxy S 4G — which you might recall is basically a Vibrant remixed with HSPA+ — looks line up for February 23rd. In other words, it’s going to be a busy, wallet-emptying couple months for you T-Mobile types… so save up while you can.
T-Mobile releases: Streak 7 and Galaxy S 4G in February, G-Slate in late March? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Of all the phones we didn’t expect to have a successor, T-Mobile USA’s Nuron ranks high on that list — though it was a great deal seeing how it didn’t require a smartphone data plan, the device itself offered users a pretty miserable (and unnecessarily WiFi-less) experience. New rumors suggest that the carrier had fixed its sights on Nokia’s Symbian^1-powered C5-03 as the successor to the Nuron for launch early next month… but don’t get your hopes up, because in the same breath, PocketNow reports that the project has already been killed off. No word on the logic behind the move, but the killing echoes the recent news that the X7’s AT&T debut had been axed after the two companies failed to agree on marketing and pricing. Doesn’t seem like T-Mobile would be playing those same games, but you never know.
T-Mobile’s Nokia Nuron 2 shelved? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Jan 2011 20:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
As AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity reluctantly teeters on the brink of oblivion, it seems a good time to take one last look at the smartphone playground, the way it is before V-Day. The New York Times has handily done that job for us with the above chart, which simultaneously gives us a sense of scale when comparing US carriers and lays out the concentration of Android devices across those networks. It also shows a big fat bump of iOS on AT&T, making it the biggest carrier in terms of combined iPhone and Android users — nothing shocking there, but the real fun will be in taking a look at this same data a few months from now. Will the iPhone fragment itself all over the four major networks? Will AT&T’s Android stable ever be respectable? Tune in to your next installment of “fun, but mostly irrelevant statistics” to find out.
Visualized: the state of the smartphone wars originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 22 Jan 2011 15:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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As promised, it seems that T-Mobile’s version of the Vibrant is getting Froyo today after a brutally long wait. The good news is that you won’t need to wait for a staggered rollout, apparently — but the bad news is that currently you’ll need to get it using Samsung’s Kies Mini PC app, not over-the-air. Tethered updates are always less convenient than their OTA equivalents (though Samsung continues to be particularly fond of them), and in the case of Kies Mini, there’s no Mac version, so you’ll need to be near a Windows machine to make it happen. This hasn’t been officially announced yet, though commenters over on TmoNews appear to be having luck — so if you give it a go, let us know how you fare.
Update: T-Mobile’s official FAQ on the update is up — so yeah, it’s official!
Samsung Vibrant’s Android 2.2 update now available, it seems (update: official) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 15:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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As promised, it seems that T-Mobile’s version of the Vibrant is getting Froyo today after a brutally long wait. The good news is that you won’t need to wait for a staggered rollout, apparently — but the bad news is that currently you’ll need to get it using Samsung’s Kies Mini PC app, not over-the-air. Tethered updates are always less convenient than their OTA equivalents (though Samsung continues to be particularly fond of them), and in the case of Kies Mini, there’s no Mac version, so you’ll need to be near a Windows machine to make it happen. This hasn’t been officially announced yet, though commenters over on TmoNews appear to be having luck — so if you give it a go, let us know how you fare.
Samsung Vibrant’s Android 2.2 update now available, it seems originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 15:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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We can do math, simple addition and multiplication anyway, but we have our doubts about T-Mobile. It seemed like a fairly straightforward thing to multiply $82.50 by four and take the result to determine the cost of the Dell Streak 7, but good ‘ol T-Mo says that was the result of a “technical error” and actually has no relevance to the MSRP of this here tablet. What is the actual price? Sadly we’re still just as much in the dark as you.
Update: This is of course a T-Mobile story, not Verizon, despite what the title original stated.
Estimated Dell Streak 7 price incorrect according to T-Mobile, honest to gosh MSRP coming soon originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 21 Jan 2011 11:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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