Ahead of iPhone 5, AT&T-Verizon battle heats up

(Credit: Apple)

CNET - The second-quarter earnings report from AT&T is out today, revealing that the company activated 3.7 million iPhones, with 22 percent new to the company.

AT&T also posted its best-ever churn rate -- 0.97 percent for postpaid devices like the iPhone -- and total smartphone sales of 5.1 million, a third of them 4G-capable devices.

But it's the iPhone number that's most interesting. AT&T, of course, was the first American carrier to offer the industry-leading Apple device, and it enjoyed a domestic monopoly on four generations of the phone from June 2007 to February 2011. After that, Verizon joined the fray with the iPhone 4. Sprint followed later that year.

Much ink has been spilled about declining iPhone sales in the face of stiff competition from Google devices, and that's certainly an interesting angle. Just as interesting is AT&T's continued hold on the iPhone crown, five generations in -- and its slipping grip with each passing quarter.    More

The $99 Sony Xperia Ion for AT&T

CNET - 

The good: The affordable Sony Xperia Ion has solid call quality and swift 4G LTE that ties into Sony's vast entertainment empire.

The bad: Lackluster images and video belie the Xperia's claimed 12MP camera. It's also held back by an old processor and an outdated OS.

The bottom line: The $99.99 Sony Xperia Ion looks like a good Android deal but its weaknesses make it not worth even the budget price.

Read the Full Review

3G/4G Performance Map: Data Speeds for AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon

 

PCWorld - See our neighborhood-by-neighborhood test results for 127 locations in 13 cities. Click the map for raw speeds, as well as Web page and video load times. 

In our April 16 article "3G and 4G Wireless Speed Showdown," we reported the results of our exclusive 13-city tests of the four national wireless services: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Our study is the largest and best-known independent test of wireless service in the United States.

Here, in Part Two of our story, we drill deeper into the massive amounts of data that we collected over six weeks in February and March of this year. Whereas the first article reported the 13-city average speeds of the carriers, in this story we detail the carriers' performance in each of the ten testing locations we visited in each city.

We've assembled a full-page map showing all 127 of our testing locations in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. When you zoom in on a particular city, you'll see ten blue map markers--one for each place we tested. Click the pin, and you'll see our full testing results for that location.

T-Mobile's HSPA+ 21 service dominated the 3G testing, earning the highest marks for upload speed and download speed in 11 of the 13 cities we studied. The exceptions were Chicago (where AT&T captured the best download and upload speeds for 3G) and Dallas (where AT&T took the lead for 3G downloads, and Verizon won for 3G uploads).

 
Photograph by Robert Cardin


We saw three major patterns in our 4G test results. In five cities (Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), AT&T swept the 4G upload and download competitions; in four (Denver, New Orleans, San Jose, and Seattle), Verizon swept both; and in the remaining four (Chicago, Dallas, New York, and Washington, D.C.), AT&T won for downloads and Verizon prevailed for uploads. Notably, in two of the cities where Verizon ruled (Denver and Seattle), AT&T doesn't offer 4G LTE service.

Web Page and Video Load Times

 

In addition to the speed results, you can see the results of our "behavioral" tests, which are meant to closely approximate the wireless usage of real people. At each of our testing locations, our field researcher loaded a 100KB static Web page and viewed a 1-minute video while connected to each of the 3G and 4G services of the carriers. For each one, the researcher logged the time the Web page took to load, as well as the time necessary to stream the video.       More

 

Where can you get 4G?

Editors’ note: This chart was originally published on Dec. 2, 2010. It has been updated with new information.

With AT&T finally announcing its first LTE markets, 4G (or some form of it) has finally made it to all of America’s major carriers. But just as is the case with regular cell phone coverage, the scope and scale of each carrier’s 4G network vary widely. Some cover a lot of ground and some cover barely any at all. As a result, it can take a lot of effort to determine where in the country you can find high-speed data access and how the different carrier networks contrast and overlap.

To save you time, we’ve compiled a handy chart that details 4G coverage for Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, MetroPCS, and AT&T. Verizon has been the most aggressive with its rollout, but in most major cities, and many medium-size and smaller markets, you can get 4G from at least two wireless providers. Almost all 50 states are covered, with just five–Alaska, Wyoming,

Montana, Maine, and Vermont–left out (a corner of southeastern New Hampshire gets coverage from the Boston market).

Now, we know what you’re saying about T-Mobile: though it can be just as fast as WiMax, its HSPA+ technology isn’t really 4G. That’s certainly true, but if you want to get technical, neither are LTE and WiMax as they currently exist. And regardless of definitions, we included T-Mobile’s network because it is the carrier’s fastest network at the time of this writing.

Now before you move on to the chart, there are a couple of other things you should know. For most metro areas, you can assume that neighboring cities and immediate suburbs are covered as well, even if we don’t list them separately. So, for example, even though T-Mobile lists Bethesda, Md., and Alexandria, Va., as distinct HSPA+ markets, we included them under Washington, D.C. Similarly, Oakland and San Jose, Calif., are listed under the San Francisco Bay Area. We also grouped together cities with common associations like Dallas/Ft. Worth and Minneapolis/St. Paul. Please let us know if we missed a carrier’s 4G presence in your area or if we missed your town entirely.              See the coverage chart

AT&T’s New Text Plan Overcharges You by 10,000,000 Percent. Literally.

Gizmodo - AT&T’s killing their $10/1,000 text plan. Now, you’ll have to choose between $20 for unlimited, or forgo a plan and pay $0.20 per message. AT&T calls this “streamlining.” We call it what it is: an outrageous, gigantic scam.

It’s important to note, before considering anything SMS, that text messages are essentially free. Not for you, of course, but for companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. Unlike uploading a video to YouTube from your phone, which eats mobile bandwidth, text messages ride the same itsy bitsy communication channel your handset uses to check in with local towers to make sure it’s turned on. Each text hitches a ride on an infinitesimally small data packet, chugging through traffic that would’ve been there anyway. For AT&T, it’s basically a freebie—160 bytes of data. A trifle. Compared to the rest of what they’re transmitting, AT&T’s texts are like amoebas on the back of a tyrannosaurus.

For you, it’s quite the opposite. For you, text messages cost money. A lot of money. How much money? Well that all depends. Starting next week, the only texting options for new AT&T subscribers will be a $20/month unlimited buffet, or paying per text, which is insane.

And here’s why it’s insane. Absolutely, skull-implodingly, village-razingly, jump-out-your-window-into-spikes insane.

AT&T offers a 2 gigabyte per month phone data plan for $25. By breaking this down, we can find out how much they think each text’s worth of data costs. And according to this value, when you’re using the same amount of data to send a text without a messaging plan, they’re charging you 100,000 times more. Yes. Blink a few times and read that again. When AT&T calls data texting, it costs 100,000 times more than when it’s in the form of photos, music, email, or anything else.

They’re ripping you off with the force of a nuclear bomb.                More

What we'd really lose in an AT&T-T-Mobile merger

 

CNET - By now I'm sure that you're familiar with the arguments against the proposed AT&T-T-Mobile merger. As critics see it, the deal will put too much power in the hands of one carrier (and one GSM carrier, at that), it will reduce customer choice and innovation, and it will lead to higher prices and poorer customer service.

Those all are valid points, but I'm more worried about something that hasn't received a lot of attention. If this merger goes through, I fear that T-Mobile's gutsy approach to expanding its smartphone lineup will be killed by AT&T's stodgier culture. Indeed, over the last year, T-Mobile has greatly outshone its potential partner in both the range and quality of such handsets. AT&T produced slightly more smartphones during that period (21 versus 19), but T-Mobile has taken more risks and its lineup has earned a higher average score from CNET editors (7.7 versus 7.2). I don't really know where the carrier gets its aggressive spirit, but customers will lose if it disappears.

LG G2x

(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

 

Better phones
Just consider that in the four months since the merger was announced, T-Mobile has continued to pump out one worthy smartphone after another. Not only did we see two CNET Editors' Choice winners with the LG G2x and the HTC Sensation 4G, but also we had the shutterbug-friendly MyTouch 4G Slide 4G, the wallet-friendly Samsung Exhibit 4G, and the Sidekick 4G, which brought the Sidekick family back to life. That's lot of handset power in a short time.

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iPhone 5 carrier testing begins with AT&T

ComputerWorld - The next-generation iPhone 5 (or 4S) is on the way and is already being tested extensively on the AT&T network, even as Apple [AAPL] watchers continue to speculate on just when we'll see iOS-friendly OS X release, Lion ship.

[ABOVE: This interesting video clip shows the movement of 880 iPhones in Europe in April 2011, courtesy of Crowdflow.] 

AT&T carrier testing begins

Citing what it calls, "well placed sources", ChipHazard  tells us the next iPhone (is it the iPhone 5, the iPhone 4S, or something else entirely?) was handed out to AT&T beta testers on July 6.

[This story is from Computerworld's Apple Holic blog. Follow on Twitter or subscribe via RSS to make sure you don't miss a beat.]

If true, beta testers are checking the new Apple smartphone for signal reception and connectivity. Apple executives really, really don't need a repeat of last year's 'antenna-gate' fiasco. If the devices make it through beta testing then the iPhone factories will get the go-ahead to begin churning out millions of the things.

Why would Apple farm the product out to AT&T's beta testers? Isn't that a big departure from its usual secrecy? Perhaps, but the device will need to be tested, and, as every Apple watcher knows, Apple's own internal testing procedures didn't work out too well last year when a stolen prototype unit ended up in the hands of tech website, Gizmodo.

Fearful times

It isn't hard to imagine that high-ranking iPhone engineers may also spend their hard-won sleep time fretting about whether their phones are being tapped by media sources seeking a story, or competitors seeking an idea.      More

Hands On: HP TouchPad for AT&T

PCMag.Com - What could goose the fortunes of HP's TouchPad tablet? How about official support from AT&T? The nation's biggest GSM carrier showed off a version of the TouchPad gussied up with a 1.5-Ghz processor and HSPA+ support at a Tuesday evening event.

The AT&T TouchPad works much like the Wi-Fi-only model we reviewed, which we called the best non-iPad tablet. It has a few differences.

There's a SIM card slot in the top: push on it and the SIM tray pops out. Similarly, there's an HSPA+ signal indicator in the status bar, and a new AT&T Communication Manager app with a long, skinny progress bar showing how close you're coming to your data cap for the month. (See them in the slideshow below.)

The 1.5-Ghz processor should give this TouchPad a boost over the Wi-Fi-only model's 1.2-Ghz unit, but sadly, I found this TouchPad to have some of the problems many people have cited elsewhere. In the hands of Ovum analyst Jan Dawson, the TouchPad's scrolling juddered and it took a noticeable while to render our PCMag.com home page.     More