At Samsung’s Galaxy Tab launch at IFA in Berlin last week, Samsung executives wouldn’t say when the tablet would debut in the U.S.–but they did say that it would be for sale from “most” major wireless carriers. Looks like they spoke the truth: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint will all offer the Tab.
Tag Archives | Verizon Wireless
Is the Future of Mobile Broadband Pay As You Go?
Over the past few weeks, I have been considering a mobile broadband solution. My reasoning is two-fold: I’d like a backup in case my regular connection fails–Comcast here has become somewhat spotty as of late–and something for when I’m on the road at a conference and don’t want to depend on the available Wi-Fi, which is sometimes unreliable.
For the time being, I have settled on Virgin Mobile’s Broadband2Go offering (I’ll have a review of it coming in a week or two after I’ve put it through its paces). It’s cheap, the initial cost of startup is not high, and it’s now Mac compatible. But while at Wal-Mart, I was shocked to see Verizon and AT&T are now offering their own prepaid plans. I must have missed their announcements–and it’s kind of surprising to me that those companies be interested in getting into the game.
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Can a Chrome OS Tablet Make It Without Apps?
The list of present, future, and speculative iPadversaries I compiled last week wasn’t comprehensive–for instance, I didn’t include Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. And it’s growing more incomplete every day. Download Squad, for instance, is reporting a rumor that Google and Verizon will release a tablet on November 26th. Unlike the scads of Google-powered tablets that will run the Android OS, this one is supposedly powered by the still-unreleased Chrome OS.
I don’t know if there’s anything to Download Squad’s story, but it would be stunning if Chrome OS didn’t wind up on one or more tablets in the next few months. When Google announced the OS thirteen months ago, it looked like a glimpse of one potential future for personal computing. But the intended hardware–clamshell case with physical keyboard–no longer feels like it’s part of the next wave of anything. And another aspect of the OS–its dependence on the Web–feels like it might be part of the next wave after the next wave, not the immediate future.
The obvious point of reference for a Chrome OS tablet is the iPad. But from everything we know about Chrome OS so far, there’s one crucial point of differentiation: iPads are all about local apps, and Chrome OS (like the JooJoo) is designed to subsist entirely on Web apps. (Google is readying a Chrome OS app store, but the apps in question will all live on the Internet.)
If Verizon is involved with a Chrome OS tablet, it’ll presumably have built-in 3G connectivity, which means that the notion of it living off Internet services isn’t completely screwy. But I’m convinced that when it comes to mobile devices, apps are where it’s at–for the next couple of years, at least–and that a platform that doesn’t even try to play catchup with Apple’s iOS would be operating at a severe disadvantage.
Your thoughts?
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A Less Delicious Flavor of Froyo
I’m not personally traumatized by the news that the version of Android 2.2 that Verizon’s original Droid gets won’t let the phone tether to a laptop or serve as a hotspot–I have a Verizon MiFi–but it’s another sign of Android’s inherently fractured nature. (Back at Google’s I|O conference, it played up the hotsot feature as a key advance.)
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Droid X Consuming 5x Data of Other Verizon Phones. Say What?
Motorola’s Droid X isn’t the only high-powered Verizon smartphone available, but it’s the biggest bandwidth hog according to one company executive.
Here’s the claim from Jennifer Byrne, Verizon’s business development executive director, made during the paidContent Mobile conference on Tuesday (emphasis mine):
“On Droid X, we’re seeing something like 5x the data usage of any other device.”
I’m skeptical. Droid X may be Verizon’s flagship smartphone at the moment, but it’s not the only one likely to consume lots of data. For Android alone, there’s the Droid Incredible, Droid Eris and plain old Droid, and I have a hard time accepting that Droid X users are suddenly way more likely to gobble up bandwidth. The only difference between Droid X and is peers is the option of becoming a mobile hotspot for $20 per month, and if that’s causing the data spike, it says more about mobile hotspot use than it does about the phone itself.
Still, the essence of Byrne’s statement is probably valid: Verizon’s seeing a huge uptick in mobile data use thanks to the popularity of Android smartphones, lending credence to the rumors that Verizon will nix unlimited data plans in favor of tiered packages.
The spike in data use also amounts to a day of reckoning for Verizon. The carrier has said in the past that it’s equipped to handle the kind of traffic generated by an iPhone. Obviously, Verizon would be dealing with a lot more bandwidth demand if it ever got the iPhone, but think of the Android invasion as a sneak preview. If Verizon can handle this, it may have a chance at dealing with Apple’s traffic.
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Verizon Moving to Buckets?
Engadget has heard scuttlebutt that Verizon Wireless will announce on July 29th that it’s moving to tiered pricing plans for wireless data, akin to the “buckets” that AT&T introduced last month. Seems inevitable that it’ll happen sooner or later (and probably sooner), right?
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Verizon Confirms Droid X Display Defects
Screen of death? Verizon has confirmed that some Droid X units have defective screens–but says that it affects only one-tenth of one percent of units.
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Are Cameraphones Killing the Point-and-Shoot? Not Yet, Not Hardly
Over the past few days I’ve had fun taking photos with a couple of neat new cameras…that happen to be phones. They’re the iPhone 4 and Verizon’s upcoming Droid X, and their cameras are the best in any phones I’ve ever used. So much so that they left me pondering the future of point-and-shoot cameras that aren’t phones.
Phones have already killed traditional PDAs dead. The best ones also render media players such as an iPod largely superfluous, and the days of standalone GPS handhelds are clearly numbered. Are we nearing the moment when a meaningful number of people will skip buying a separate camera in favor of snapping photos with a phone?
Some thoughts on that in a moment–but first, my impressions of the photographic capabilities of these two handsets. When I had plenty of natural light, I liked most of the photos from both phones quite a bit…although even the nicest portraits I took looked slightly out of focus and lacking in detail. In murkier environments, the iPhone performed better than the Droid X, although the LED flashes on both phones aren’t very useful. (They only made a noticeable difference when there was very little available light, and even then tended to produce unflattering, fuzzy portraits.)
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Verizon iPhone Questions
Over at ZDNet, my friend Sam Diaz has some good questions about the impact of Verizon’s iPhone, assuming it exists…
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Is There a Verizon iPhone? Definitely, Reportedly
Bloomberg’s Amy Thomson is reporting that unnamed sources have told her that Verizon Wireless will begin selling the iPhone in January of 2011. She seems pretty sure they’re right–so much so that part way through the story, she stops couching the possibility in language like “people familiar with the plans said” and treats it as a done deal.
I hope she’s right, and maybe she is. I mean, odds are that somebody will report this news and be accurate sooner or later. But so far, Apple-Verizon rumors–including some as convincing-sounding as Thomson’s–have an unblemished record of resulting in absolutely nothing. After the jump, a little nostalgia from 2007 through earlier this year.