Slashdot Mirror
HTC Does What Google Wouldn't: Sell an LTE Phone That Sidesteps AT&T
schwit1 writes "You won't see it advertised on billboards or television, you won't hear it mentioned in a carrier store, and your less technologically-savvy friends most certainly won't know about it — but quietly, HTC's done something extraordinarily important this month: it's broken AT&T's stranglehold on its nationwide LTE network. It's a move that even Google, for all its money, power, and influence, didn't make with the Nexus 4. HTC is shipping both 32GB and 64GB versions of the One — an early contender for the best phone of 2013 — in a carrier- and bootloader-unlocked version that supports both T-Mobile and AT&T LTE. No strings attached."
company dears to do something in the US (under cover of darkness) which is standard practice everywhere else on this planet. Welcome to the 21th century!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Looks great except for One thing: No SD card slot, so screw it. I'm not buying into the "stream everything" BS. "Always online" is a disease. Lack of this basic feature is a huge "Fuck You" to me and anyone else who shuffles a lot of data -- The power users -- The people who would by the thing -- The target demographic...
I mean, even my cunting Sansa Clip+ has a fucking SD card reader -- Loaded with a 64 gig micro SD... Which is more than this damn thing can store (the full 64GB of the 64GB version isn't fully usable for data) -- And I have a 8 of these cards (in a CD jewel case holder). It takes me 10 seconds to swap cards -- That's 384 GB/sec... For the price they're changing for this thing, it should be as feature complete as a $30 music player.
What is it going to take? Wait until software defined radio gets cheap enough before I can have a damn SD card slot back? Ugh.
Believe it or not, people care about different things.
I use the hell out of my smartphones, but I've yet to need more than a few gig of local storage. I just don't use my phones to hold my entire music and movie collections, even if I have the option.
And given how many smartphones do not have card slots, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it isn't necessarily a make-or-break feature.
Each carrier uses different frequencies. The majority of phones in the USA are sold by the carriers rather than the manufacturer, which they then sell to the user for a steep discount in exchange for signing up for a multi-year contract. Because it is the carriers rather than the end user who is making the actual purchase from the manufacturer, they typically ask them to do things like place sim-card restrictions and drop support for frequencies they do not use.
What is it, exactly, that Google didn't do? Offer 32/64GB capacities? LTE?
Oh, wait: https://www.google.com/search?q=Nexus+4+lte
I'm going with: whoopdedoo. Is it even possible to actually take advantage of LTE with SoC mobile hardware or typical network congestion? Even it is, what's the point if you hit your data cap after 5 minutes and get wallet-raped by your carrier?
I'm aware of exactly one regional carrier in all of Canada, and maybe one in the US that actually offer unlimited data in only specific areas, not nation wide (subject to arbitrary "excessive use policies" of course ... so it's not really unlimited so much as it's "unlimited"). Everyone else makes a big fucking deal about one whole gigabyte and it's absolutely hilarious how anyone thinks that is any real amount of data in 2013.
No, it most certainly was Google who started upsetting the status quo. The Nexus line has always been available unlocked straight from Google, and for an extremely palatable price. Pop in your SIM card, no plan restrictions*, no contract, it just goes.
I will admit that HTC's One is proportionately well priced. They also get kudos for a big fuck-you plainly directed at AT&T.
* I have my Nexus 4 on a voice & text plan (no data) because I can wait until the next available wifi signal or until I get home to check this or that and I don't need to post every damn meal I eat on shitsagram. Yes, I'm aware that some carriers will automatically tack on charges to your bill for features you never even used when they detect your phone model from the IEMI. Fortunately, the government here still seems to give a modicum of shit about us, as we have specific laws disallowing any carrier from adding adding features or changing plans without a customer's explicit consent.
Subsidizes phones is a business model from the past.
It's so heavily broken that I can't even understant :
- Why (we) the people accepted this ? (Okay, GSM phones were VERY expensive in 1996...)
- Why did the banksters allowed the carriers to steal their favourite business (small consumer credits with huge interests) !?
Since past year, here in France, one carrier (and then... every other) bagan to sell "low cost" subscription. It's in fact the same service, without the cost of the "subsidized" phone. Minus 30€ a month (or more).
24 months later, you have 24*30=720€ to buy the unlocked phone of your choice.
For people who prefer to pay 25-30€ a month to pay their handset, banks are back in the dance, with credit offers to buy your unkocked phone on a 24 months credit.
It is for me. Not only that my 16gb MicroSD card is almost full (offline navigation data, music), the micro USB port of my phone is broken. I can neither recharge it nor copy data through USB.
If I had one of the many smartphones without a card slot or a changeable battery, I'd be screwed. As the things are right now, I can continue to use the phone - a top of the line device few years ago - until something else fails. I can even still update the firmware without much hassle.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
"Touchscreen typing is inferior to a keyboard no matter how limited."
I think this depends, if you're typing command line commands or code with lots of switches, brackets, braces and so forth then I think you're absolutely right.
In fact, I used to agree with you in general, but now I use swype on my Android phone I actually think it's far faster and far superior to typing on a phone sized keyboard if you're typing general text such as SMS messages, e-mails, Slashdot posts...
I'm certainly a convert in this respect to touchscreen keyboards, Swype is the only input device I've ever encountered that allows me to reach near full-sized keyboard input speeds when typing plain English text. I certainly used to think touchscreens would always be shit, but Swype and Swype like keyboards are genius and completely changed the touchscreen input game.
There's a variety of possibilities here, because LTE has kinda screwed up the standards thing.
1. It might just mean frequency. For example, T-Mo's UMTS is different from AT&T's in that T-Mobile runs their's on 1700Mhz and 2100MHz, while AT&T runs their's on 850MHz and also on 1900MHz. That said, this seems unlikely, both are running LTE on 1700/2100, though AT&T is also running it on 700MHz.
2. How the two networks use their frequencies may vary, though I doubt it. Verizon and AT&T choose different ways to handle, for example, uplink and downlink frequencies when running it on their 700MHz allocations.
3. I don't know if either network supports voice on LTE yet, but there's at least three different ways to implement it and it's not impossible that T-Mobile has selected a different voice protocol to AT&T. No, I'm not making that up - originally, the intention was that voice on LTE would be GSM's pre-existing IMS protocol. Several carriers balked, arguing that it doesn't support what's necessary to ensure there's a consistent quality of service when the network is congested, and as a result there's VoLTE and also, for reasons that remain unclear to this day, a version of GAN (UMA - that "GSM over Wi-fi" thing) all competing in that space.
Before you rule out (1) and (2) and deduce it must be (3) by process of elimination, (3) is unlikely to be the issue as most phone makers are simply avoiding the entire question by routing voice over 2G or 3G.
So I don't know. My guess is that this is a regular phone that supports LTE, in all of its forms, on 1700/2100, and maybe on 700MHz too. It probably doesn't support voice on UMTS at all. It may well be standard enough to work on Sprint PCS's LTE too, though as it doesn't support cdma2000/cdmaOne, it's wouldn't be marketed towards Sprint customers as it would suck being limited to being a data phone only, and then only in the few places Sprint has LTE.
It's probably very boring in practice.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Even though they mention T-Mobile support for LTE, if you look closer at the frequency support on the phone's specs at HTC's site, there is something important to note.
HSPA/WCDMA: 850/1900/2100 MHz
This will not support T-Mobile 3G in a number of areas where they haven't converted AWS from HSPA+ use to LTE use. For people considering this phone for T-Mobile, you may get stuck on 2G depending on where you live.
But I am not so sure. Verizon has a huge cash cow, in the form of FiOS. It can use that revenue stream to undercut t-mobile and try to kill it instead of competing with it on a level ground. AT&T has inertia and corporate support helping it. I just hope T-Mobile succeeds just to bring sanity to this market.
T-mobile got the best deal in the failed merger with AT&T. Apparently that contract gave T-mobile 2 billion dollars if the deal was rejected by the Govt, and more importantly bandwidth in the edge network for T-mobile in some 50 markets. If it plays this hand of cards well, things should shake up in the mobile market in USA.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Can't talk on phone while driving on interstate" is a pretty big negative for me.
But probably safer for the rest of us, and the practice of phoning while driving will probably be unlawful most places soon anyway.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .