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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.
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
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.
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