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by Stephen Schenck | May 23, 2012 11:13 AMCarriers in the US don't have the best track record when it comes to offering a full selection of smartphones for their prepaid plans. Besides just cutting down on the sheer number of phones available, that can mean severely reduced options when we're dealing with anything but a plain slate form factor. If you're still not enamored with the idea of on-screen keyboards, AT&T and its GoPhone prepaid program are getting a new option that may be right up your alley, adding a new QWERTY slider Android to the lineup. Samsung's Galaxy Appeal is a relatively low-end Gingerbread-running Android,...
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by Michael Fisher | May 21, 2012 4:31 PMWhat's more annoying to a mobile-phone user than not having service? If you answered "nothing," you're right. And never is that truer than when a user is trying to share something. Like the awesome photo they just snapped from their courtside or ringside seats as the ... puck hit a ... home run ... through the fullback's legs. Okay, I don't do sports. But according to my basketball-savvy friends, we're in the midst of something called the "2012 playoff season," which I gather is a pretty big deal. In an effort to avoid butchering any sports terminology, I will put this succinctly: The Bosto...
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by Anton D. Nagy | May 21, 2012 7:38 AMThe AT&T HTC One X and Sprint EVO 4G LTE (plus probably the T-Mobile Amaze 4G) were affected by U.S. Customs reviews and were delayed from the shelves because of an ITC ban imposed in defense of an Apple patent. The ban came into effect on April 19 and the manufacturer as well as the operators couldn't tell anything specific regarding a timeframe for resolving the issue. According to recent reports, HTC has issued a statement in Taiwan that brings some relieving information: "Some of our products have passed the review and have been delivered to our telecoms operators’ clients in the US...
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by Anton D. Nagy | May 21, 2012 7:19 AMSamsung announced the Focus 2 Windows Phone on May 7 and promised to make it available starting May 20 so if you want to start your week off by getting a new device you should really look into this one. There's a four-inch Super AMOLED screen with WVGA resolution, five-megapixel camera with HD 720p video recording capability, and VGA webcam for video calls and Skype but the most important bit is that the phone supports 4G LTE connectivity. You can get all this for $49.99 given that you sign a two-year contract with AT&T if you somehow don't fancy the Nokia Lumia 900 or the HTC Titan II,...
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by Joe Levi | May 18, 2012 12:14 PMUnder pressure from the community, HTC announced they would begin to offer tools to unlock the bootloaders on "their" phones. Over the past six months they've made significant inroads and have "allowed" the unlocking of a great deal of "their" devices. I know I'm being liberal with the quotation marks, but once you buy the phone, isn't it your phone? Neither HTC nor AT&T force you to call your mom for exactly 15 minutes every seven days, nor do they tell you that you can't call your mom more than once a week. Absurd, you say? Why would a carrier or a manufacturer force you to do some...
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by Anton D. Nagy | May 18, 2012 5:29 AMRegardless if you're rocking an international / unlocked HTC One X or you're waiting patiently for your AT&& version to arrive, you will probably notice a little bit of lag while paying attention to HTC's Sense 4.0 custom user interface running on top of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. We noticed it too with the occasion of our international HTC One X and the AT&T HTC One X reviews. Those who are heavy tweakers/modders are probably familiar with Rosie; not a "she", but an "it", a mod which aims to eliminate that slight lag we told you about. As the author of the mod himself desc...
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by Michael Fisher | May 17, 2012 4:54 PMI've recently learned that there are two things about being a mobile-phone reviewer. The first thing: you get to handle awesome pieces of gadgetry days or weeks ahead of their official release date, and you're not just allowed to use the heck out of them; you need to, in order to do your job. That's the awesome thing. The other, less-awesome thing: you eventually have to give them all back. "Empty Nest" is a recurring column discussing what I miss -and what I don't- about the devices I've had to return. I put the AT&T HTC One X review unit in the mail earlier this week, sendin...
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by Michael Fisher | May 17, 2012 2:37 PMEarlier this month, Verizon Wireless announced that it was targeting a date sometime in 2013 for delivery of a new service to its customers. The new feature isn't a high-speed data option or device upgrade policy, but something much more mundane or critical, depending on your perspective: an SMS-to-911 backbone. Developed in partnership with TeleCommunication Systems, the system will allow customers in the United States to send SMS text messages to emergency-response call centers. This is something that's been in the works for a very long time, and it makes a lot of sense: I've talked about ho...
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by Anton D. Nagy | May 17, 2012 3:06 AMHTC Sense 4.0 is the company's latest iteration for custom UIs which we first met at MWC, as it was launched on the new One line. It is present on all One-series phone which includes the International One X as well as the AT&T version. Of course, playing with Sense 4.0 for a while, beyond the good looks and deep integration, made us realize that there are a couple of things we'd change with the custom UI but the folks over at XDA Developers are not satisfied with the way HTC implemented multi-tasking. It's not necessarily about the webOS-like card look instead of the default Ice Cream S...
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by Anton D. Nagy | May 16, 2012 3:15 AMThe HTC One X for AT&T and the upcoming HTC EVO 4G LTE for Sprint -- which should hit the shelves this Friday, May 18 -- appear to be delayed by U.S. Customs, according to an official statement released by the Taiwanese manufacturer. The reason behind the delay, according to the wording, is "standard U.S. Customs review of shipments that is required after an ITC exclusion order". "The US availability of the HTC One X and HTC EVO 4G LTE has been delayed due to a standard U.S. Customs review of shipments that is required after an ITC exclusion order. We believe we are in compliance with t...
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by Stephen Schenck | May 15, 2012 8:19 PMBack in March, an unknown Pantech Android showed-up in some benchmark data. The phone appeared to run a 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 and showed signs it would arrive one day for service on AT&T. Today that same model P8010 makes its return, upon the FCC publication of the phone's certification paperwork. Sure enough, the P8010 is packing all the bands it will need for operation on AT&T. Interestingly, besides the standard LTE bands we've seen the carrier use so far on phones such as Pantech's own Burst, this time there's additional support for LTE on the 850 and 1900MHz bands the carrier us...
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by Jaime Rivera | May 15, 2012 8:00 AMAs a geek, it's sometimes hard for me or many of us to leave the tech bubble that we're surrounded with in order to understand why the average consumer sees things differently. Our own passion for gadgets pushes us to swap phones constantly, where as the average user signs a contract for one phone they won't be able to change for the next two years. With such a huge commitment, it's still an illogical mystery to many how Apple was able to push their iPhone from complete in-existence to being the top selling smartphone in the world. I say illogical because it was significantly more expensive th...
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by Evan Blass | May 14, 2012 11:30 AMWith the highly-anticipated Samsung Galaxy S III practically confirmed for all four major US carriers, we thought it would be fun to gather up test shots from their respective eight-megapixel cameras. Don't expect anything you can print out and frame, though: the pickings here were decidedly slim, with most of the variants only offering up a handful of examples -- none of which apparently took into account the subject nor quality of the image. Still, as with the first iPhone 4S test photo, there's something fun about checking out images from unreleased devices that will soon sweep the country ...
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by Anton D. Nagy | May 13, 2012 2:35 AMWhile we didn't find any deal-breaking bugs on the AT&T HTC One X with the occasion of our review, some users who grabbed their unit early experienced issues related to WiFi connectivity and speed. There were also some messaging notification problems with the phone (and not only) but HTC seems to have acted quickly with regards to the WiFi issue. "In regards to the wifi issue your running into, this is currently an issue that has been brought to our attention and we are actively working on a fix for this. We don't have an ETA on the release of the fix yet, but we do have a work around in th...
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by Michael Fisher | May 12, 2012 8:16 AMIf you haven't noticed, AT&T has really turned up the heat in advertising its latest smartphone heavyweights. Now feeling the pressure from two other iPhone-carrying competitors, it's working hard to maintain a diversified smartphone portfolio, and it's doing a pretty good job of it, too. In line with that goal, AT&T has been heavily marketing its version of the HTC One X, as well as the Nokia Lumia 900. Of course, those of us who make the mobile industry our occupation, hobby, or obsession know the differences between these two high-end devices, but most people don't. So if you're ...
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