AT&T is reportedly slated to increase their device upgrade costs from $18 to $36 this coming Sunday, February 12.

Because the overall costs associated with upgrading to a new device have increased, effective Sunday, February 12, 2012, AT&T will change its upgrade fee from $18 to $36

Just my luck. I’m due for an upgrade, and I’ve been chomping at the bit to try a Windows phone, as evidenced by Dan and Judie’s saga of their HTC Titan usage. Speaking for myself, it’s just unfortunate that by the time I want to try out the Titan II or the Nokia 900 I’ll be paying a lot more than I anticipated.

In a message to… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Image Courtesy T-Mobile

Today is a good day for T-Mobile customers. This morning the FCC listed the filing for a $1 billion transfer of Spectrum from AT&T to T-Mobile. This pretty much means to the common consumer that T-Mobile will be getting some more bandwidth to grow their GSM network. If you followed the deal last year, you know that AT&T promised a few billion in cash as well as some spectrum to Deutsche Telekom as payment if the takeover did not occur. As we all know late last year AT&T pulled their bid for the #4 US mobile provider leaving them responsible to pay the German based company reparations for a… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

This afternoon I attended a standing room only event in the impossibly small Ballroom A at the Venetian. The purpose was to hear about Nokia’s latest announcement for North America, and what I was hoping for specifically was news that the Lumia 900 (the North American version of the Euro Lumia 800) would soon be available. I wasn’t disappointed.

The front of the room was decorated with color tiles on the wall reminiscent of the live tiles in Windows Phone 7; if there were any doubts about what we were there to see, these should have removed them.

Stephen Elop, President and CEO of Nokia, came out and mentioned the first pillar of their global… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Wow, I am glad that I hadn’t already spring for a Titan from AT&T; today saw the announcement of the Titan II, and this model appears to be even more impressive than the first!

Today, at the 2012 International CES, HTC introduced the HTC TITAN II as the company’s first Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) device to run on a 4G LTE network. Expected to become available in the U.S. exclusively to AT&T customers in the coming months, the new smartphone is designed to help consumers stay connected while on-the-go with the largest display among Windows Phones, an advanced digital camera and access to 4G LTE speeds.

Equipped with a brilliant 4.7-inch super LCD display, the HTC TITAN II offers

As a small town guy living in the Chicago area, there are a lot times when I get frustrated with the traffic, the density, and the general inconveniences that are necessarily associated with urban living.

Then again, there are times like today, when I’m happy to be living in one of the larger metropolitan areas in the country because we tend to be among the first to get new technologies, such as AT&T’s new LTE network.

At the moment, AT&T has two phones able to take advantage of the LTE network: the HTC Vivid and the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket. The Vivid offers a 4.5 inch qHD screen, but the Skyrocket has a slightly faster processor and is part of the popular Galaxy S II line of Samsung… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

AT&T is bound and determined to tease those of us who don’t live in major markets with their 4G LTE speeds and the phones that can handle them; today HTC has announced the new HTC Vivid.

Thanks to the dual core 1.2 GHz processor, browsing the web, listening to music, and downloading apps is a snap on the brilliant 4.5 inch qHD display, allowing you to do more – faster. [You can] multitask efficiently—browse the web while streaming video to your TV wirelessly, with zero wait time and no buffering. The AT&T 4G LTE service will launch Nov. 6 in Boston, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Indianapolis and Athens, Georgia. AT&T offers the only smartphones that are able to utilize

Ah, AT&T.

So, I’m sitting here staring at my shiny new iPhone 4S. It’s unusable right now, thanks to AT&T’s lack of preparedness. They’ve had several years to figure out how to handle the spike in the load on their servers that accompanies the launch of a new iPhone model. Yet they still manage to hack up a hairball when it comes time to process orders and activate phones.

Apparently, I’m not the only one, either. Several blogs are reporting AT&T customers are experiencing widespread problems with activations. When AT&T carried the iPhone exclusively, I could at least understand that they may have felt that they could get away with inconveniencing their customers. If… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

So the day has finally come where the official announcement has been made for the Samsung Galaxy S II to hit US soil. The press conference is under way right now (Dan is there as I type), and just as we thought details are slim. A 4.5″ SAMOLED+ screen is destined for AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, while Verizon is holding off for the Samsung Galaxy Prime, or Nexus Prime or whatever they decide to call it. As I watch the blogging commence I noticed while reading over at TmoNews some of the announced features of the new phone. What caught my eye is the promise of the robust Enterprise features that will be included with this phone… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Image courtesy of Droid-Life

What drives me nuts about mobile carriers these days is that I truly believe they are using new technology against us. Maybe you think I’m out of my mind, but it’s really easy to see the common trend happening with 3 of the 4 big carriers in the US. As mobile broadband and equipment evolve, our data plans seem to reverse direction and impose some serious and costly limitations. If I remember correctly in the past before smartphones were big, you could use all the data you wanted. But let’s remember the hardware was not nearly as advanced and you really weren’t streaming anything over a mobile… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Guess which Stooge is Doug in this little scenario

It all began back in January . . .

See, here’s the deal:  for the kids’ “big holiday gift,” I got them both iPhone 4s.  Alas, now you have to get limited data plans.  But these are good kids, and I knew that if I got the lowest plan and threatened them with severe consequences–and then had to actually dole out punishment one time–they would stay on WiFi, not download games and music over the cell network, and otherwise avoid non-WiFi data.

So yes, one month they both went over.  I explained (again) how they had to be careful, not download games or whatever except… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

If you are a Facebook junkie who can’t go for even five minutes without checking in, then I may have found the perfect phone for you. HTC recently brought one their two Facebook-integrated phones to the US; somewhere along the way, the device formerly known as the ChaCha became the Status. You may  remember that the ChaCha was the candy-bar style Android phone with full QWERTY keyboard that so impressed me at Mobile World Congress — mainly because its keyboard blew away the one on the BlackBerry Bold I was using while traveling.

the phone formerly known

This is a Sponsored post written by me on behalf of a third party.

There’s a big problem that isn’t just coming; it is already here. The problem? The Internet is running out of IP addresses. Since 1981 IPv4, internet protocol version 4, has been the foundation for most of our Internet communications. It has worked just fine for 30 years but the rapid growth of the Internet has resulted in a huge number of IP addresses being used up. The demand has finally reached the point that there is a greater need for IP addresses than IPv4 can provide. In other words, we’ve run out of IP addresses.

That’s where IPv6 comes in

I checked out the HP TouchPad the day it was released and… didn’t walk out with one. I’m impressed with WebOS but I found the tablet a bit too laggy for my taste. Well the speed issue is about to be resolved with the new version of the HP TouchPad 4G that is coming to AT&T Mobile. The updated version will have a built-in 4G connectivity and a faster 1.5GHz processor (the current version has a 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon).

According to David Gee, vice president, Marketing and Enterprise Solutions, webOS, Personal Systems Group, HP, “TouchPad 4G is ideal for anyone who needs maximum flexibility for productivity on the go,” “It’s particularly well suited for users who rely on… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

It always pays to shop around, even when buying a carrier-branded phone.

Did you know that the same phones you can buy at the Verizon store are available on Amazon — some at greatly reduced savings from the carrier sites? No kidding — on the Verizon site, the HTC Thunderbolt (a phone I truly enjoyed while reviewing) is available with contract for $249.99.

That price seems fair enough, right? Especially since the full retail says $569.99.

Well guess what? On Amazon… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...

Image courtesy of Productivity 501

We all have iPhones in our house. For the kids and Sami, I got the lowest data plans, because they’re all on the wifi all the time. But weirdly, every month, Maggie’s phone was approaching and going over the limit.

At first, after talking with the AT&T support folks, it seemed that it was just because she was going outside the range of our WiFi modem–which is not that tough, honestly; it’s only a little 2Wire job–and so the phone was flipping her requests to the 3G network. So I disabled 3G on her phone. But still, the charges kept piling up. So I disabled cellular data on… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...