LG will compete with Apple, Google, and Samsung with a smartwatch of its own that is expected to run Google’s Android operating system. The company is also said to be working on another wearable computing device that will reportedly rival Google Glass.
Some really good news just surfaced for current and potential Verizon iPhone 5 owners.
It’s been confirmed that Verizon is actually selling the iPhone 5 factory unlocked out of the box, and you can pop in another SIM card to use the device on even a GSM network like AT&T. Jeff Benjamin of iDownloadBlog has already tried inserting an AT&T SIM card into his CDMA Verizon iPhone 5, and it worked!
One of the best things about the iPhone 4S was that it rolled GSM and CDMA into the same baseband. What that means is if you have, say, an AT&T iPhone, it could technically run on Verizon as long as you unlocked it. Likewise, if you had a Verizon iPhone, you could just slap in a GSM pay-as-you-go SIM card if you were traveling in any other country in the world to avoid exorbitant international roaming fees.
With the iPhone 5, though, things are changing. There will be two versions of the iPhone 5, a separate device for both GSM and CDMA carriers. Why? Seems to all be about LTE.
Has Apple been running Instapaper on the iPad mini?
iOS developer Marco Arment has discovered two new iPads — believed to be two iterations of the upcoming iPad mini — in his Instapaper developer logs. The devices have the “iPad2,5’ and “iPad2,6’ model numbers, according to their operating system, which haven’t been seen before, and could point to Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi + cellular versions of the device.
It might look similar from the back, but that’s as far as it goes.
If, for whatever reason, you won’t be upgrading to the iPhone 5 this fall, but you don’t want to feel left out when everyone else upgrades. Then check out this mod that promises to covert your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S into an iPhone 5. All it really does is change its back panel, but it’s still pretty cool.
iPhone users consumer more 3G data on average than any other platform
It’s a pretty good bet that iPhones and iPads will be responsible for 3G/4G traffic spikes around the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week as Apple developers lucky enough to score a ticket attend WWDC. Beyond this week, however, it seems that iPhone users have a tendency to gobble up a large amount of data – more so than other platforms including Android.
On average, iPhone owners represent about 20% of smartphone customers for mobile carriers worldwide. You might expect that those customers would amount to around 20% of data usage. That isn’t the case as iPhone users account for an average 45% of carrier data traffic and data use by iPhone users is more consistent than data consumed by Android customers.
Shortly after the Chronic Dev-Team launched Absinthe 2.0 last Friday, Apple pushed out a revised iOS 5.1.1 (9B208) update for the iPhone 4. As yet, no other device has received the same update, and it’s unclear exactly what the software does. But if you installed it accidentally, you’ll be pleased to know that the Rocky Racoon untether now supports it.
The weekend hasn’t arrived quite yet, as Apple has quietly pushed out a revised build of iOS 5.1.1 for the GSM iPhone 4 (AT&T). The update (Build 9B208) is available now only for GSM iPhone 4 owners who have not yet updated to the 5.1.1. If you have a GSM iPhone 4 on 5.1.1 already, you won’t be able to grab this second (seemingly identical) update.
Apple has re-released iOS builds in the past, but this time around there seems to be no known bug fixes or changes. It’s also interesting that the update is only for GSM iPhone 4 owners. Some sort of changes must be included, but Apple has provided no documentation. There’s a chance that updated builds for other devices could pop up, so we’ll keep you posted.
AT&T will unlock in-contract iPhones for deployed service men so that the handset can be used with other carriers abroad.
AT&T finally began unlocking iPhones for customers whose contracts had now expired over the weekend, allowing the device to be used with other SIM-cards from GSM carriers. But for deployed military personnel, the carrier will unlock iPhones still tied to a contract so that they can be used with others carriers abroad.
T-Mobile has announced its earnings for the 2011 holiday quarter, and the GSM carrier lost over 800,000 subscribers. Being the only major U.S. carrier left not carrying the iPhone, T-Mobile saw a 3.3% decrease in revenue to $20.6 billion.
Although the network’s growth has been on the decline for awhile, the fourth quarter of 2011 resulted in an exponentially greater loss following the launch of the iPhone 4S.