We’ve already seen hacked carrier updates for iOS devices on AT&T and T-Mobile, and now there’s one for customers on Verizon, too. Like the others, this one promises to increase the 3G and 4G data speeds on your iPhone 5, iPad, and iPad mini — and it doesn’t require a jailbreak.
Best Buy is set to knock $50 off the iPhone for a four-week promotion that starts this Sunday, AllThingsD reports. The discount will apply to the iPhone 4, the iPhone 4S, and the iPhone 5 when bought with a two-year contract on AT&T, Sprint, or Verizon.
Starting in May, AT&T is introducing a new “Mobility Administrative Fee” to the bill of all postpaid customers. The new fee will cost AT&T customers an extra $0.61 per line, per month.
While the total cost of the fee is unlikely to break the bank on your next bill, it does mean that you’re going to pay an extra $7.32 per phone line per year on your wireless bill, so if you have multiple lines on your account, you’ll pay much more than an extra 7 bucks a year.
The new fee is crummy deal for customers, but AT&T is super excited to take more of your pennies because with over 70 million postpaid customers the new fee will generate hundreds of millions of dollars in extra revenue every year.
Virgin Mobile has slashed 15% off both the 8GB iPhone 4 and the 16GB iPhone 4S on one of its prepaid Beyond Talk Unlimited data plans. The deal will get you a new iPhone — without a contract commitment — for less than $300.
Last week we told you that Verizon would be selling the iPhone 5 for 50% off later this month. The promotion has now begun, and the iPhone 5 is being offered for $99 with a carrier contract instead of the normal $199 retail price.
But there’s a catch that severely limits eligibility.
Mother’s Day is in just a few days, and if your way of saying “I love you” is gadgetry, then T-Mobile thinks they have the perfect gift for you by heavily promoting its deal to get an iPhone for $0 down.
The deal has been running since April 12th, when the carrier rebranded itself as “The Uncarrier”. T-Mobile will ramp up the promotion by displaying prominent ads Mother’s Day iPhone 5 ads in the top 20 markets, along with 3 National ads in USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times.
If you weren’t grandfathered into an unlimited 3G data plan, then you probably spend each minute on your cellphone judiciously deciding what to spend your data on before you reach your limit. It sucks for users, and it sucks for content providers who want you to stream more videos and consume more content.
ESPN is trying to make thing better for consumers though by striking a deal with the carriers to subsidize your data plan so you can watch more sports video and analysis on your smartphone without it costing you anything against your data plan.
T-Mobile finally started selling the iPhone back in April, and it has already been a successful move. In its financial report for the first quarter of 2013, which was published this week, the carrier reveals that it sold half a million iPhones in less than a month.
If you’re in the market for an iPhone 5, this is intriguing: Twitter user evleaks, who has good sources on upcoming Android devices and carrier deals, is saying that Verizon will start offering the iPhone 5 for $100 off starting in the middle of this month. That means that instead of paying $199 upfront for a 16GB iPhone 5 on two year contract, it would only cost $99. Not a bad deal at all, if true: we’ll let you know when and if the deal goes live.
Source: Twitter
Via: iClarified
It’s no secret that AT&T is the least affordable carrier for the iPhone in the U.S. While T-Mobile has quickly rebranded itself as “The UnCarrier” and other prepaid carriers have attracted customers with their flexible plans and cheaper service, AT&T has clung to its expensive data and phone plans. All that might be ending soon though.
AT&T is planning to launch a pre-paid brand called ‘All In One” on June 15th to compete with other pre-paid carriers like Cricket, U.S. Cellular, Boost and now T-Mobile. The new AT&T pre-paid brand will offer customers monthly services starting at $35 per month for feature phones and $50 per month on smartphones.
Now days, if you’re a carrier and you’re not selling the iPhone, you’re kind of screwed. As T-Mobile became the last of the four major U.S. carriers to start selling the iPhone earlier this year, smaller carriers like Cricket and U.S. Cellular have been trying to attract customers with cheaper phone and data rates.
Along with expanding its LTE offerings to over 86% of it’s customer in 2013, U.S. Cellular just announced that they will probably start selling the iPhone by the end of 2013.
Here’s an interesting tidbit for you: even as Apple’s stock price has plunged below $400 as twitchy Wall Street investors panic upon rumors that iPhone and iPad demand has slowed, Verizon Wireless has reported that they activated 4 million iPhones in the last quarter. That’s 500,000 more than was estimated, an 84% increase year-over-year in iPhones activated: overall, it means that almost 56% of all phones Verizon sold last quarter were iPhones.
So can everyone calm down about iPhone growth slowing, already? We’ll know the truth when Apple announces their financial earnings next Tuesday, April 23rd.
Source: Verizon
Even as companies like T-Mobile try to loosen the restrictions and obligations you sign up for when you get an iPhone, Verizon is tightening them up. The nation’s largest wireless carrier has just announced that they are ending their early upgrade eligibility program, which allowed customers on a two-year contract to upgrade their devices every twenty months. Instead, you’ll have to wait until your contract expires.
Speaking at a conference for the National Association of Broadcasters conference, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam mentioned that he had talked to Steve Jobs about the power of LTE in a meeting with the late Apple CEO. McAdam said that he spent some time trying to convince Jobs to add an LTE radio to Apple’s then-unreleased iPhone.
“I was really trying to sell him and he sat there without any reaction. Finally, he said, ‘Enough. You had me at 10 Mbps. I know you can stream video at 10 Mbps,'” said McAdam.
Earlier this week, T-Mobile announced that it will finally begin selling Apple’s iPhone next month, almost six years after the device first made its debut in the U.S. When you buy an iPhone 5 on T-Mobile, it will come with support for AWS bands, so that it can be used on the carrier’s LTE network.
Existing iPhone 5 handsets already in circulation don’t have this, but it can be enabled on the AT&T and unlocked models. And if your iPhone 5 is jailbroken, you can enable it yourself. Here’s how.
Hey, T-Mobile is finally an iPhone carrier now! Not only that, they’re a pretty competitive one, offering you an iPhone 5 for just $100 down and $20 a month over 24 months in what the nation’s fourth-largest carrier is calling a “no bullshit” plan. If you buy an iPhone 5 at T-Mobile, you can leave at any time as long as you pay off your device; otherwise, your service is provided month by month.
Sounds pretty great, but how competitive is T-Mobile’s new iPhone plan compared to the competition really? We compared the cheapest T-Mobile iPhone 5 plan you can get against the 24 month cost of getting one from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Cricket, Virgin Mobile and Straight Talk. The result? T-Mobile is one of the cheaper plans around… but it’s not the cheapest.
T-Mobile CEO John Legere kicked off the company’s press event in New York City today with an aggressive yet entertaining onslaught against rival carriers. He called for the likes of AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint to “stop the bullshit” with traditional subsidy models, which T-Mobile has now abandoned in favor of its new “Uncarrier” plans.
It’s only taken just under six years, but T-Mobile has finally reached a deal with Apple to sell the iPhone. The iPhone 5 will be one of the first devices available on T-Mobile’s new LTE network, launched today, and it’ll be available to purchase for a $99 up-front fee starting April 12.
One of the biggest complaints about Android, is that Google will announce a new version of Android, but then it takes over six months for that software to actually get on your phone. What gives?
The guys over at Gizmodo decided to talk to both manufacturers and wireless carriers to find out what’s the hold up. It seems like a software update would be a pretty straightforward process, but what they found was a myriad of problems that can take months to answer before your Android phone gets an update.
T-Mobile has been relegated to being America’s #4 U.S. carrier, thanks to it’s failed acquisition deal with AT&T. Apparently, the company has some big plans to put it back in the spotlight though.
T-Mobile just sent out invites to an exclusive event on March 26th in New York, where it is expected to detail plans to change its wireless business.
Sprint has today announced its fourth quarter and full year financial results for 2012, and they don’t make for pleasant reading. Despite healthy smartphone sales driven by the iPhone, the carrier reported a loss of $1.3 billion for during the three-month period, which is the same figure it lost during Q4 2011. It also saw more than 1 million Nextel subscribers jumping ship.
The new 128GB iPad with Retina display is now available to order from the Apple online store. The device is priced from $799, and it’s currently shipping in 1-3 business days. You’ll also be able to find it in your local Apple retail store.
Apple and the U.S. carriers have always had a bittersweet relationship. Carriers love Apple because the iPhone brings people into their stores, but carriers are also pressured by Apple to pay high subsidies so that Apple can maintain its high profit margins.
Given that there’s way more competition for the iPhone these days, Apple’s chokehold on the industry is starting to loosen. Carriers are trying new business models for selling smartphones. T-Mobile recently announced that it would be doing away with subsidized two-year contracts altogether. Instead, customers will pay a cheaper price up front for a device like the iPhone and then pay monthly installments towards the full price of the phone.
Carriers want to drive retail prices down on smartphones so more people will buy, and Apple may have to adapt to that model in the near future.
We rarely think of frequency spectrums to be a finite resources, but some of the wireless carriers in the U.S. are already bumping into their limits. Spectrum issues can lead to a network slowdown, like the one we saw last summer, and the only way to get more is to buy it.
To beef up their network, AT&T announced today that they have agreed to acquire spectrum in the 700 MHz band from Verizon Wireless. The deal covers 18 states and will cost AT&T $1.9 billion in cash.
Siri wasn’t always baked into iOS. It started out as a standalone iPhone app that launched in the App Store almost three years ago. Three weeks after it went live to the public, Apple showed interest. Siri was bought by Apple a few weeks later for hundreds of millions of dollars. The personal assistant was then reborn in the iPhone 4S in October 2011.
Many don’t know the fascinating history behind Siri, like the fact that it started as a research project for the U.S. Defense Department, or that Steve Jobs personally spearheaded the acquisition. Apple is lucky it swept in when it did, because Siri was almost made a default app on Android.
