April – 2011 – TechVirtuoso

Fun with AT&T U-verse

April 27th, 2011 at 9:07 PM 1 Comment Michael Stanclift

I’ve had AT&T’s U-verse service since October 2009, the day we moved into our house. At it’s heart, it’s really a fantastic service offering… IPTV, whole home DVR, advanced DSL, all wrapped up into a nice package. But for the last 6 months I’ve been struggling with a lot of different issues ranging from broken DVRs, freezing TV signal to Internet connections that go away at random. While the issues have not been persistent enough to track down an exact cause, they’ve been frustrating.

The other day, after watching Face Off on HBO (for the first time, I know) and getting right to the climax of the movie, the whole TV signal froze and wouldn’t come back. It was 1AM and my wife was already sleeping, so I muted by frustration and went to be deciding to look into alternatives the next day.

Monday, I called up the two traditional cable providers in the area looking for pricing. Then, I hit Twitter with my plan: (more…)

No LTE iPhone is coming in the near future

April 21st, 2011 at 2:34 PM No Comments Michael Stanclift

Another one of predictions for the next iPhone that seems to be coming true, was confirmed by Apple COO Tim Cook yesterday during their quarterly report conference call. The next generation iPhone will not have support for LTE wireless data technology.

From Forbes:

“The first generation of LTE chip-sets force a lot of design compromises with the handset, and some of those we are just not willing to make.”

Adding LTE into the next generation iPhone would mean adding more complexity by needing both a 3G and a 4G chip, that would only work on one provider, and require more power. Currently only one LTE mobile phone is on the market right now, the HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon, which has been the only US carrier so far to roll out any LTE service. In addition to lack of real LTE coverage in most of the country, even on Verizon’s network, the Thunderbold has been plagued with horrendous battery life.

The next iPhone will probably feature HSPA+, as the Qualcomm chip that is making its way into it, supports it already. It just needs to be enabled in the firmware.

Next iPhone to be GSM/CDMA ‘world phone’, says Verizon CFO

April 21st, 2011 at 1:45 PM 3 Comments Michael Stanclift

During a conference call with investors and the press to discuss quarterly results, Verizon CFO Fran Shammo let loose what most of us already assumed… that the next version of the Apple iPhone will be a ‘world phone’ meaning one device that is capable of running on both GSM and CDMA networks.

From Barron’s:

… when a new device from Apple is launched, whenever that may be, and that we will be, on the first time, on equal footing with our competitors on a new phone hitting the market, which will also be a global device.

GSM is the network technology used by AT&T and T-Mobile in the United States and every other mobile provider on the planet that has the iPhone for sale. CDMA is used by Verizon and Sprint in the United States, Bell and Telus in Canada, and a handful of other major providers around the world.

Currently, the iPhone 4 is sold in two different flavors, the GSM version and the Verizon specific version. Each version has different radios and internal layouts, and currently run different versions of iOS. A unified phone would allow Apple to engineer one device for every provider on the planet, allowing them to sell the iPhone in more markets on more providers.

A unified GSM/CDMA phone was one of my five predictions for the next iPhone.

image via iFixit, iPhone 4 teardown