Sprint converts its network to LTE, plans 'aggressive rollout' to be completed by 2013

We knew more or less that an announcement of this sort was coming. Back in July, Dan Hesse had teased us face-to-face with the promise of a "great story this fall around 4G," and now the time to tell that tale has arrived. At its strategy event today, Sprint finally went public with plans to "simplify its network" by converting its 1900MHz holdings and LightSquared's 1600MHz spectrum ("pending FCC approval") to LTE, an industry favorite. Helping the operator make that transition is the swath of 800MHz spectrum it reclaimed from the, now defunct, iDEN push-to-talk network -- which had been a drain on the company's resources. This spectrum, acquired from Nextel, will be phased out by mid-2013 and rolled into LTE. The company plans for a rapid deployment of this new 4G network, with the first LTE markets and handsets to hit in mid-2012, and the full rollout mostly completed by 2013. Current subscribers signed up for WiMAX plans won't have to worry as their devices will continue to be supported throughout 2012.

Beginning tomorrow, Sprint's consolidating its 4G LTE (including LightSquared), 3G and Direct Connect networks into one single architecture. All the major technical milestones, such as test calls and field integration, have cleared their hurdles and work on over 22,000 cell sites are currently in process. Samsung, Alcatel Lucent and Ericsson have partnered with Sprint to install multimode 3G and 4G base stations to handle the network's future traffic, essential for deploying the multitude of frequencies required by hosted devices. Prospective iPhone 4S users on the network will be able to take advantage of better signal strength and improved voice service as Sprint intends to also offload the latter onto 800MHz.

Expect a steep "reduction in roaming costs" and deeper signal penetration throughout the operator's expanding national footprint over the course of the next two years. Naturally, LTE speeds on this new network will be significantly improved over the currently in-use WiMAX, and a planned implementation of WiFi offloading should help to cut congestion by 20 percent. By the end of next year, Sprint aims to have a combined WiMAX/LTE population coverage of 176 million -- with 123 million covered by LTE and 76 million overlapping both. When the network build-out is nearly complete in 2013, the company should have over 250 million blanketed in LTE, far outstripping the stagnant 120 million served by WiMAX.

Sprint converts its network to LTE, plans 'aggressive rollout' to be completed by 2013 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/tKu_1NDNJhU/

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Android Theme Review: Frost

Frost

I think once you've got the theming fever, the only prescription is more cowbell theming. Returning back to my initial obsession with monochrome and minimalism, I'd like to present another theme by Sonny Sekhon (the creator of Tangerine): Frost.

Frost takes your status bar icons and turns them black. How will black show up on your bar, you might ask? Well, your notification bar is transformed into a brilliant, frosty silver. Same as Tangerine, the battery percent is put inside the battery by default, so you'll always how much time you've got before you need to swap in a spare battery.

The pulldown notification bar is similarly themed, with a transparent background and silvery-white text and icons. The bottom of the bar is a sort of metallic rectangle with a slice cut out of it. Your notifications are also on metallic rectangles too.

The dialer is relatively unchanged, with just some transparency added. The phone icon is now silver, people's frames around their pictures is a slightly darker grey, but otherwise, it's the same app you've come to know and love.

Icons and widgets have been heavily themed, with many of the apps in my drawer sporting some new, silver threads. A number of widgets have been skinned, too, like the analog clock and the Google search widget.

As a matter of fact, everything in Frost is themed or skinned in some form or fashion. Check box buttons, the settings menu, field highlights, and toast notifications are all cold, frosty, and monochromatic. There isn't a part of your ROM that won't have been themed, and it all comes together in one very convincing package or total frosty immersion.

If you're on the hunt for a brightly colored theme (like me!), then look no further than Frost. It's bright, steely, and very eye-catching. And for only $1, it can be yours.

We've got download links and more pictures after the break.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/eLAIIcUCau8/android-theme-review-frost

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9 Reasons Why Online Video Advertising Has Failed to Meet Previous Forecasts

tc-accustreamIn 2007, I published a post that aggregated a series of projections for where online video advertising would be in the future.  One estimate, set in 2004, of the expected size of the US online video ad market by 2009 was $657 million.  A year later, there was a 2009 estimate at $1.5 billion. According to the IAB, the actual number for video advertising in 2009 was $908 million (and grew to $1.4 billion in 2010). If you go back to 2007, estimates for 2011 ranged from $4.3 billion (eMarketer, again) to $10 billion. The economic meltdown of 2008-09 made all previous projections moot, but its net effect was favorable for online advertising and video at the expense of print and television advertising.  Despite that, eMarketer's current $2.16 billion forecast for 2011 is half of what it projected four years ago.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/1TDGfi5iRNA/

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Hello Expense is a simple, reliable expense tracker for Android

helloexpense
A good mobile application is a fine balance between simplicity and functionality. You're using it on the go, so you don't have a lot of time to sit there and fumble with the phone to figure it all out. But you also need it to be powerful enough to let you do whatever it is you're trying to get done.

Hello Expense is one mobile app that gets it right. It's an expense tracker that lets you use your Android-powered phone to quickly log the money you spend and then analyze it and see where it all went.

I recently had the chance to use it in a real-life situation - a road trip that took a few days and involved quite a few expenses. Logging each expense took seconds, and at the end of each day I could get a great overview of how much money I spent on each category so far.

Categories and tags are user-configurable; the app also sports its own number pad to make number entry easy, regardless of what keyboard you're using.

Hello Expense is a simple, reliable expense tracker for Android originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/29/hello-expense-is-a-simple-reliable-expense-tracker-for-android/

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Sprint converts its network to LTE, plans 'aggressive rollout' to be completed by 2013

We knew more or less that an announcement of this sort was coming. Back in July, Dan Hesse had teased us face-to-face with the promise of a "great story this fall around 4G," and now the time to tell that tale has arrived. At its strategy event today, Sprint finally went public with plans to "simplify its network" by converting its 1900MHz holdings and LightSquared's 1600MHz spectrum ("pending FCC approval") to LTE, an industry favorite. Helping the operator make that transition is the swath of 800MHz spectrum it reclaimed from the, now defunct, iDEN push-to-talk network -- which had been a drain on the company's resources. This spectrum, acquired from Nextel, will be phased out by mid-2013 and rolled into LTE. The company plans for a rapid deployment of this new 4G network, with the first LTE markets and handsets to hit in mid-2012, and the full rollout mostly completed by 2013. Current subscribers signed up for WiMAX plans won't have to worry as their devices will continue to be supported throughout 2012.

Beginning tomorrow, Sprint's consolidating its 4G LTE (including LightSquared), 3G and Direct Connect networks into one single architecture. All the major technical milestones, such as test calls and field integration, have cleared their hurdles and work on over 22,000 cell sites are currently in process. Samsung, Alcatel Lucent and Ericsson have partnered with Sprint to install multimode 3G and 4G base stations to handle the network's future traffic, essential for deploying the multitude of frequencies required by hosted devices. Prospective iPhone 4S users on the network will be able to take advantage of better signal strength and improved voice service as Sprint intends to also offload the latter onto 800MHz.

Expect a steep "reduction in roaming costs" and deeper signal penetration throughout the operator's expanding national footprint over the course of the next two years. Naturally, LTE speeds on this new network will be significantly improved over the currently in-use WiMAX, and a planned implementation of WiFi offloading should help to cut congestion by 20 percent. By the end of next year, Sprint aims to have a combined WiMAX/LTE population coverage of 176 million -- with 123 million covered by LTE and 76 million overlapping both. When the network build-out is nearly complete in 2013, the company should have over 250 million blanketed in LTE, far outstripping the stagnant 120 million served by WiMAX.

Sprint converts its network to LTE, plans 'aggressive rollout' to be completed by 2013 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/07/sprint-converts-its-cdma-network-to-lte/

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Google Chrome and Chromium add protection against malicious downloads

google chrome malicious download
Google Chrome already sports a number of security-minded features, from Incognito mode to a software sandbox which makes exploiting the browser a Herculean task. Now, Google has announced additional protection for Chromium and Chrome users.

Built upon the Safe Browsing API, the new feature introduces protection against malicious downloads. If a download link appears in the Safe Browsing blacklist, Chrome and Chromium will warn users against downloading -- a save button is still presented, of course, in case you're convinced a file is perfectly safe to download.

We'd like to see something a bit more eye-catching than the red warning icon -- like perhaps painting the entire bar red. Many of the people a feature like this aims to protect probably won't notice the icon or change in wording as they'll be focused on clicking the save button.

Google is initially making download protection available to Chrome dev channel users, and you'll likely see it in Canary and Chromium snapshot builds as well. After thorough testing, beta and stable users will be next in line.

Google Chrome and Chromium add protection against malicious downloads originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/04/05/google-chrome-and-chromium-add-protection-against-malicious-down/

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ChromeLite: experience the ASCII Web of yesteryear

ChromeLite ASCII extension
Have you ever wondered what the Web was like before the Mosaic Web browser? If you were born in the last 20-odd years, or you only discovered your inner geek recently, did you miss out on monochrome monitors and the dial-up BBS era? Well, here's your chance to get a sneak peek at history: grab the ChromeLite extension and marvel as the entire Web is transformed into ASCII characters.

Now, ChromeLite isn't really all that functional. For the most part, it simply strips images and converts text into a monospaced terminal font. There are a few Easter eggs inserted -- such as a fun message at the bottom of YouTube (image after the break) -- and some fun ASCII art, but that's about it. Rather oddly, most JavaScript continues to work -- so you can still enjoy Google Instant Search!

ChromeLite was actually made by Google as an April Fools' joke -- and indeed, an annoying 'you can uninstall this!' message appears at the top of every page -- but we're kind of hoping that Google, or another developer, takes ChromeLite and turns it into a real ASCII browsing extension with configurable settings. If anything, it will provide an easy way to save bandwidth and CPU time.

Continue reading ChromeLite: experience the ASCII Web of yesteryear

ChromeLite: experience the ASCII Web of yesteryear originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 04 Apr 2011 07:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/04/04/chromelite-experience-the-ascii-web-of-yesteryear/

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DropSpace adds real Dropbox sync to Android

dropspace
Dropbox offers a lovely client for Android, but it's lacking true "sync" functionality. You can merely browse your Dropbox, pull files into the device, and manually upload specific files.

DropSpace is a little Android app that makes Dropbox on Android work like Dropbox - that is, you get real folder synchronization in the background.

When you run the app you're prompted for your Dropbox credentials. After logging in to Dropbox, you get to select which device folders you'd like to sync to the cloud. It's a straightforward mapping process: You select a folder on the device, and then specify where in Dropbox it should go.

The interface is rather clunky, at least for now. The biggest annoyance is that you can't edit your "sync list": if you add a folder and then wish to remove it, you must delete the entire list of folders and start over.

In terms of functionality, it works quite well. I tested it with the camera folder, and it was nice to be able to take my photos using the lean default Camera app and have them sync up to the cloud instantly.

DropSpace adds real Dropbox sync to Android originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/04/dropspace-adds-real-dropbox-sync-to-android/

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Sand Trap is a fun and difficult physics maze game

Sand Trap
Sand Trap is one of those games that at first seem too hard to bother with, but when you try to stop playing it you discover you're hooked.

The goal is to get as much sand as you possibly can out of the maze and into the bucket at the bottom of the screen. You need to rotate your maze every which way to get the sand rolling around it. You then try to direct the sand to one of the exits of the maze, and hopefully into the bucket. It took me several tries to actually get sand into the bucket, but that might be due to the fact that I didn't even realize the bucket was there at first. Things improved significantly after that.

As you level up, the mazes get more complicated, with moving parts and other things making your life more difficult. Once you manage to get through all these obstacles and get enough sand into your bucket, you can move on.

As I mentioned, this is not an easy game, but it's highly addictive. The graphics remind me of some long lost game from the 80s, but this just proves that you don't need super graphics and crazy sound to make a game work. There's a soothing guitar track playing in the background and that's it, as far as I could hear, and you can enjoy it just as much with no sound at all.

If you like a fun physics challenge, don't miss out on this one!

Sand Trap is a fun and difficult physics maze game originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/04/04/sand-trap-is-a-fun-physics-maze-game/

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This Battery Powered ATV Is Your Grand Theft Auto Deal of the Day [Dealzmodo]

My parents never loved me enough to buy me a rideable batter-powered car. Well, either that or I never showed interest in one. Actually, it's probably that. But one time I was at this girl's birthday party and I reaally wanted to try out this little pink battery-powered Corvette because it was well, a freaking pink Corvette. As I felt the torque under my seat grow, I floored that baby and? ended up running over the birthday girl. I really didn't mean to! Or maybe I did. Who knows! It's not my fault. Blame it on my parents for not getting me a battery-powered car! More »


Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/W1xTYFI4u6s/this-battery-powered-atv-is-your-grand-theft-auto-deal-of-the-day

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