LTE

Apple will start making its next iPhone before the end of August and launch the device late in the third quarter, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty.

Following meetings in Taiwan last week, presumably with Apple suppliers, Huberty said in an investor's note yesterday that she expects Apple to start ramping up production of the iPhone "aggressively" in mid- to late August and on into the fourth quarter.

Following the August push, the analyst believes, Apple will launch the iPhone in September and ship 2 million units in the fourth quarter, a shift from her previous … Read more

LightSquared, which is building a nationwide 4G LTE network, said today it has a fix that will ensure its network doesn't interfere with GPS navigation equipment.

The company said it is setting aside spectrum that is in the spectrum band adjacent to the one used for GPS or Global Positioning Systems. LightSquared has worked out a deal with satellite provider Inmarsat to use frequencies lower in the spectrum band that is further away from the GPS spectrum. These frequencies are not expected to interfere with GPS gear.

Originally, LightSquared had planned to move into that band of spectrum over … Read more

Boy Genius Report says it's received "exclusive" word from a source on just what we'll find in the next version of Google's Nexus smartphone.

With the third iteration of the Nexus possibly to be named the Nexus 4G, BGR is calling it an "absolute beast."

The new Nexus will be powered by a dual-core 1.2GHz or 1.5GHz CPU, either a Texas Instruments OMAP 4460 or a low-power 28nm Krait-based Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, says BGR. If true, those specs run counter to earlier reports that the new Nexus would be outfitted with … Read more

Just about anyone who uses wireless networks for data is hungry for more speed, a new report from ABI Research suggests. In the first quarter of this year, Verizon Wireless alone activated half a million LTE-enabled devices; in Japan, NTT DoCoMo added 25,000 LTE subscriptions, according to the report.

LTE networks are often marketed as "4G" networks, but the term can be misleading because LTE (short for "Long Term Evolution") and all other currently available networks do not fully comply with 4G requirements--they're often more accurately referred to as a pre-4G technology.

Verizon has been selling the LTE service since January and claims data download speeds of between 5 and 12 megabits per second and upload speeds of 2-5Mbps--or roughly 10 times faster than its 3G offerings. AT&T is testing an LTE network in suburban Dallas that it says is capable of nearly 30Mbps.

But regardless of dithering over the nomenclature of 4G and how well the real-world networks deliver on the promise of their underlying technology, more subscribers are signing up for LTE, bottom line.… Read more

Huge support from content providers will give Apple's new iCloud service an edge over the competition, while the iPhone 4 will go through a slight revamp this year, followed by a 4G iPhone 5 next year.

Those are some of the thoughts shared by J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz in an investor's note released just ahead of the opening of Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) today.

Apple last week already revealed that it would be talking about iCloud, its new cloud-based service, at WWDC. With news that Apple has already signed up several top record companies … Read more

Just a couple of days ago, J.K. Shin, Samsung's president of mobile communications, said an LTE version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 was in the works for later this year, but it looks like it's going to be sooner rather than later.

Verizon Wireless announced today that it will start taking preorders for the 4G Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 on June 8. The carrier will offer a 16GB version for $529.99 and a 32GB for $629.99 but did not specify when the tablets would ship or be available in stores.

The Honeycomb-based … Read more

Samsung's new 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab tablet is slated to reach consumers in June, with Best Buy revealed as one of the retailers, but Samsung is also busy prepping a 4G edition due to hit the market later this year.

Best Buy's product page touting the Galaxy Tab says only that it's "coming soon," however, comments made recently by J.K. Shin, president of Samsung's mobile communications division, confirmed that the new 10.1-inch tablet and its smaller 8.9-inch cousin will reach consumers in June.

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet is slated … Read more

Slowly but surely the unlimited data plan for mobile phones is slipping away.

First it was AT&T, which announced last year that it was getting rid of its unlimited data plan to ensure mobile data overeaters didn't gobble up a disproportionate share of network resources. T-Mobile followed with a plan that it still calls "unlimited," but actually throttles usage after users hit a certain threshold. And soon Verizon Wireless will also be saying bah-bye to unlimited data.

For most consumers, who use well below the thresholds that carriers charge for overages, the switch to a … Read more

Microsoft goes all tropical on us with the announcement of Windows Phone Mango, the next big update to the Windows Phone operating system. We discuss all of the Windows Phone news, the latest 4G markets, and a cavalcade of Verizon smartphones that include the Motorola Droid X2 and the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play.