Motorola Hosting Hour Long $100 Off Sale On Moto X Devices, January 27th

Motorola announced a new sale that is set to take place next Monday on January 27. The deal will only last a single hour online, beginning at 3pm EST and ending at 4pm EST. During that time frame, you can grab an off contract Moto X for $100 off of the full retail price $299 for the 16GB model and $349 for the 32GB model.

Motorola stated if you miss the $100 off fire sale on Monday, Moto X phones will remain at $70 off of the full contract price until Valentine’s Day in February.

Source: Motorola

Sprint Galaxy S 4 Approved By FCC With Global Roaming In Tow

The FCC today approved Sprint's version of Samsung's flagship Galaxy S 4 phone. The approval documents show support for GSM and WCDMA, in additional to Sprint's CDMA and LTE networks, indicating that the phone is intended to have global roaming capability. Last year's Galaxy S III for Sprint was the only Galaxy S III for a top-tier carrier without global roaming. The FCC also approved the Galaxy S 4 variant for U.S. Cellular (and, most likely, Cricket); it does not appear to support overseas networks.


Source: FCC

Alltel To Offer Apple iPhone Starting March 15th

The iPhone 5 is already available for pre-order and the 16GB model starts at $149.99 with a two-year agreement.

AT&T is positioned to acquire Alltel’s assets and customers in their entirety in the second half of this year. It is still business as usual for the once large regional carrier, mostly bought out by Verizon Wireless.

As you may recall from that merger some years ago, Verizon had to divest several markets or work some spectrum swaps with other providers (like AT&T) in order to secure regulatory approval. The leftovers remained as the Alltel brand, operated by Atlantic Tele-Network Wireless and that is what AT&T will be taking on later in the year.

Meanwhile, Alltel continues to maintain its lineup of products and services and that includes the iPhone. In addition to the iPhone 5, Alltel will also begin selling the iPhone 4S and iPhone 4. The16GB iPhone 4S will run just $49.99 and the iPhone 4 will move for $0.99. The iPhone 5 starts at just $149.99 for the 16GB flavor, add an additional $100 for each iteration up the storage ladder for the other models.

Alltel operates a CDMA/EV-DO network in 6 states and hold spectrum licenses that AT&T will certainly be able to make use of. Though with the addition of the more expensive hardware, it will be interesting to see what route AT&T takes as it converts Alltel’s network to GSM/UMTS and LTE.


Source: Alltel

Unlocking Your Phone Is Now Illegal In The U.S.

Yesterday 01/26/13 was marked a day in history, unlocking your phone has become illegal. As harsh as it seems, anyone who unlocks his or her handset in the U.S. without written consent from his or her carrier, could face civil or even criminal action. At most, you could face a $2,500 fine if you unlock your handset merely to use another carrier. For example, there are nearly 2 million Apple iPhone users who have unlocked their phone, and use T-Mobile's unlimited service. If you unlock phones for profit because you're, say, a cellphone re-seller then it is a whole other ballgame and you could face a half a million dollars in fines and some prison time.

So what happened to make doing something to your own personal property against the law? The Library of Congress and the U.S. Copyright Office no longer give cellphones an exemption under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The intent of the law was to prevent infringement of copyrights, not to specifically ban the unlocking of your new smartphone. For most people, the change won't make any difference because the majority of mobile phone users don't unlock their handset.

If your phone was unlocked prior to this weekend, don't keep staring at the door waiting for the cops to come bursting in as you are grandfathered in. Besides, no one really expects the carriers to go after their own customers anyway. Despite that, at least one attorney recommends not to unlock that new handset you just bought. 

Brad Shear, an attorney who is an expert on social media says, "I don't see carriers going aggressively after people, but bottom line is that I would not recommend violating this provision of the law."

Sound off, leave a comment and let us know what you think. Will this affect you? Are people blowing this out of proportion? 


Source: Yahoo News

T-Mobile Announces MetroPCS Merger

T-Mobile this morning announced that it's merging with MetroPCS in a $1.5 billion deal. The two companies will unite under the T-Mobile name, with current T-Mobile parent company Deutsche Telekom to keep a 74 percent stake. The rest goes to MetroPCS shareholders, who also get the cash.

MetroPCS already has LTE up and running, a technology sorely lacking from T-Mobile's current U.S. offerings, so we'd expect that's part of the impetus behind all this. But it'll take a little time to get all that worked out.

• The two companies actually will remain operating as fairly separate entities. Two business units. One network. MetroPCS isn't going anywhere for a few years.
• They're hoping to have GSM-capable devices ready to sell on MetroPCS when the deal closes next year.
• As we figured, LTE's playing ia big part here.

Is T-Mobile using 1900 band to test there 84Mbps HSPA+ deployment?

Ever since T-Mobile launched 3G service in 2008, it's used AWS exclusively — the 1,700MHz band auctioned by the FCC in the middle of the last decade — while keeping its legacy 2G services confined to the 1,900MHz PCS band. That might change, though, as the carrier looks to keep pushing on HSPA+ to deliver ever-higher 4G-like speeds in the absence of a clear LTE plan (and the absence of an AT&T acquisition). T-Mobile has already lead the way on deploying 21 and 42Mbps HSPA+, but the 3G roadmap doesn't end there: 84Mbps networks are a reality and the chipsets exist, it's just a question of securing the bandwidth to deploy it.

To that end, TmoNews noticed through HowardForums that unlocked iPhones connected to T-Mobile are picking up spots of 3G service in a few locations. What does that have to do with anything? The iPhone doesn't support AWS at all — the only band T-Mobile is known to be using for HSPA+ so far — which means that the carrier appears to be testing HSPA+ on its 1900 holdings, a prerequisite to deploying dual-carrier 84Mbps service. The site points out that most of T-Mobile's recent smartphones support 1,900MHz 3G, and this would explain why.

For owners of unlocked iPhones (and other unlocked devices that don't support AWS) on T-Mobile, this is potentially great news: in the long term, you might be able to move around the country and pick up a fair bit of 3G service. Meanwhile, it seems likely that we'll see the carrier deploy branded modems and handsets before too long that take advantage of 84Mbps HSPA+