U.S. Cellular Launches Its First LTE Smartphone

Just a couple of weeks after U.S. Cellular launched its first 4G LTE tablet in the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, today the carrier announced that its first 4G LTE smartphone is now available for purchase as well. The Samsung Galaxy S Aviator is up for sale on U.S. Cellular's website and is also in its stores and is priced at $199.99 with a two-year contract and $100 mail-in rebate, though U.S. Cellular says that customers in "select markets covered by its 4G LTE network" can snag an Aviator for $99.99 after $100 mail-in rebate for a limited time. The Aviator is an Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread device that includes a 4.3-inch WVGA SAMOLED+ touchscreen, an 8 megapixel rear-camera, front-facing webcam, and an HDMI port.

Samsung Evaluating Getting Android 4.0 on the Galaxy S and Galaxy Tab

  

The folks at Samsung first denied original Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S users a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich and, as you might imagine, it created quite the uproar. It couldn’t be a hardware performance issue due to the Nexus S getting Ice Cream Sandwich with near identical performance hardware. No, it was a space issue and you can probably guess the biggest culprit – TouchWiz.

Thankfully, there’s still a chance (albeit not a very favorable one) that the devices will still be able to get Ice Cream Sandwich. Samsung heard the complaints from users of their 2010 flagship devices and have gone back to say that they will continue to find solutions for getting Android 4.0 up on these devices.

Debloating or completely eliminating TouchWiz would be ideal for users, of course, but Samsung likely won’t or can’t do that. They have to commit to providing the same experience with 4.0 that they did out of the box.

Of course, they could go the HTC route and allow carriers to defer users to the market for specific TouchWiz apps. Fingers crossed.