Displaying items by tag: Wireless

Not all that long ago AT&T announced that it had plans to merge (buy) wireless company T-Mobile. This was not terribly shocking news as T-Mobile is one of the only competitors in the market that is using the same GSM technology. In fact when the first unlocks hit the iPhone many potential AT&T customers fled to T-Mobile as an alternative.  As you can imagine, AT&T would like to put a stop to things like this. So they plan to buy up the other half of the GSM market in the US.

Not too long ago I made a comment about the iPhone losing ground in the smart phone market. Not too long after that I started looking at the mobile phone market; not because I was trying to find some information about on smartphone purchases, but because I was interested in a new phone. The phone I was replacing is one of the most popular Android based phones on the Market. It was actually one that many people went to after the issues with the iPhone 4 (the grip of death). In fact that is how I ended up with my HTC EVO 4G from Sprint. The phone that caught my eye was another HTC phone. This was the HTC EVO 3D. This is a dual core high performance phone with a 3D Screen that does not need glasses to view.  So I went out and picked one up, let’s see if it was worth the money and time.

The launch of the 450Mbps segment of the 802.11n specification was sort of backwards. We saw some of the first routers last year in the September – October time frame. Then at CES we got our first glimpse of one of the new 450Mbps wireless adapters. This was the TRENDNet TEW-687GA that we just finished testing. But we are not going to stop there as we have another 450Mbps adapter from TRENDNet in the lab. This one is more PC specific and connects over USB 2.0. You lose the universal appeal that the 687GA had but gain more on portability. So let’s introduce the TRENDNet TEW-684UB 450Mbps Dual Band USB wireless adapter.

Recently there was an announcement that Intel is pulling out of WiMax in Taiwan.  Now, this is pretty big news as Intel was one of the major proponents of WiMax and was in alliance with more than a few companies to see this project to its completion. The Taiwanese are not happy about this and are now there are rumblings that they are thinking of heading over to ARM to help them complete what they started. But those are just rumors at this stage of the game. After all Intel has not said they will not live up to their side of the deal ($500 Million towards building a WiMax network) they have only closed their offices in Taiwan. There are, however, indications that they are indeed getting ready to drop WiMax. Less than a month ago they released Clearwire from their exclusivity agreement. This agreement would have kept Clearwire tethered to WiMax until 2011. This is good news really as it now allows Clearwire (the provider of 4G service to Sprint in the US) to look into other options for rolling out their 4G service.
But why would Intel do this? The answer is an easy one; the recent settlement with the FTC. In fact if you look back at this one the writing has been on the wall for some time.

We have another unboxing to tell you about. This one is in the networking arena. As you saw in our recent deliveries article we now have an Asus RT-N16 wireless router.  We have played with a few routers from Asus before and while they were not the fastest out there, they had some excellent features.  With that in mind let’s take a look at what we find inside the box and get a good look at the RT-N16 from Asus.