Author: Kevin Fitchard

Not waiting for its big launch event in June, Samsung has revealed the details of its latest smartphone, the Galaxy S 4 mini. As my colleague Kevin Tofel suggested on Wednesday, the name is a bit deceiving. The mini isn’t a tiny powerhouse – rather it’s a mid-tier phone designed to attract customers unwilling to pay for Samsung’s full-featured flagship device.

The mini is smaller than the standard S 4 — the display of which measured a full 5 inches – but at 4.3 inches the device is by no means miniscule. The specs, however, are much more representative of a current-generation mid-range device. It sports a 1.7 GHz dual-core processor, 1.5 GB of RAM, 8 GB of internal memory, an 8 megapixel main camera and a 1.9 megapixel front-facing camera.

The mini lacks some of the full-fledged S 4’s fancier environmental sensors and pedometer, though it contains the usual complement of motion, bearing and light sensors. The 16:9 display uses Samsung’s Super AMOLED technology, but it uses a lower quarter-HD resolution. The smartphone will ship with Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean) installed. The gadget will also contain many of the new software features released with the original S 4.

The market variations of the mini are all based on connectivity. In its blog, Samsung said it would make LTE, HSPA+ and 3G dual-SIM versions of the device. It mentioned nothing of CDMA, though it would have to create an LTE-CDMA variant if it hopes to sell the device on Verizon Wireless and Sprint’s networks.

The mini lacks the high-powered 802.11ac Wi-Fi connectivity of the full-fledged S4, but it will include Bluetooth Low Energy, infrared and, in the case of the LTE models, near field communications (NFC) connectivity.

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Tensions have risen even further in the four-way stand off between Sprint, Clearwire, Dish Network and SoftBank. On the eve of a shareholder vote determining whether Sprint will take over Clearwire, Dish has upped its bid for the WiMAX operator by 29 percent.

Dish is now offering $4.40 a share for Clearwire, representing $1.10 more than its initial proposal and a huge premium over Sprint’s most recent offer of $3.40 a share. Dish’s deal values Clearwire at $6.3 billion, but unlike Sprint, Dish wouldn’t necessarily take complete control over the company. Dish said it is willing to settle for a minority stake as long as it can get 25 percent of the company.

Sprint was already on shaky ground going into Friday’s vote as many of Clearwire’s institutional investors have been agitating for better terms. Dish’s new offer definitely complicates Sprint’s takeover plans even further. Dish said it would formally submit its offer to Clearwire shareholders at tomorrow’s meeting, forcing a standoff between it and Sprint.

“The Special Committee of Clearwire’s board of directors has received Dish Network’s offer and will review it to determine the best course of action for the company and its stockholders,” read a statement issued by Clearwire late Wednesday. “The Special Committee has not made any determination to change its recommendation of the current Sprint transaction.”

Dish and Sprint aren’t just battling over Clearwire. Dish is trying to take over Sprint as well, challenging SoftBank’s $20.1 billion buyout of the U.S. carrier. Sprint and Softbank are gradually getting the necessary regulatory approvals to finalize their deal, but Sprint is formally weighing Dish’s offer. When Sprint holds its own shareholder vote next month to approve the deal, Dish could create similar controversy.

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Verizon Wireless is still months away from rolling out LTE network No. 2 using its recently acquired cable company airwaves, but that hasn’t stopped it from seeding its customer base with devices that will support the new 4G frequencies. Other press reports have claimed this new network will double speeds available to those supported devices, but that’s not the case. This is more of a capacity upgrade than a speed boost, but customers will definitely see their mobile internet experience improve.

Verizon is selling seven devices that sport LTE radios in the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) band – including the popular Samsung Galaxy S 4 and Nokia’s latest Windows phone, the Lumia 928. When the new network goes live, Verizon will ship out a software update that will activate its dormant AWS radios, Verizon spokesman Tom Pica said.

The other AWS-capable devices are Samsung’s two 10-inch Android tablets, two Verizon Jetpack mobile hotspots and a USB dongle. The current LTE iPhone 5 iteration used by Verizon doesn’t support the AWS band, but that could change with future versions. Meanwhile, the forthcoming BlackBerry Q10 will be able to access the new network, Pica said.

Customers won’t necessarily get faster speeds (though they might experience some initial bandwidth gains over these less-crowded AWS airwaves), but they will have access to a lot more network capacity. Verizon will be adding anywhere from 20 MHz to 40 MHz of new spectrum to its LTE systems – either doubling or tripling its current 4G capacity.

What’s more, Verizon will be focusing the new LTE systems in congested urban centers. It will overlay capacity at cell sites where demand is highest and in some cases surgically inserting bandwidth into highly trafficked indoor and outdoor areas using small cells. Bottom line: customers with newer AWS-capable devices will have access to a hell of a lot more network and enjoy a better mobile data experience in the exact places that experience tends to suffer.

Eventually Verizon will be able to use new LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation techniques to combine its two 4G networks into a single superfast system, but we’re still a year or two away – and another generation of handsets – from seeing that capability.

Going forward, Pica said, Verizon will require its device makers to include AWS support for most new LTE devices. So even if your current smartphone won’t work on the forthcoming network, your next Verizon smartphone most likely will.

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Sprint revealed on Wednesday that its acquisition by SoftBank had passed a key regulatory hurdle. Normally telecom mergers are the sole purview of the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice, but since Japan-based SoftBank would effectively take over a U.S. company, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. also gets its say on the deal’s national security implications.

CFIUS has given its blessing, and Sprint has entered into a national security agreement with the U.S. government. But according to a Wall Street Journal report there are plenty of strings attached. Sprint will create a national-security committee and appoint an independent security director to its board, according to the report. The deal also gives the government the unusual right to veto infrastructure deals and even ban certain vendors outright from Sprint’s network, the Journal said.

The target here is clearly Huawei, which has waged a long political battle with lawmakers and government officials over whether privately-owned Chinese networking giant presents a security risk to U.S. interests. According to the Journal, Sprint would not just be banned from working with Huawei and other Chinese equipment vendors, but it would have to rip out existing Huawei gear in its networks. That would include equipment Sprint’s affiliates installed, but most significantly it would mean a major overhaul for Clearwire if the mobile broadband operator accepts Sprint’s buyout offer on Friday.

Huawei has built a substantial portion of Clearwire’s WiMAX network, which could cost as much as $1 billion to remove. Huawei is also building a portion of Clearwire’s new LTE network, but Clearwire CTO John Saw told FierceWireless last week that the carrier is reducing its dependence on Huawei, and the Chinese vendor accounts for only 5 percent of its LTE spend.

Sprint is encountering problems with the multiple deals it’s juggling. Despite upping its offer to Clearwire shareholders last week, institutional investors are still opposed to the deal. That could make the Friday’s shareholder vote awfully hairy. Sprint is also forced to weigh a takeover counter offer from Dish Network. Despite those distractions, Sprint said today that it expects its deal with SoftBank will become final in July.

For that to happen, Sprint and SoftBank still needs a thumbs up from both the FCC and Justice Department. The DOJ in January raised a red flag about security concerns, but this week’s agreement seems to address all government agencies national security questions. There are really no anti-trust issues, since Sprint isn’t being acquired by a U.S. telco, so the DOJ is likely to sign off on the deal shortly. The only thing remaining is the FCC’s public interest review.

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When mobile-focused Silicon Valley accelerator Tandem Entrepreneurs started recruiting new partners last month, it promised it would start thinking globally about investments. It turns out India will be the first the target of its international expansion.

Tandem said on Tuesday it has opened an office in India’s tech-hub Bangalore and plans to fund between 10 and 20 new startups on the Subcontinent over the next year. Partner Rohit Bhagat will lead Tandem’s global push, but the accelerator has also brought on two new Bangalore-based partners, Indian entrepreneurs Ranjan Pai and Mohandas Pai (unrelated).

As with its U.S. investments, Tandem will continue to focus on mobile startups, but it said it would look for companies that have a cross-border outlook rather than companies targeting the local Indian market.

Tandem raised $32 million for its second fund last June. Typically it has invested in three or four companies each quarter, but the accelerator also claims to take a much more hands-on approach – an approach it calls “muscle capital” — to the companies it backs, moving beyond mentoring to day-to-day operational and strategic support. That approach had kept its portfolio small, but now that its partnership ranks have nearly tripled, Tandem plans to grow the size of its accelerator classes.

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AT&T is no longer saving its sparkly new LTE network for its high-end contract customers. On Friday the company confirmed it is opening up the faster speeds of its LTE and HSPA+ systems to GoPhone prepaid customers.

Those high-capacity connections are only available to customers who buy a compatible device (many phones in GoPhone’s portfolio are either 2G-only or can only access slower HSPA speeds) or to customers who bring their own compatible devices to the network. And yes, that includes new high-end smartphones like the iPhone 5 and the Galaxy S 4.

AT&T sells data add-ons to GoPhone plans, ranging from $25 a month for 1 GB to $5 a month for 50 MB. New customers will get immediate LTE and HSPA+ access, but current customers will have to wait a bit. An AT&T spokesman said the carrier is working on ways to extend these new network capabilities to its existing customers with compatible devices, but it’s still working out the details.

AT&T’s archrival Verizon Wireless has restricted access to its LTE network to only its contract smartphone customers, and it looked like Ma Bell was going to do the same. Earlier this month AT&T launched a new prepaid brand called AIO Wireless, targeting more data savvy smartphone users who didn’t want to deal with contracts. The AIO service, however, doesn’t include access to LTE.

I suspect we’ll see LTE on AIO as it rolls out to new markets, though. Of its two prepaid brands, GoPhone is definitely the lower-end service. If AT&T is finding that its GoPhone customers are asking and willing to pay for LTE, then AIO customers most certainly would do the same.

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Ericsson engineers have begun experimenting with a new type of cell site – one embedded inside a window. As demand for mobile data grows, networks must get denser. That means building increasingly smaller cells and putting them much closer to mobile users. So why not take advantage of the glass surfaces that cover our homes, businesses and vehicles?

At CTIA Wireless this week, Ericsson Networked Society Evangelist Mats Guldbrand gave me a demo of the technology at the equipment maker’s booth. Basically, a small antenna element is embedded into a pane of shielded glass. That antenna can pick up Wi-Fi or cellular signals from nearby phones, tablets and laptops and then aggregate those connections, sending them as a combined transmission to the nearest LTE cell tower.

Guldbrand gave an example of a bus containing 50 people all surfing the internet on their smartphones. Each device is trying to connect separately to the same tower, and you wind up with a big mess. Not only are all of those signals interfering with one another, the network is trying to manage 50 simultaneous hand-overs between cell towers. The network might be able to pull it off, but everyone’s experience suffers, Guldbrand said.

If those 50 devices, however, were all connecting to localized antennas embedded in the vehicle’s windows, the bus could then link to the cellular network through a single transmitter mounted on the roof. It’s much easier for the cellular base station to handle a single high-capacity connection than a bunch of smaller connections. Everyone in the bus experiences greater speeds and more resilient links, and since each device isn’t reaching out to a distant tower, their device battery life is spared.

This might sound a bit like the repeater or range-booster kits you can buy to enhance your cellphone’s signal at home, but this technology is designed to integrate closely with the network. Normally a repeater would create all kinds of interference in a crowded network, but by using shielded glass Ericsson can limit the number of competing transmissions bouncing around the cell. The treated windows (and the steel frame) block signals trying to escape the bus, turning it into a kind of Faraday Cage on wheels.

Forthcoming LTE-Advanced technologies will introduce network relay points mounted on bus rooftops and utility poles, which would route signals within the cell. The principle is simple: if you can narrow the distance between network hops you get more resilient and higher-capacity connections.

Ericsson has other plans for connected glass. Guldbrand said that as long as the windows are networked, you could embed all kinds of technology into their surfaces. As part of the demo, Guldbrand showed me a pane of plain glass with an infrared field on its surface. When you interrupted the field with your hand at specific points, you triggered actions like turning on and off the lights or skipping between songs on the stereo. So not only the windows in your future home access the internet, they could replace your light switches and remote controls.

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock user irabel8

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Intel has been angling to get its processors into the mobile network for years. Now thanks to partnership with Nokia Siemens Networks it’s finally getting its chance.

At CTIA Wireless Thursday, NSN and Intel said they have begun jointly building a mobile edge computing architecture that would put applications servers at every cell site. The partnership is an extension of NSN’s Liquid Applications strategy, which it unveiled at Mobile World Congress with IBM.

The idea is to transform the radio access network from a mere delivery network to one that hosts content and services. Such an architecture would not only put video and content closer to mobile subscribers, but it would make such Liquid Apps much more network-aware apps. Here’s how I described when NSN first partnered with IBM:

Mobile applications and radio infrastructure have always been walled off from one another – applications just barrel ahead onto their radio on-ramps oblivious to the highway traffic conditions ahead. What NSN proposes to do with Liquid Apps is to make those disparate portions of the network work in unison.

For example, mobile video today can be a precarious proposition. As video viewers rack up in a particular cell, the network will keep trying to cram those video streams into the same limited airwaves, The result is a backed-up network with no one getting a quality video stream – or any stream at all. By processing video at the cell site, though, the base station could make decisions how to deliver those individual video feeds based on the prevailing network conditions.

If the cell is congested, then the base station downgrades the video quality of every stream, ensuring everyone sees a decent-quality picture. And as users gradually vacate the cell, the base station could gradually boost video quality for those that remain.

At the heart of Liquid Apps is an application server utilizing Intel’s Crystal Forest platform for network infrastructure and a boatload of Xeon silicon. Those servers would perform the localized processing and content storage as well as maintain a constant collaborative link with the radio base station.

This is some pretty cool technology, but there’s a scary aspect to it, too. Technically the Liquid Apps architecture could be used to optimize all content traversing the network by acting as a traffic cop that dictates the flow of different types of data before they enter the airwaves. But Intel and NSN are also proposing that carriers sell Liquid Apps as a service to developers and content providers.

In such a scenario, a YouTube or a Netflix could pay to have their content not just hosted at then cell site but also prioritized as it leaves the tower. It’s a pay to play model that doesn’t exactly sit well with net neutrality principles — content providers that choose not to participate might see their customers’ experience suffer.

U.S. carriers like Verizon and AT&T are already talking up two-sided revenue models in which content providers subsidize their customers’ data usage on the mobile internet. Liquid Apps could become another tool in that pay-to-play arsenal.

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Wireless equipment makers Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks took important first steps toward the future heterogeneous networks this week at CTIA Wireless. Both vendors announced new traffic steering technologies that make Wi-Fi and cellular data networks play nice with one another.

Today Wi-Fi and 3G/4G networks sit side by side, but they hardly work together. When you’re in the presence of an authorized hotspot your device will log in, leaving the cellular connection behind. As you wander away from the access point, your Wi-Fi connection gets weaker to the point of uselessness until your device finally disconnects and forces its way back onto the cellular grid. It’s hardly an ideal or seamless experience.

These new traffic steering technologies, however, make what were once two distinct networks act as one, selecting the optimal connection at any given moment. So if you suddenly wander into a congested hotspot, the network knows to keep you connected to your 3G cell, instead of forcing you onto a useless Wi-Fi link. As the congestion levels change on those two networks, the user’s device is shifted between them in real time.

This kind of traffic steering will be a key component of heterogeneous networks, or HetNets, which will make use of different radio technologies to create multi-layered and tremendously high-capacity mobile networks. But according to Petri Hautakangas, Nokia Siemens North American head of technology, it’s just a first step. Networks and devices will eventually be able to balance traffic between networks, as well as ship data simultaneously across multiple radio connections, he said.

For Ericsson, the news also represents the full integration of BelAir Networks’ Wi-Fi hotspot technology into its cellular architecture after acquiring the Canadian vendor last year. Nokia Siemens doesn’t make its own Wi-Fi gear but it partners with Wi-Fi access point and hotspot makers like Ruckus Wireless.

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Verizon Wireless is going after the Latino market through a new venture called Viva Movil and it’s getting a little bit of help from Jennifer Lopez. The new venture, owned by Lopez, retail chain Moorehead Communications and mobile supply chain manager Brightstar, will have its own physical and online stores, but the devices and service plans all will be Verizon’s.

Speaking at a Verizon press conference at CTIA Wireless, Lopez said that there are 52 million Latinos in the U.S. with a combined purchasing power of $1.2 trillion annually, presenting a huge opportunity for a premium mobile service. “As modern Latinos, we do things differently, including how we shop for mobile devices,” said Lopez, who is assuming the role of Viva’s chief creative officer.

The venture might sound like one of the new breed of mobile virtual network operators, like TracFone’s Telcel America, which also targets the Latino community. But it’s not an MVNO. Nor is it a Verizon brand, like Virgin Mobile is brand of Sprint.

The best way to think of Viva Movil is as an authorized dealer, like RadioShack or Best Buy. Verizon has no ownership stake in the Viva, but it will be the venture’s exclusive service and device provider, said Verizon COO and EVP Marni Walden.

The only thing Viva stores will sell other than Verizon phones and services will be a line of accessories such as smartphone cases supposedly designed by Lopez. Viva is also adding a twist on the online front. It will turn its Facebook page into a full retail portal. Customers can see what phones their Facebook friends have bought or recommended, and they will be able to buy their devices and set up their accounts directly from the Facebook page, Lopez said.

The first store will open on June 15 in New York City. Lopez and Walden wouldn’t say where it would be located, though they strongly hinted it would be Times Square. The company plans to follow up with 15 more store openings in cities with bug Latino populations.

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At CTIA Wireless, I had a chance to sit down with Sprint vice president of product platforms and services Kevin McGinnis and talk about Boost Mobile’s new digital wallet. It quickly became apparent from our convesation that Sprint has some big ambitions for the new financial services app.

McGinnis said that it will soon offer a similar wallet to customers of its other prepaid brand — Virgin Mobile — and it is considering bringing it to the main Sprint brand as well. Sprint also plans to build on Wallet’s initial batch of services, to create what McGinnis calls “a virtual bank” for its customers.

Today, Boost’s Mobile Wallet can transfer funds between accounts, pay e-bills, wire money to physical locations and, with the help of prepaid Visa card, you can make purchases and withdraw money from ATMs anywhere Visa is accepted. Soon Boost’s wallet will let you scan physical checks, depositing funds directly into your wallet account.

But McGinnis said there are other services in the works. He didn’t provide specific deals, but it’s not hard to imagine features like virtual checking accounts or peer-to-peer payments such as those offered by PayPal, Venmo and now Google and Square.

Sprint doesn’t want to become bank itself — that would put it under the regulatory scrutiny of the U.S. Department of Treasury, which Sprint wants to avoid, McGinnis said. Instead, Sprint is working with Wipit, a mobile payments provider focusing on people without bank accounts and credit cards, to provide the financial services infrastructure.

“From the customer’s point of view, it’s kind of a bank in the sky that is Boost backed,” McGinnis said.

Sprint’s wallet is unique because it focuses on what the financial industry calls the unbanked – households that deal almost entirely in cash. Most other wallet and financial services apps are linked to bank accounts, credit and debit cards. This approach to financial services has had a huge impact in other parts of the world and has made Kenyan mobile operator Safaricom the biggest bank in East Africa.

The U.S. isn’t Kenya, of course, but according to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation study (pdf), 8.2 percent of U.S. households have no bank account whatsoever, while an additional 20.1 percent of U.S. households have a bank account but also make use of alternative financial services such as check cashing and payday loan companies.

Of the major providers, Sprint is in an ideal position to serve those customers. People who rely primarily on cash naturally gravitate towards prepaid mobile phones, and Sprint is one of the most aggressive carriers when it comes to prepaid. It runs three prepaid brands (Boost, Virgin and Assurance Wireless) and offers pay-as-you-go options on its primary Sprint brand as well. At the end of the first quarter it had 16 million customers on prepaid plans.

While Mobile Wallet’s initial focus will be on those unbanked customers, McGinnis said there is a lot of potential for the app for customers who have traditional bank accounts, especially as Sprint and Wipit add new features to the app. That’s one of the reasons McGinnis thinks Mobile Wallet will be a good fit for Sprint’s contract customers.

Sprint already is working with Google on mobile payments, but McGinnis pointed out that Google Wallet is really a point-of-sale transaction technology linking to credit cards or bank accounts. Meanwhile, Sprint’s Wallet is intended to be a replacement for or a supplement to those accounts and payments cards — just without the actual bank.

“There’s nothing broken with plastic in retail today,” McGinnis said. Sprint, he added, just wants to make that plastic available to more people.

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Sprint-owed prepaid operator Boost Mobile unveiled a mobile financial services app called Mobile Wallet at CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas on Tuesday. This isn’t your typical near field communications (NFC) or QR code contactless payment setup though. Instead, Boost is combining its prepaid mobile services model with a prepaid cash account, providing a physical prepaid card that customers can use at the register.

Mobile Wallet was developed by Wipit, a mobile payments provider for people without bank accounts and credit cards. Its platform therefore makes an ideal fit for many Boost customers who rely on cash to make pay for their wireless service. The approach seems to emulate the mobile payments revolution going on Africa and South Asia, where mobile operators are become bigger financial services providers than the traditional banks.

Mobile Wallet allows you to pay bills and send money to family or friends in 135 countries through Ria’s cash transfer network. Soon Boost will also offer a digital check cashing service, which lets you scan in a physical check and deposit the funds in your wallet account. You can also transfer money between different accounts, and top off your Boost Mobile plan within the app.

What you can’t do is use the Wallet App to make a payment at store. But Boost and WiPit have gotten around that problem by issuing a Visa prepaid card to any customer that signs up for a premium account. The card draws directly from the Wallet account and is accepted anywhere where Visa is. Google reportedly considered adopting the same approach for its digital wallet but dropped the idea.

Of course, all of these services come with fees, many of which are rather steep. Paying bills costs anywhere from $2 to $5 per transaction, while Ria money transfer fees vary depending on amount and destination. Even loading money into the account costs $3, though once the money is there, you can spend it freely using the Visa card. Until the check cashing service goes live, customers can only load money into the account at authorized Boost dealer locations.

The app is available to Boost’s Android customers and is downloadable in Google Play, but initially Boost is only enabling accounts for customers in Los Angles, San Diego and parts of New Jersey. The company is planning a nationwide rollout by the end of the year.

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Facing the possibility of a shareholder revolt on Tuesday, Sprint at the last minute boosted its offer for Clearwire from $2.97 to $3.40 a share. Clearwire shareholders were set to vote today on the deal  – which would give Sprint the roughly 50 percent of Clearwire it doesn’t already own — but Clearwire canceled its stockholder meeting when the new offer came in, rescheduling the vote for Thursday, May 30.

(Update: Clearwire has rescheduled the meeting again, this time for Friday, May 31.)

Ever since Sprint made its $2.1 billion buyout offer in December, Clearwire shareholders have been expressing increasing dissatisfaction with the terms of the deal, especially after Dish Network swooped in with a counter offer. Sprint’s new bid is 19 percent higher than its old one and beats out Dish’s $3.30-a-share proposal.

Even if Clearwire shareholders accept Sprint’s new terms, Dish isn’t going away. The company is playing multiple hands, offering to buyout Sprint itself, despite the buyout deal it struck with Softbank. Sprint has kept Dish at arm’s length throughout the negotiations, but on Monday Softbank agreed to let Sprint start working directly with Dish, releasing internal documents necessary for any merger negotiation.

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Nvidia’s first integrated smartphone chip won’t just have the latest and greatest Tegra processor; it will support some impressive LTE connection speeds as well. Nvidia has upgraded the radio of its forthcoming Tegra 4i to support download speeds of 150 Mbps, capabilities it began demoing at CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas this week.

Nvidia is showing that even though it’s new to the radio silicon market, it’s keeping up with the technical prowess of the competition. The 150 Mbps benchmark is the most cutting edge LTE device currently available (in industry parlance it’s know as category 4 LTE), meaning the Tegra 4i can go head-to-head to with the superchips designed by Qualcomm, Broadcom and Altair Semiconductor.

But also like its competitors, Nvidia is been playing fast and loose with its marketing. It’s calling its modem “LTE-Advanced,” a benchmark no chipmaker in the industry is even close to matching. These chips are still 150 Mbps shy of meeting even the most minimal definition of LTE-Advanced. Nvidia and its peers are clearly abusing the term.

Nvidia has long made powerful applications and graphics processors for smartphones and tablets, but its momentum in the market has always been hampered by its lack of an integrated processor-modem. Integrated chips take up less space, draw less power and are generally cheaper, making it difficult for Nvidia to compete against mobile silicon giant Qualcomm in everything but the highest tier of the smartphone market.

Nvidia rectified the situation in 2011 by purchasing software defined wireless radio maker Icera. It gained an impressive modem to match its impressive multimedia processor, but it still needed to spend two years integrating the two into a single tight package. The Tegra 4i was the result.

When Nvidia first announced the chip back in February, however, it appeared that Nvidia was still having trouble keeping up with the competition. It’s processor was cutting edge, but the LTE modem was still an iteration behind – using category 3 LTE — making it a third slower than the other chips then hitting the market. Nvidia said it was able to rectify that quickly by utilizing Icera’s software defined radio architecture: it upgraded to category 4 with a simple firmware update.

Networks that support category 4 speeds don’t yet exist, though we could start seeing in them appear in the next year or two. That timing, though, works out well since Nvidia and other silicon vendors won’t have their superchips ready for commercial devices until late 2013 or early 2014. In the meantime, Nvidia is demoing Tegra 4i’s 150 Mbps throughput at CTIA over a simulated network, not a real one.

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Truphone has always had a soft spot for the international business traveler. When it became a virtual mobile carrier in 2010, its core service was a plan that charged you local rates for voice, SMS and data on either side of the Atlantic – a boon to any globetrotter accustomed to paying exorbitant roaming fees outside his home country. Now Truphone is extending more love to border-crossing businessmen and women – or at least to the companies that pay their phone bills.

On Tuesday Truphone is unveiling its first shared plans for business. Companies can now buy big batches of minutes, texts and megabytes and pool them across not just multiple devices, but also multiple nations. For instance a $500 plan includes 5000 voice minutes, 5000 text messages and 1 GB of 3G data, all of which can be used anywhere in the U.S., U.K. Netherlands, Australia and Hong Kong. Germany, Poland and Spain will join that list later this year.

Those prices will definitely seem high to most of us since we’re accustomed paying only for the for the domestic-only voice and data buckets offered by our local carriers. But if you’re splitting your time between countries in the Truphone “Zone” those rates look like a bargain. Anyone who has ever opened their mobile browser overseas can attest to international data roaming rates being practically criminal — $20 a megabyte isn’t uncommon.

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PayPal may be taking on Square on its home mobile payments turf, but Square figures two can play that game. It has its own peer-to-peer payments in the works that will let users to transfer cash to each other by simply hitting the send button on an email.

A splash page first spotted by TechCrunch on Square’s website shows a demo of the service, which for now is available only to invited users. The demo shows that a registered user only has to send an email to the payment recipient with the dollar amount of the transfer in the subject line and [email protected] in the CC field to complete a transaction. According to the page, you can email money to any debit card. An accompanying FAQ reveals that all transactions will cost the sender 50 cents a pop, but the recipient pays nothing.

We reached out to Square to get more details on the mysterious service, but the company isn’t revealing any more details for now. “We’re excited to share Square Cash with our friends,” a Square spokesperson said via email. “We’ll continue to invite others to try it out in the coming weeks.”

Of course, Square is a bit late to the party given that PayPal has dominated this space for a decade, while other companies like Braintree’s Venmo have been filling whatever gaps PayPal left in mobile peer-to-peer payments. The major banks all have their own email transfer services, and just last week at I/O, Google announced its intention to dive head first into the same market by adding Google Wallet support to Gmail. Square might just be another peer-to-peer payments setup, but it’s building up a consumer following thanks to Square Wallet (and Starbucks, which will help it distinguish its cash service form others.

Speaking of Google, the search giant revealed a sunset date of Nov. 20 for Google Checkout, a service it’s been promising to shut down for two years. Google has long intended to fold Checkout’s on-screen instant payment technology into Wallet. Google finally announced that transition at I/O last week.

In a blog post, Google said it would continue to support U.S. merchants that have their own payment processing technology with its new Wallet Instant Buy system. For customers who don’t have their own payment processing, Google is working with Braintree, Shopify and Freshbooks to get them up and running on new a new commerce platform.

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Chances are you’ve contemplated late-night pizza or Thai food delivery, you’ve run into GrubHub or Seamless (or both, depending on your city). Chicago-based GrubHub is the largest of the e-commerce engines that power independent restaurants’ delivery and takeout orders, and New York’s Seamless is among GrubHub’s biggest challengers.

Now the two have decided to merge and build the mother of all delivery and takeout portals. The companies said combined GrubHub and Seamless will have a presence in more than 500 cities and more than 20,000 restaurant clients. In 2012, the companies said they processed a combined $875 million in gross food sales, bringing in $100 million in revenue (though neither has taken the unusual step of accepting Bitcoin as payment like competitor Foodler.)

The companies didn’t reveal any financial terms of the deal, nor did they unveil a name for the combined the company. GrubHub co-founder and CEO Matt Maloney will become CEO of the merged entity, while Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky will become President.

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LevelUp has struck a deal with one of the largest makers of retail point-of-sale systems, NCR, helping the startup make further inroads into its most important market: restaurants.

The payments startup is now chummy with the top two POS terminal and software makers used by U.S. restaurants (the other is Micros), and has deals will several smaller suppliers. The startup still has a long way to go before all of the burger joints and bistros that use those systems adopt its payments solution, but it’s comfortable in the knowledge that half the restaurants in the country could easily adopt that solution.

LevelUp offers both its own mobile payments app and white label technology that retailers can integrate into their own apps. In both cases, the implementation is pretty simple: they generate QR codes linked to a customer’s credit card information, which they can then scan into a terminal at the restaurant to make a mobile payment.

That terminal could be as basic as the proprietor’s smartphone (several previously cash-only merchants have used LevelUp to start accepting credit card payments), requiring no additional hardware, or it could take the form of a dedicated terminal. LevelUp takes 2 percent off the top of any transaction, but it also uses its platform to track customer data for rewards and promotions, bridging the gap between a loyalty program and a payment processing service.

At the end of 2012, LevelUp’s apps had about 500,000 users and it was handling about $5 million in transactions each month. Even in the nascent mobile payments market that makes it relatively small, however – in 2012, Square’s annual processing rate was $10 billion. But LevelUp believes it can become the Android to the Square’s iOS by working with other players like NCR in transaction value chain.

That’s one of the main reasons is focusing on independent restaurants, LevelUp said. Most restaurants already have a fully functioning (and often expensive) POS system in place. Instead of requiring a business to implement a new system for mobile payments, LevelUp merely acts as an appendage to their existing ones.

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In the next few months, 420,000 U.S. Cellular customers in the Midwest will find themselves without a mobile network. Sprint on Friday closed a $480 million deal with U.S. Cellular that will hand all of the latter’s spectrum in Chicago, St. Louis and the surrounding regions into Sprint’s waiting arms.

This is no mere transfer of network title, though. Sprint plans to shut down U.S. Cellular’s network completely some time in those two metropolitan regions in the next several months (Champagne, Ill., and South Bend, Ind., will also be affected). And despite the fact that U.S. Cellular’s systems uses the same CDMA technology in the same PCS frequencies, Sprint isn’t supporting its existing handsets. All of those customers must either start over with new devices and new service plans on the Sprint network or go find a new mobile operator entirely.

Sprint Regional VP for the Midwest Kevin Gleason told GigaOM that Sprint planned to make the transition as easy as possible for U.S. Cellular’s customers by offering them plenty of incentive to move to Sprint.

“I believe our recapture rate will be high,” Gleason said. “We’ve already started communicating with them and several of them have already made the switch.”

Sprint has sent out an initial batch of letters notifying them about the transaction but Gleason said Sprint will soon follow up, detailing the timing of the network shutdown and the discount offers Sprint is making to draw those customers under the Sprint umbrella.

While Gleason wouldn’t give any specific details on the exact amount of the discounts, he said they would take many forms: device discounts over Sprint’s usual subsidies, trade-in fees for older phones, porting credits for making the switch and activation fee waivers.

Many customers will be able to get new phones and comparable service plans without having to pay a dime, he said. Many will also be able to upgrade to fancier devices such as the iPhone 5 or Samsung Galaxy S 4 for a much lower than price than other customers would pay, Gleason said. He added that switching customers would also have a great deal of flexibility in plan choices, since Sprint is extending the discount offers to its Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile prepaid brands as well.

In general, Sprint and U.S. Cellular’s contract plans are comparable, and in the case of its unlimited data plans, Sprint is actually cheaper. But depending on the circumstances, not every customer will be getting an equitable deal.

For instance if you happen to have just bought a new high-end smartphone or tablet, Sprint incentive discounts won’t cover the full cost of replacing it. What’s worse is that brand new smartphone essentially become useless in a few months when the Chicago and St. Louis networks go dead (though it would work on U.S. Cellular’s other networks). Some customers may also balk at the idea of signing new two-year contracts if they want to take full advantage of the discount offers.

Gleason acknowledged that some customers will feel like they’re getting a raw deal, but he expects those cases will be kept to minimum. He pointed out that 60 percent of U.S. Cellular customers in affected cities have let their contracts lapse and the large majority of them use feature phones. Those subscribers are ripe for an upgrade, he said.

That’s one of the main reasons why U.S. Cellular opted for a wholesale replacement of U.S. Cellular’s networks and devices, rather than a gradual phase out like Sprint is doing with its Nextel iDEN network, Gleason said. So many of those U.S. Cellular devices are old or obsolete that it decided to start fresh with phones optimized for Sprint’s new Network Vision architecture, which boasts the most up-to-date CDMA and LTE technologies.

We’ll know more details about the sunset timeline and the specific discounts in the next couple of weeks. And if you’re a Chicagoan, you’re probably wondering what will happen to the name of U.S. Cellular Field, the home of the White Sox, now that the carrier is leaving the city. Well, it won’t become Sprint Field. Gleason said U.S. Cellular is keeping the naming the rights.

U.S. Cellular Field hoto courtesy of Shutterstock user Alan Mars

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