Category: News

With hectic schedules, it can be hard to keep track of everything in your news feed. That’s why we created the TalkAndroid Daily Dose. This is where we recap the day’s hottest stories so you can get yourself up to speed in quick fashion. Happy reading!!

Reviews

MMGuardian Parental Control [Tools]

Apps

Google Play Music lands in Australia, New Zealand… while also taking more of Europe over in the process

Carriers

Boingo and AT&T enter into a global roaming agreement

Google

Record high 60,000 apps deleted from the Google Play Store in February

Google in the hot seat again as Microsoft, Nokia, and Oracle file new antitrust complaint with the EU

WhatsApp says no deal with Google is in the works

Google Play Store gets fresh new look starting today

New redesigned Google Play Store (version 4.0.25) now available to download

Phones

Motorola unlock tool for RAZR HD, RAZR M and Atrix HD released

Root method for Motorola RAZR HD and other devices running 4.1.2 released

Specs for Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 now confirmed

Xiaomi Unveils The Mi2S And Mi2A Smartphone

Tablets

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 coming to U.S. on April 11

ASUS finally spills the beans on the FonePad’s release date and price

Miscellaneous

Gamestick delayed, release slated for June

Come comment on this article: TalkAndroid Daily Dose for April 9, 2013

ASUS created much buzz with the announcement of its FonePad smartphone/tablet hybrid, but has created tons of mystery about its launch date and pricing for prospective customers since then. Fortunately, it has finally come out and given us all the launch details we have been eagerly waiting for. The manufacturer has confirmed the FonePad will come in at £179.99 (about $276 USD). Additionally, the device will be available for pre-order at retailers like Carphone Warehouse, Amazon and Sainsbury’s from April 12, with stock due to arrive on April 26.

We’ll give more information as we hear anything.

source: techradar

Come comment on this article: ASUS finally spills the beans on the FonePad’s release date and price

Google’s Play Music service has been one heck of a godsend to plenty of Android folk out there, but unfortunately— people in parts of Europe and the southern hemisphere haven’t been able to get in on the awesome service… until now. The awesome service has been launched in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, New Zealand and Portugal. This means that many users in those countries will finally have the ability to shop and store up to 20,000 songs in Google’s library. Sweet, right?

Of course there are still many countries still without access to Play Music, but hey— access to the service one country at a time will work out for now.

source: Play Music

Come comment on this article: Google Play Music lands in Australia, New Zealand… while also taking more of Europe over in the process

If you happen to extensively travel abroad and are an AT&T customer, then you’re probably going to be excited at this tidbit of news. Boingo and AT&T have announced that it has gone into a special global roaming agreement with one another, allowing AT&T customers to access wireless hotspots at locations worldwide for free. It’s pretty straightforward too: all customers need to do is simply use the AT&T WiFi International App in order to use Boingo’s global network. Also part of the agreement, Boingo customers who happen to travel into in the United States will also be able to access AT&T WiFi hotspots throughout the US.

One small thing to note is in order to use AT&T’s WiFi International App, AT&T customers will need to ensure that they already have the appropriate 300MB or 800MB AT&T Data Global Add-On package as part of their mobile plan. Once that’s done, customers will be able to access up to a gig of Boingo service. Sweet.

More details can be found once you hit the break and check out the presser.

Boingo Announces Global Wi-Fi Roaming Agreement with AT&T

AT&T Customers Have Access to Boingo’s Global Wi-Fi Hotspots in Major International Airports

LOS ANGELES – April 9^th, 2013 – Boingo Wireless, Inc. (NASDAQ: WIFI), the Wi-Fi industry’s leading provider of software and services worldwide, today announced a global Wi-Fi roaming agreement with AT&T.

Travelers abroad can now gain access, via the AT&T Wi-Fi International App, to Boingo’s global network of Wi-Fi hotspots managed and operated by Boingo’s subsidiary, Concourse Communications Group.  The AT&T Wi-Fi International App lets AT&T customers on applicable data global packages access up to 1GB of Wi-Fi each month at no additional charge.*

The total Boingo managed and operated network reaches more than 1.5 billion people worldwide annually. Boingo Wi-Fi hotspots at major international airports are available to AT&T customers today, with service continuing to expand throughout 2013.

Additionally, as part of the agreement, Boingo customers traveling in the United States will also be able to access AT&T’s network of Wi-Fi hotspots throughout the country, including airports, restaurants, sporting arenas and retail locations.

“We’re committed to keeping our customers connected to the people, places and information that matter most, which is why we’re pleased that many of them can now seamlessly connect to Boingo’s global Wi-Fi during their travels abroad,” said JR Wilson, vice president, Partnerships and Alliances, AT&T Mobility.

“AT&T’s domestic Wi-Fi network helps fill in the gaps for Boingo users actively seeking Wi-Fi hotspots,” said Howard Buzick, vice president of business development for Boingo Wireless. “With the explosion in both Wi-Fi enabled devices and customer data demand, Wi-Fi roaming continues to be a key facilitator for global data access.”

Both AT&T and Boingo Wireless are Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) member companies with executives serving on the WBA Board of Directors. The companies also are currently participating in the WBA’s Next Generation Hotspot trials for seamless Wi-Fi roaming.

*The AT&T Wi-Fi International app is available to AT&T customers who subscribe to either the 300MB or 800MB AT&T Data Global Add-On package. Visit att.com/worldpackages for complete details.

About Boingo Wireless

Boingo Wireless (NASDAQ: WIFI) helps the world stay connected. Our vast footprint of small cell networks covers more than a million DAS and Wi-Fi locations and reaches more than 1 billion consumers annually – in places as varied as airports, stadiums, shopping malls, restaurants, universities, and military bases. The Boingo platform is the only monetization engine of its kind, driving revenue through carrier offload, advertising, location-based data analytics, and consumer products like IPTV, high-speed broadband, and Wi-Fi.  For more information about the Boingo story, visit www.Boingo.com. 

Contact:

Katie O’Neill

Boingo Wireless, Inc.

Phone: 310-689-1163

Email: [email protected]

 

Boingo, Boingo Wireless, the Boingo Wireless Logo and Don’t Just Go. Boingo! are registered trademarks of Boingo Wireless, Inc. All rights reserved. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.

Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains “forward-looking statements” that involves risks, uncertainties and assumptions. Forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as “anticipates,” “intends,” “plans,” “seeks,” “believes,” “estimates,” “expects” and similar references to future periods. These forward-looking statements include the quotations from management in this press release, as well as any statements regarding Boingo’s strategic plans and future guidance. Forward-looking statements are based on the company’s current expectations and assumptions regarding its business, the economy and other future conditions. Since forward-looking statements relate to the future, they are subject to inherent uncertainties, risks and changes in circumstances that are difficult to predict. The company’s actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements include regional, national or global political, economic, business, competitive, market and regulatory conditions, as well as other risk and uncertainties described more fully in documents filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including Boingo’s Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2012 filed with the SEC on March 18, 2013. Any forward-looking statement made by Boingo in this press release speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Factors or events that could cause the company’s actual results to differ may emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for Boingo to predict all of them. Boingo undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise, except as may be required by law.

source: Boingo PR

Come comment on this article: Boingo and AT&T enter into a global roaming agreement

My distaste for the privacy challenges of Facebook and its apps including the Home is pretty well documented. As we move into the connected age and build a quantified society, Facebook’s dark shadow looms over us like a menacing monster. So perhaps that made me an unlikely reviewer of the HTC First, which is the first official phone that comes with Facebook Home, a hybrid app-skin environment for Google Android.

Since I don’t really review devices like my talented colleague Kevin Tofel, I will restrict myself to things I like and dislike about Facebook Home. And then, I will share my quick impressions of the actual hardware. So here we go – and please don’t treat this as anything more than just my impressions!

What I like about Facebook Home (on First)

1. Facebook Home is visually very attractive and makes Android a lot more attractive and qualifies for “good” sobriquet. I wouldn’t expect anything else considering that the company has been stockpiling nuclear arms of design war. It reminds me of some of the elements we loved in Al Gore’s book, Our Choice, which was published to the iPad by Push Pop Press. (Facebook acquired that company and Push Pop co-founder Mike Matas works at Facebook.)
2. Facebook has made Android faster by removing a lot of crud that typically ships with Android on carrier-branded phones. It has taken many design and use-case cues from iOS and Facebook’s iOS app and applies them to the Android environment. For instance, notifications are much more improved, not just for Facebook but also for other applications.
3. The check-ins and process of taking photos are more tightly integrated and are simpler to use.
4. Facebook Home took its inspiration from the “Launcher” category that is extremely popular in Asia and made a far superior product. Home is a very polished product and focuses the phone owner’s attention on all the right things. (I remember buying similar skins for Windows XP and Windows 98, back in the day when it was a thing to do.)

What I dislike about Facebook Home (on First)

1. For a service that is supposed to bring us updates in real time, this isn’t close enough and it is clearly working on Facebook Time. Facebook hasn’t been able to fine tune its algorithm and as a result it shows only a very specific kind of update — big bold pictures — from your newsfeed. You can actually feel the slow speed (and infrequency of updates) of the feed when you compare it with the desktop feed which moves at a faster pace.
2. It is still hard to do many of the basic Facebook tasks on Facebook Home.
3. While I appreciate the unified messaging option of Facebook Home, the new “Chat Heads” feature is not as easy to use. For example, If you hit five (or more conversations) it takes over the entire screen. It is quite intrusive and really hard to get rid of the chat screen.
4. I found navigating between Facebook Home and the Android environment a little confusing and jarring — enough to feel the difference.

And now about the hardware:

1. HTC First has a 4.3-inch display. It is powered by a 1.4 GHz dual-core Qualcomm 400 chip and it comes with 16 GB of storage and an adequate 1 GB of memory. It uses Android 4.1 Jelly Bean as the base operating system.
2. The phone has a soft-touch rubber design which is easy to grip and it is something I appreciate because my phone keeps dropping from my hand. In this age of giant Android phones (and phablets), the 4.3 inch screen device is actually a pleasant change.
3. Despite the company’s claims, the HTC First isn’t very responsive and feels underpowered. I have used the Nexus 4 and let’s just say, this feels like a mid-range smartphone at best.
4. It started out as very responsive, but over a couple of days of use, I felt that swiping between apps, messages and photos wasn’t as brisk.
5. The device’s look is a little dated and reminds me of iPhone 3GS.
6. It gets really hot and the battery isn’t anything to write home about.
7. AT&T’s LTE network isn’t as good as advertised, slowing down in places during my tests which also showed connection drops.

Bottom line: I am unlikely to use this device. But if you are a Facebook addict, are on a budget and have solid AT&T coverage in your area, this might be a good one for you.

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Intel is just a few months away from production of new chips targeting the microserver market, and more powerful chips for other applications are on the way, Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s data center and connected systems group, is expected to say at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing on Tuesday.

The chip maker wants more developers to try out its products, and to that end it’s opening a cloud innovation center in Beijing where the latest Intel gear will be available for testing and development. Intel is also working on reference architecture to redesign racks and rethink the placement of the elements inside of them in hopes of influencing microserver computing deployments.

Aiming at microservers

While the microserver market might not be huge, it is growing. And Intel needs to play in it, as competition from chip makers using ARM architectures grows.

That’s why Intel is following through with plans to start making power-sipping 22-nanometer Avoton system on chips (SoCs) with billions of transistors in the second half of this year. The “wimpy-core” Avoton chips built with the new Silvermont microarchitecture, announced in June at GigaOM’s Structure 2012 conference in San Francisco, target webscale data center deployments. They will be available for use in Hewlett-Packard’s new Project Moonshot servers.

A Facebook spokesman has said the company looks forward to Avoton, as an earlier wimpy-core chip for microservers, code-named Centerton, didn’t appear to be capable of handling the social giant’s workloads. Whether Facebook adopts Avoton or not, Intel will need to be competitive on price in order to gain widespread adoption in microservers, as my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported in December.

Just a week after Applied Micro started shipping an ARM-based chip that contains networking capability, Intel is expected to announce a chip targeting networking, too. Intel will start production of its 22-nanometer Rangeley SoCs for networking devices in the second half of 2013. Lisa Graff, vice president and general manager of Intel’s data center marketing group, couldn’t provide details on Rangeley beyond the product’s name and basic purpose.

At the same time, Intel has much more experience with brawny cores than wimpy cores. In the fourth quarter of the year, it will produce Ivy Bridge-EX chips in the Xeon E7 family with upgrades boosting memory capacity from around 4 TB to 12 TB. That’s helpful for in-memory databases. “We’ve been working with (SAP) on HANA, and this is exactly what they want — as much memory as we can possibly give them,” Graff said. “They would like (much) more.”

Storage-specific SoCs in the Atom family and Haswell Xeon E3 processors that will go as low as 13 watts are also on the way, Intel plans to say.

Beyond chips

Beside the chip announcements, Intel is showing interest in working with webscale data centers by collaborating with Chinese companies Alibaba, Baidu, China Telecom and Tencent on Project Scorpio to build more efficient server racks for certain types of applications. Intel is developing rack-scale reference architecture that will show a wide variety of options for racks for hyperscale environments that could allow products to emerge from Project Scorpio and the Open Compute Project.

Taken together, the Intel announcements make the company look like it’s keen on staying top of mind for webscale deployments. But competition is more brawny than wimpy, and that’s why Intel needs to keep making its chips do more, use less energy and cost less money.

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A wearable patch that can monitor a patient’s heart activity for two weeks straight has won a $16 million investment. iRhythm, a startup spun out of Stanford’s biodesign program, plans to announce on Wednesday that it has raised a Series D round that brings its total amount raised to $68 million. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), with participation from existing funders New Leaf Ventures, Synergy Life Science Partners and Kaiser Permanente Ventures.

“What the company has done is do a good job integrating consumer electronics and ergonomics,” said Casper de Clercq, a partner at NVP and a new member of iRhythm’s board. He said the company was attractive because it’s addressing an unmet need with innovative technology and its Zio device (not to be confused with the now-defunct sleep monitor Zeo) is already reimbursed by health plans as a diagnostic test.

If a doctor suspects that a patient has cardiac arrhythmia, she can affix the Zio patch to a patient’s chest and simply instruct him to leave it on for 14 days. At the end of the two weeks, the patient removes the device and mails it back to the company. At that point, it’s analyzed by iRhythm’s cardiac technicians using its proprietary algorithms.

Unlike other monitoring devices that collect and wirelessly transmit information, the Zio only collects the data. While it may sound old-school to rely on snail mail to deliver the information back to the company, it makes for a cheaper product, no batteries to charge and a wireless, waterproof product patients don’t have to worry about taking on and off. Because the device is patient-proof, the company says compliance with the Zio is about double that of other similar products.

By providing a way to more quickly and easily assess whether symptomatic patients actually have heart arrhythmia, the company said it can help doctors determine the best treatment option and reduce the overall cost of care. So far, it’s tracked about 140,000 patients and has amassed 20 million hours of patient cardiac activity.

Kevin King, the company’s CEO and president, said the new funding would go towards marketing, technology expansion, distribution and investing in new uses for the product.

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Mystery solved. Many were scratching their heads over why Google sold Frommer’s Travel Guides this month — less than a year after buying the brand for $22 million. The answer is the same as for why Google does nearly anything: data.

As Skift reports, Google handed over the company to founder Arthur Frommer sans social media accounts. In other words, Google is keeping all of the followers that Frommer’s accrued on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google+, YouTube and Pinterest. These thousands — or more likely millions — of accounts are valuable because they represent a huge collection of serious travel enthusiasts.

While Google will not keep the Frommer’s name, it’s able to keep the followers by simply changing the name on the account; in the case of Twitter, all of the @FrommersTravel followers are now following Google-owned @ZagatTravel:

This account is now @zagattravel! Welcome. Stay tuned for info on where to go, where to stay and how to explore around the world.

— Zagat Travel (@ZagatTravel) April 9, 2013

The social media data will power Google’s ongoing forays into the travel market in which it offers services like flight and hotel search, and Zagat reviews.

In retrospect, it appears that the social media data may have been Google’s goal along when it obtained Frommer’s from publisher John Wiley & Sons for $22 million in August of 2012. The company has not disclosed how it much received for selling the brand back to Arthur Frommer, who intends to relaunch the title’s print editions which Google decided to discontinue in favor of digital-only offerings.

In response to a question about the social media accounts and the price of the sale, Google provided this response:

We’re focused on providing high-quality local information to help people quickly discover and share great places, like a nearby restaurant or the perfect vacation destination. That’s why we’ve spent the last several months integrating the travel content we acquired from Wiley into Google+ Local and our other Google services. We can confirm that we have returned the Frommer’s brand to its founder and are licensing certain travel content to him.

Social media accounts are becoming increasingly significant as more people use them to connect with people and brands and to explore the internet. Popular New York Times reporter, Jim Roberts, cause a fuss for instance, when he revealed that he would take his 75,000 Twitter followers with him when he left the paper this year.

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So I stopped by the National Association of Broadcasters show today to talk big data with Gracenote Co-Founder and CTO Ty Roberts, after which he took me on a brief tour of the nearby show floor. If you’ve never been to NAB, it’s like a behind-the-scenes-version of CES, filled with the biggest, baddest, most-expensive television and movie-production equipment you’ve ever seen.

The big thing this year — 4K television. Here are a few factoids that Roberts, clearly having been educated by his peers in the Sony family, shared:

• The storage footprint of 1 hour of 4K video is 512 gigabytes.
• That’s a lot of data to move across IP, so 4k cameras just send everything straight to production storage systems over fiber-optic cable.
• The picture is so detailed that it’s difficult for one person to shoot scenes and focus at the same time. The answer: new two-person camera setups where one guy shoots and the other stands next to him focusing the shot on a larger screen.

Oh, and there were drones, too:

The Schiebel Camcopter S-100.

This is the civilian version of the Schiebel Camcopter S-100. There’s a military version, too. Its sticker price of several hundred thousand dollars probably isn’t surprising.

For the more cost-conscious aerial cinematographer, Freefly Systems had its own booth:

The Freefly Cinestar helicopter

Or for those who prefer the ground:

A video rover, I guess.

This all kind of makes me wish I shot video for a living. If I had a flying, rotating video camera or an off-road setup, I’m sure I could find some way to use them.

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When it comes to online fashion and large digital brands, it seems social shopping might have hit a plateau. It’s pretty standard now for companies like Amazon or Nordstrom to display products along with buttons for sharing to Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. Products might have reviews and photo galleries, or the company might have its own blog.

But beyond that? There isn’t much social activity happening on most of those larger sites.

I sat down with the team at Zappos Labs last week to talk about the future of online shopping. It’s not like Zappos is struggling to find shoppers, but the company’s leadership clearly understands that as the world moves more toward social media adoption, there must be ways to use social to boost sales and improve the shopping experience.

“It’s hard for us to think of new ways to shop when people are keeping the lights on of a 2 billion dollar e-commerce site,” said Will Young, director of Zappos Labs. But social media for large e-commerce sites is tricky. ”For a lot of people, they just want their shoes overnight. And they want free returns.”

So where is a team like Zappos looking for inspiration?

Young immediately pointed to sites like Poshmark or Pinterest as having built strong communities around liking and sharing particular items. I’ve written about Poshmark before, and there’s no doubt users are engaged on the platform, but it’s unclear how many people are actually turning those likes into purchases. Wish lists do not always turn into shopping lists, even if the engagement is strong, although some sites like Wanelo are trying to change this.

And then Young pointed out that you have sites like Modcloth or Lululemon or NastyGal, which have built notoriously passionate communities of shoppers around fairly niche products, and turned those shoppers into sales. But those companies have very clearly-defined products and target audiences.

But for Zappos or Nordstrom or Amazon, who can’t just settle for targeting one specific demographic, like young women? They need to figure out if they can grab any of the social elements these other sites are using so well, and then apply them to a broader audience.

“If our main goal was just to do sales, we’d just be creating coupon applications,” Young said, noting that Zappos Labs is dedicated to understanding how people shop. “That’s one of our big challenges. Which is, how how do we put social only in front of people who care about it? Building communities is tough when we’re so wide.”

So what has Zappos come up with so far? The company has tried out a Pinterest recommendation engine that was fairly hit or miss in terms of the products it suggested, but they said it had enough positive reactions that they’re looking to improve it. They’re also trying out a site called Glance that shows curated groups of items around particular themes that users can like and save, since discovery on a site like Zappos that has so many products can be a challenge. And the company has experimented with collecting all the tweets about individual products to serve as a sort of crowdsourced Twitter review.

Young pointed out that for the majority of the company’s shoppers, getting them into the idea of social shopping at all can be tricky.

For most of our customers, “they’re on Facebook. They’re probably on Twitter,” he said. “But when they come to a site like Zappos they don’t always want to link their Facebook account or anything. They might like our fan page, but how do we create a social experience for those users?”

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Apple’s having yet another services problem and this time it’s affecting one of the core features of iOS devices: iMessage. Since about noon Pacific Time, both Apple’s messaging service and its video chat feature, FaceTime, have been experiencing problems, according to Apple’s Systems Status page.

One thing that’s not clear is how many users are experiencing the problem — many times the status page will identify a percentage. Anecdotally, I know both me and some of my colleagues on the West Coast have had issues with iMessages sending as text messages and coming in out of order, and Twitter users from a variety of areas are complaining.

While some people may be moderately annoyed by a FaceTime outage, iMessage problems are another story. Messaging is one of the most popular and important features for mobile devices. Sure, text messages can be a backup, but people using iPad or an iPod touch without a data plan don’t have that option. And even for those with a cellular plan that comes with texting, some people are having those come in out of order (“it’s the worst,” a colleague informs me).

Any company can have a services or cloud outage — many do. But for Apple, a company with a history of problems with services and its cloud-based platform in general, today’s outage is yet another reminder of how much work it has to do.

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Remember FLO TV? Qualcomm’s mobile broadcast TV service went live in 2007, promising to deliver digital video content to mobile phones all over the country. The network was supposed to be a proof-of-concept on the grandest scale, generating enthusiasm for Qualcomm’s proprietary MediaFLO multicast technology across the globe. The reality turned out to be much different.

No one seemed interested in paying a subscription fee for TV programming they already got at home. Nor were they interested in buying the special MediaFLO phones necessary to receive that broadcast signal. After limping along for three years, Qualcomm shut it down in 2010 and eventually sold its spectrum to AT&T.

Now Qualcomm is back on the live TV bandwagon, beating the drum over a new video and data multicast technology called LTE-broadcast. Recently I had a chance to catch up with Neville Meijers, VP of business development for Qualcomm, and I asked him the obvious: Didn’t Qualcomm learn its lesson with FLO TV?

Meijers readily acknowledged that FLO TV was a failure, but he claimed it wasn’t a failure of technology. Nor did Qualcomm misidentify the demand for live video content, he said. “At the end of the day it came down to economics,” Meijers concluded.

Why FLO didn’t flow

FLO TV failed for many reasons, but the biggest one was the huge ecosystem every participating player had to buy into to make the whole thing work. FLO required specialty chipsets, and thus specialty devices. It required new spectrum and a new network, and it even necessitated the negotiation of content rights to redistribute any program being broadcast. Those are huge hurdles to overcome, requiring big investments from both carrier and consumer.

If FLO had been a cheap service that you could use over any phone, then it could have worked, but the argument is moot, Meijers said. Qualcomm isn’t trying to recreate FLO TV with a new technology. Instead, Meijers said, Qualcomm views LTE-broadcast as a different kind of service proposition altogether: a means of easing congestion on carriers’ mobile data networks to make all kinds of streamed multimedia content more accessible and cheaper for consumers.

Unlike MediaFLO, LTE-broadcast doesn’t require new phones and new networks, and it uses standards-based, not proprietary, technology. What that means is carriers will be able to use their existing LTE infrastructure and spectrum through hardware upgrades for broadcast and future generations of radio chipsets will automatically support the feature.

What’s more, implementing LTE-broadcast doesn’t mean sacrificing capacity on the regular LTE network, Meijers said. If the network isn’t broadcasting content — or if no one in a cell is watching that content — it simply reverts to its normal unicast LTE state. For those reasons operators are much more enthusiastic about LTE-broadcast than they were in MediaFLO’s dedicated network model. The first trial networks will show up this year, but we won’t see LTE-broadcast on a meaningful scale until 2014, Meijers said.

What can you do with a broadcast network?

If LTE-broadcast was just about live TV, it probably wouldn’t work. As I wrote in January, there just aren’t that many live TV events that would get multiple users on the same cell all watching the same program — the Superbowl, the Oscars and the State of Union Address don’t happen every day.

But Meijers said that there is a lot of content beyond video that carriers or third-party content providers can ship to multiple phones simultaneously. For instance, instead of having each phone individually downloading app, device firmware, OS updates; operators could ship a updates in a gigantic batches to all users. Take a widely used app like Facebook — an update to its iOS software could hit hundreds of devices in the same cell simultaneously, eating up a fraction of the cell’s bandwidth.

LTE-broadcast could also be used to provide unique content at specific locations, Meijers said. At a football game, for instance, all of the cells serving the stadium could feature live video from every TV camera pointed at the field.

And while FLO TV may have failed, carriers are still interested in other video models, Meijer said. Instead of trying to convince customers to watch TV on a schedule, carriers could turn phones into miniature DVRs. At set times of the day they would broadcast programming, whether its popular YouTube videos or HBO’s Game of Thrones, which your phone could then would scoop out of the air and store for later viewing – if you have a subscription, of course.

“There are operators that have close alliances with television providers, particularly overseas,” Meijers said. “They want to offer over-the-top video services of their own.”

Right now watching an entire season of Game of Thrones streamed to your tablet over a mobile network is prohibitively expensive given the amount of data you would consume. But what if HBO paid Verizon Wireless to broadcast every new series episode to all of its HBO Go subscribers when the show aired each week? Since the program is broadcast to millions of devices simultaneously and then recorded in memory, it would cost Verizon little in network resources. That would allow it to exempt what would normally be gigabytes of data from its monthly data caps. Now that’s a compelling case for LTE-broadcast.

TVs photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Peter Sobolev

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