Verizon has had an on again/off again love affair with “global” phones – phones that carry CDMA support for the U.S. and a GSM radio for frequencies abroad. More often than not, however, the GSM radio is only supportive of GSM frequencies not used in the U.S. making any hackery to unlock and run on a local GSM carrier out of the question. But as it turns out, the newer generation of silicon inside of specific VZW phones is truly global, supporting foreign...

While T-Mobile pretended to like AT&T just so they’d buy them and solve a fair chunk of their money problems, now that the gov’t has spoken and broken up their little love party, T-Mobile is back at the anti-AT&T game. And what better way to get people to jump ship to your service than tug at their wallet strings. AT&T had an asinine policy regarding cellphone unlocking. The whole purpose of a SIM card is to allow the end user to swap SIM cards...

Are you an Australian who was misled by Apple and duped into buying a WiFi + “4G” iPad that is anything but in your homeland? You’re entitled to a refund, this according to the Sunday Morning Herald. One solution that was reputedly given to Apple after the brouhaha that erupted earlier today was to have Apple apply warning/notice stickers to all Australian-bound 3rd-gen iPads, though Apple struck down such a plan as “too cumbersome”. Instead,...

The Australian gov’t has a bone to pick with Apple over their new iPad, specifically with how the LTE model is branded as “WiFi + 4G”. You see, while the 3rd-gen iPad does feature LTE radios inside, they are only for the U.S. and Canadian markets. Frequency differences abroad mean that “4G” model is much slower due to having to fall back to only HSPA+ networks. And therein lines the Australian government’s argument — that Apple is...

LTE is a wonderful thing. Even more wonderful, however, is VoLTE (Voice over LTE) — a technology that will transition voice from GSM/CDMA to the much higher quality LTE spec. Currently, carriers use a mixture of EDGE, HSPA and CDMA technologies paired with LTE radios to shuttle voice and data amongst multiple networks. It’s a band-aid type of solution as a single network in today’s modern world would not only be simpler to maintain and operate, but allow...