Posts tagged Mobile
AT&T agrees to buy T-Mobile USA for $39 billion
Mar 20th
AT&T and Deutsche Telekom just announced the sale of T-Mobile USA for $39 billion — $25 billion cash and $14 billion in AT&T stock, giving Deutsche Telekom an 8% stake in the U.S. telecom giant. If the deal passes regulatory approval, which the companies estimate will take up to 12 months to complete, the combined subscriber base would exceed 130 million, making AT&T by far the largest mobile operator in America (followed by Verizon and Sprint). Moreover, since AT&T and T-Mobile are the country’s only major GSM operators, AT&T would gain a monopoly on GSM cell service in the U.S.
AT&T says the deal will bring “straightforward synergies” due to ”complementary network technologies, spectrum positions and operations.” The company also claims the deal will expand the footprint of its LTE 4G service by 46.5 million people, to 294 million, or 95% of the U.S. population. T-Mobile USA itself had no clear plans to migrate to LTE, however, suggesting that AT&T intends to use T-Mobile’s AWS spectrum (1700/2100 MHz) for LTE, alongside its own 700 MHz bands.
If the deal does not receive regulatory approval, AT&T will have to pay T-Mobile a $3 billion “breakup fee,” transfer AWS spectrum it is currently not using for LTE deployment to T-Mobile, and sign a roaming agreement to give T-Mobile access to its network.
Read on for more about the deal.
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Qualcomm ships dual-core 1.2 GHz Snapdragon CPU for smartphones
Jun 3rd
Qualcomm just shipped the first dual-core smartphone processor, a 1.2 GHz Snapdragon chip. The new third-generation QSD8260 and 8660 chips are based on a die-shrunk 45nm version of the 1 GHz QSD8250 chip found in phones like the HTC HD2, EVO 4G, and Google’s Nexus One and should use less power while packing a lot more computing horsepower.
The third-generation Snapdragon CPUs offer a next-generation Adreno (ATI Imageon) GPU with support for Open GL ES 2.0 and Open VG 1.1, hardware acceleration for 1080p HD video encode/decode, and video output resolution up to WXGA (1280×800) with 24-bit color. They also pack a dedicated low power audio engine (to allow the rest of the CPU to go to sleep when you’re just playing music) and low power GPS electronics (to reduce power consumption in navigation apps).
The 8260 model packs an HSPA+ radio (GSM), while the 8660 supports both HSPA+ (GSM) and EV-DO Rev. B (CDMA). Qualcomm will also offer the QSD 8672, a 1.5 GHz version for tablets and larger devices that began sampling several months ago.
The CPUs are based on the same Scorpion core design as current Snapdragon chips, implementing the ARMv7 instruction set but offering slightly better performance clock-for-clock than ARM’s reference design, Cortex A8. For more information, check out our Smartphone Processor Guide.
No info on when the new chips will hit production smartphones, but we’re probably looking at early 2011 at the earliest.
Full press release after the break.
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