24
Mar
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The rumors were true and now T-Mobile has launched its new, simplified, contract-free plans. Starting at $50/month for unlimited talk and text with 500MB of high-speed data (throttled, but sans overage fees after that), the new services allow customers to forget about counting minutes and messages and focus solely on data. This could be good or bad news, depending on your usage, but perhaps the most important aspect of these new plans is that you can get them without a 2-year commitment.

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You can select to get the new plans with or without a new device (which some carriers will allow you to do already), but if you do decide you want to buy a phone from T-Mobile, you'll have two tabs: 'Monthly Payments' or 'One Payment'.

05
Mar
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In the past, Android apps have been limited to a 50MB file size. App developers who needed to add extra data, as is the case with most big games, would have to have a secondary, self-hosted download after the user first launched the game. Today, that changes with Google introducing support for up to 4GB of "expansion files". While APKs must still be under 50MB, Google will host two 2GB files that include extra data for developers' apps. Nice!

This will solve a lot of problems for a lot of people, not the least of whom are developers. Since Google is doing the hosting, it's no longer necessary for a game developer to host hundreds of megabytes, or even gigabytes of data on their own servers.

21
Sep
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The carriers continue screwing us in lockstep. Sprint is once again making its service less appealing (and more in line with the rest of the quadopoly) by putting a 5GB cap on its Mobile Hotspot plans. As always with capped data, overage fees are now here to keep you up at night. Going over the 5GB cap will tack 5¢ per MB onto your bill, which means the homepage of AP is going to cost you around $0.30. We're like an old timey newspaper.

As for right now, this won't affect regular mobile data (it strictly applies to mobile hotspot), but perhaps they're saving that announcement for later.

08
Jun
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Come Friday, June 10, Sprint subscribers with 4G coverage will be treated to a pleasant surprise: the WiMAX uplink speed cap will increase from 1.0Mbps to 1.5Mbps.

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Obviously, the 1.5Mbps upload speed won't be consistent everywhere, as reception varies (significantly, with Sprint). Also notable is that if you're using a "fixed device" (i.e. a Motorola 4G desktop modem), you won't be affected; the 1.0Mbps speed cap is on your device to stay.

Nevertheless, we're sure EVO and Epic 4G users will be happy to hear about these changes - faster upload speeds are always good news, even if competitors don't even have such caps.