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Your old T-Mobile 3G phone is going to keep working for a little while longer
The shutdown won't happen until the second half of 2022
T-Mobile, could you just pick a set of dates and stick with it, please? A few weeks ago the company's internal documents said it would be shutting down its legacy UMTS 3G network on October 1st, as announced earlier this year. But in a new press release, that date has been moved back for the better part of a year: it's now going out on July 1st, 2022.
AT&T confirms it is sending surprise Galaxy Note9s to some customers affected by its 3G shutdown
Other unsolicited Note and S-series phones were apparently given out
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Ahead of the shutdown of its 3G network early next year, AT&T has been prompting customers who own devices that are set to become obsolete to get new phones. It's gone so far as to offer a free if cheap replacement for those who request one. However, some subscribers who have yet to take action of any sort on this matter are receiving devices anyway and they're not the phones we were told to expect.
Samsung vows to remotely brick stolen TVs
A press release says that the company can shut down any of its smart televisions once they're connected to the internet
Having more or less every appliance in your home constantly connected to global interconnected networks can enable some remarkable tools. And not just tools for the consumer: device manufactures are finding themselves able to exercise more and more control over the things they sell after the sale is made. The latest example is a batch of Samsung TVs, which the company says it will remotely disable after they were stolen from a warehouse.
T-Mobile's 3G shutdown is back on schedule for October
Also, Sprint's LTE network now has an end date
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In its bid to keep on the forefront of the 5G race in the United States, T-Mobile hasn't made its plans to kill off its and Sprint's 3G networks exactly loud and clear, but we had a good idea of when the ball would start rolling and when it would finish. Well, that was until the plans apparently changed, before shifting again just a few months later.
Shed a tear, folks: there's another tombstone in the Google Graveyard. Today's dearly departed is Google Poly. What's that? You've never heard of Google Poly? Join the club. Despite covering Google products for over a decade, this one passed through the Android Police radar with nary a blip.
LG Pay is shutting down later this year
Things will progressively break until November 1st, which marks the end
Following LG Mobile's shutdown on July 31st, owners of the company's smartphones have another calendar date to make a note of. Come November 1st, LG's widely unused contactless payments system is also shutting down, according to emails currently being sent to customers. Between now and then, features and sign-ups will be progressively disabled.
Lucky LG employees can reportedly buy the company's last unreleased phones, including the Rollable
"Lucky" so long as you don't value, like, software support or anything
LG's ignoble exit from the smartphone business made headlines last month. But an international electronics giant doesn't simply flip a switch and exit a market: there were plenty of in-development phones still floating around LG offices and factories when it decided to stop making them. According to one noted leaker, the company is selling off the last Android phones it will ever make straight to its employees.
Hey Google, set a timer for "Timely is shutting down"
The popular alarm clock is disappearing from the Play Store 7 years after Google bought the developer
Wow, talk about a blast from the past. The gorgeous Timely Alarm Clock showed up on the Play Store in the summer of 2013, an example of what well-designed Android apps should look like in the Jelly Bean era. Just a few months later, Google gobbled up the developer Bitspin, and made all of the pretty add-ons for Timely free.
Verizon reveals the shutdown date for its 3G CDMA network
Phones and other 3G devices will lose connection at the end of next year
Today, Verizon put a date on its intention to shut down its aging 3G network: December 31st, 2022. It's not just the end of the extremely widespread 3G system, but a watershed moment for Verizon, since its network began on CDMA technology when the company was first formed in 2000. Greater reliance on the GSM-based LTE network, and finally pushing more customers towards 5G, has let the company wean itself off of the outdated standard.
Cricket starts winding down 3G network, presenting a big problem for BYOD customers
Unsupported devices won't be able to be activated starting next week
If you're still using an old, non-LTE-capable phone on Cricket, we have bad news: the company will be shutting down its 3G UMTS networks in February 2022. Additionally, customers will no longer be able to activate their unsupported devices on Cricket starting January 19th, which is only a few days away. Because of the way Cricket handles BYOD phones, this is a real problem.
Quibi will fully shut down on December 1
No matter which way you hold your phone, things don't look good
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When Quibi launched earlier this year, it sounded kind of cool. Episodes specifically designed for mobile viewing that automatically adjusted to however you were currently holding your phone? Sure, let's give it a shot! But unfortunately, Quibi never really took off. Now, the only episode left is a finale for the video streaming platform itself—The Wall Street Journal says Quibi has decided to shut down.
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Social media platforms have maintained slimmed-down versions of their apps in the past few years to grab more users from developing markets with low-end hardware. Facebook, however, has decided to shut down Instagram Lite and is now redirecting users to the main app. The company has not said why.
Andy Rubin's Essential launched its first phone in 2017, and it turns out that will be its only phone. After making some news last year with the bizarre Project GEM prototype, Essential has now announced that it won't be releasing that device or any other. Essential will shut down, effective immediately.
Back in 2010, Hipmunk launched with the promise to simplify and improve flight search across multiple airlines and released an Android app soon after. Its innovations have long been copied by other search engines including Google, which made it hard for the company to keep up. It was acquired by SAP Concur in 2016, and Hipmunk has announced today that it will shut down for good on January 23. The business-focused Concur Hipmunk service is also retiring.
Google is delaying the shutdown of its longtime internet protocol chat and call app, Hangouts. G Suite users were originally told that Hangouts would be retired starting in October. Now, the deadline for G Suite customers to move has now been pushed back to "no sooner than June 2020."
Google launches a lot of things, and some of them don't survive. You're probably familiar with the high-profile deaths like Google+, Allo, and Reader, but there are numerous little-known services that never gain a following before Google kicks them to the curb. That's the case for Follow Your World, which shuts down next month.
Late last year, Google launched a blog management tool named 'Blog Compass.' It could connect to sites running either WordPress or Blogger, and provided the owner with insights into trending topics and a centralized dashboard for analytics/comments. However, it's time to dig another grave in the Google Graveyard, because Compass is now dead.
We were recently tipped off that some OnePlus 7 Pro owners are running into a significant but thankfully not widespread issue: Their phones appear to randomly turn off or shut down, potentially while they're even being used. The only means of resuscitation in such cases is manually rebooting into fastboot by holding down a combination of hardware buttons. Thankfully, OnePlus is both aware of the issue and planning a fix.
There are numerous options for automating your digital life, but there's one fewer today. Stringify, which was purchased by Comcast in 2017, is closing its virtual doors in June. The company isn't technically shutting down, but it will focus on developing technology as part of Comcast. That means no more consumer automation app or service.
Google just released the first Android Q developer preview earlier this month, and we're still digging around to discover all the new stuff. It's clear even from this first version that Google is taking privacy more seriously, and tightening control of the clipboard is part of that. One notable clipboard manager is already planning to retire features in anticipation of Android Q. On May 1st, 2019, Clipper Sync will go offline according to an email sent to users.