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SK Telecom launches the world's first LTE-Advanced network, and the Galaxy S4 LTE-A
Just days after an LTE-Advanced variant of Samsung's Galaxy S 4 leaked, Korean carrier SK Telecom has officially announced it's launching the world's first publicly available LTE-Advanced wireless network. The Galaxy S4 LTE-A is also official (in red or blue) as the first device able to take advantage of the new technology for even faster data transmission speeds. According to the press release, SK Telecom plans to have as many as seven LTE-A devices available by the end of the year, all capable of up to 150Mbps. While SK Telecom is using Carrier Aggregation and Coordinated Multi Point technology to improve speeds right now, it will add Enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination in 2014 to go even faster. After that, it suggest carrier aggregation will improve to support higher speeds and faster uploads in subsequent years. To take advantage of the higher speeds, SK Telecom's Btv IPTV service will begin offering 1080p video streaming in early July. That will be accompanied by enhanced multiview baseball broadcasts, more free videos, an HD video shopping service with six channels on one screen in August and the addition of FLAC audio files via its music package. Right now, the company has Seoul covered in LTE-A, and plans to eventually offer it in 84 cities, all at the same price as existing LTE service. Check after the break for the press release with all the details, plus video of a speed test. Update: We've just come across another juicy tidbit that makes the Galaxy S4 LTE-A all the more worthwhile -- it'll ship with a Snapdragon 800 SoC that contains a 2.3GHz quad-core CPU, plus 32GB of built-in storage and a 2,600mAh battery. It goes without saying that this phone will be speedy on all angles. As spotted by SlashGear, the new GS4 variant will also see the debut of a new Samsung software feature: ImageON. Explained as a Google Googles-esque app, it'll automatically analyse photos and offer up related videos and "extend access to relevant content on the internet."
Fix coming for HTC's drivergate, sort of
When CEO Peter Chou himself declares that there's a fix en route for the video problems plaguing several of his company's devices, that's a pretty good sign -- there are a couple of catches, though. One, we still don't know which devices will be patched, and two, it turns out that the fix to improve video acceleration performance still won't involve an actual driver for the ATI silicon within the Qualcomm chipsets. Our mommies always told us never to look a gift horse in the mouth, so we're going to stay cautiously optimistic here until we get the actual patch out in the wild (in March, if we're lucky) for some testing.
HTC cooking up faster video for affected devices -- no drivers involved
TyTN II owners, put your cash back in your wallet -- for a minute, anyway. CEO Peter Chou himself along with HTC's European VP have allegedly both gone on record saying that accelerated video drivers are in the works for an unspecified number of devices afflicted by the now-legendary performance issues. Independently, though, we've received word from HTC that that's not quite true. While the company is definitely banging through some improvements in the way video is handled on some of its recent touchscreen models, it turns out that there's technically no driver involved for the dormant Imageon circuitry; rather, the company's crack team of engineers has discovered performance enhancements to the existing software stack that they hope to roll out in the not-too-distant future (March is the tentative plan), and if all goes well, it won't even involve anything more painful than a .cab install. It's a marked improvement over the last official statement, isn't it?
