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AT&T rolls out expanded 4G LTE coverage to 16 US markets
AT&T customers scattered around the US have something to be happy about today -- 4G LTE coverage was just switched on several market areas. The company announced that the following markets can now access the 4G LTE network with their iPhone 5s, LTE-compatible iPads or iPad minis and other compatible smartphones: Asheville, N.C. Casa Grande, Ariz. Culpepper, Va. Dover, Del. Fredericksburg, Va. Goldsboro, N.C. Leonardtown, Md. Linglestown, Pa. Longview, Wash. Ocean City, Md. Port Townsend-North Whidbey Island-Camano Island, Wash. Prince Frederick and Calvert County, Md. Roanoke, Va. Salem, Ore. Schenectady, N.Y. Shelton, Wash. AT&T plans to extend LTE to a total of 79 new markets by the start of summer, which is just a scant three weeks away. LTE is up to 10 times faster than the company's 3G data network, and TUAW editor Dave Caolo is anxiously awaiting its arrival on Cape Cod so he can rely less on slow WiFi service when he's having his car worked on. Soon, Dave, soon...
Engadget's tablet buyer's guide: spring 2013 edition
Much like bears, tablet designers are coming out of hibernation: there have been a handful of noteworthy models reaching the wild after a few months of silence. Most of these are the Windows 8- and RT-based tablets that didn't quite make the cut for the holidays, and we're launching our 2013 spring tablet buyer's guide with a dedicated Windows section to accommodate a distinct and rapidly filling category. Just be careful before you commit to a purchase, wherever your allegiances lie: Mobile World Congress brought us tablets that haven't quite shipped yet, like the FonePad and Galaxy Note 8.0. (We've included a heads-up in those situations where waiting a few weeks, or months, may be wisest.) As chaotic as spring can be, our guide might just provide some kind of stability if you're shopping for your next slate.
Gazelle: Third-gen iPad trade-ins spiked after iPad 4, mini announcement
On October 23, 2012 when Apple announced the fourth-generation iPad and iPad mini, the TUAW newsroom was abuzz with questions, one of which was "How many owners of third-generation iPads are going to get rid of their 'old' devices to get a new iPad?" Thanks to Gazelle, a company that accepts trade-ins of Apple gear in return for cold, hard cash, we how have an answer of sorts. On that day, Gazelle recorded a 700 percent increase in the volume of iPad trade-ins, with 450 percent of that increase happening immediately after the end of the Apple announcement. So, how many of those trade-ins were third-gen iPads? Gazelle's numbers show that a whopping 70 percent of the trade-in offers made were for iPad 3s, with the 32 GB WiFi model being the most popular trade-in. Not every iPad 3 owner jumped on the opportunity to get one of the new devices. But Gazelle alone presented about 140,000 offers on October 23 to iPad owners anxious to go faster or smaller. That's a lot of people clamoring to trade in a device that was only seven months old. Gazelle Chief Gadget Officer Anthony Scarsella also noted that a whopping 17 million connected devices were activated on Christmas Day 2012 -- that's up from 6.8 million the year before. It looks like there will be a lot of trade-ins coming up after Apple's next announcements.
iPad Mini, 4th generation iPad hit Sprint retail stores in limited quantities, (update: Verizon and AT&T, too!)
Eager to size up Cupertino's latest tablets on the Now Network? Better call your local retailer -- Sprint is now offering the iPad mini and Apple's 4th generation revision at select brick and mortar locations. Existing smartphone customers who make the trek down to their local mini-mall will be able to add the slates to their account at a discounted rate, scoring a 1GB data plan for $15 per month or 100MB for $10. Sprint will also be enacting a waitlist system for customers who miss out due to the company's admittedly limited stock, asking customers to purchase a $50 gift card in exchange for a guaranteed device when the next wave of tablets hit stores. Check out the official press release after the break for Sprint's full announcement. Update: Looks like Verizon and AT&T have the mini on shelves starting today as well.
Cellular-capable iPad pre-orders reportedly shipping
A report from MacRumors claims the cellular versions of the fourth-generation Retina iPad are shipping and will land on doorsteps by the end of the week. Customers who pre-ordered the iPad are receiving shipping notices with an estimated delivery date of November 16th. iPad mini pre-orders have not shipped yet and are rumored to land on November 21st, the day before the US Thanksgiving holiday. MacRumors also claims that the iPad mini and the fourth generation iPad will be eligible for AT&T's new $100 off tablet promotion starting November 16th. Customers buying a new tablet will receive $100 off the retail price, if they sign up for a new two-year data plan. AT&T announced the promotion last week, but did not specifically mention Apple's latest tablet devices or their sale date in the announcement.
Fourth generation iPad bests Playstation Vita in graphics power
Portable gaming has come a long way in recent years, but in many ways the biggest push for gaming on the go has come from smartphone and tablet makers, rather than video game hardware manufacturers. Nowhere is this more apparent than a recent GPU throwdown test by AnandTech that shows the new fourth-generation iPad boasts enough graphical might to edge out known benchmarks of Sony's PlayStation Vita. The Vita was released in February of this year, making it a relative newcomer -- not to mention the most powerful dedicated gaming handheld ever. But with the new iPad's huge increase in graphical muscle over the Apple's previous, third-generation tablet, it manages to top Sony's portable console. Now, just because the new iPad's guts are technically more capable of rending a game world than the Vita, there are other factors to consider. The biggest is screen size, and with so many more pixels to power than the Vita, the fourth-gen iPad still has to make compromises when it comes to resolution. [Via: VentureBeat]
Engadget's tablet buyer's guide: fall 2012 edition
Three months is a long time in tablet-land, it seems. Since we last brought you a buyer's guide, a few things have changed. In fact, this is probably the biggest shake-up yet, with not only the long-rumored iPad mini making an appearance, but also new offerings from two other big guns -- Microsoft and Google. Oh, and that means there's a whole new species of device altogether. With Windows RT finally shipping, there's new hardware to go with it, and we expect to see more popping up on the list in the months to come. This is all good news for you prospective tablet owners, as more competition can only mean more choice. With more options, though, comes more confusion. That's where we come in, armed with a few notable picks. Read on to find out what made the cut this season.
Report: October a record month for tablet trade-ins
It's not just original iPads that are still very much in demand -- it's all tablets, past and present. According to a new report by trade-in site SellCell.com, October 2012 was the biggest month for tablet trade-ins in history, spurred by brand new tablet announcements from Google (the Nexus 10 was officially revealed), Microsoft (the long-awaited Surface saw release), and of course Apple, with the long-rumored iPad mini and fourth-generation iPad. The release of new tablets like these sent the trade-in rates on older tablets soaring, resulting in iPad trade-ins specifically up 500 percent just a week after the iPad mini announcement. In terms of devices coming in for trade, Apple's iPad claims 76 percent of trade-ins, while the BlackBerry PlayBook is next at 10 percent and then the Samsung Galaxy Tab at 7 percent. Of course, more tablets available for trade-in means that prices drop as well, and SellCell says that's exactly what's happening. Trade-in values for the iPad 2 with 3G dropped from $375 to $275 in just the last month. But the good news is that more new tablet models also makes older tablet models more affordable, so even if you can't drop the cash on a new iPad fourth generation, maybe you can find something a little cheaper on Craigslist or trade-in sites like SellCell itself. But the fact that there is such an active market for older tablets shows just what the demand looks like for the category at large. As long as Apple continues to have trouble keeping up with demand on new units, there will also be a trickle-down demand for older versions as well.
Late 2012 iPad carries new PowerVR SGX 554MP4 graphics, muscles ahead in video speed
It's well established that the A6X chip in the fourth-generation iPad is about twice as fast as its predecessor in pure number crunching, but how about those reportedly doubled graphics amid some increasingly fierce competition? Thanks to some help from Kishonti, AnandTech has learned that Apple may still have an ace up its sleeve. The new tablet carries a new, quad-core PowerVR SGX554MP4 with twice the raw potential as the already quick 543MP4 graphics in the A5X. While that doesn't always lead to a literal doubling of 3D performance, it unambiguously puts the new new iPad on top in GLBenchmark, with even the imminent Nexus 10's new Mali-T604 video left in the middle of a large pack. We're somewhat surprised when the Samsung-made Nexus is using a brand new chip architecture that many had thought would represent a fundamental leap in speed. Visuals aren't the only factors in buying tablets, so take the results with the appropriate grains of salt; if gaming or sheer responsiveness matters most, however, there's now a clear frontrunner.
The iPad 3rd-gen's "miraculous transformation" from magical device to object of shame
Anyone who buys Apple products will eventually experience deep frustration with Apple the company. It's inevitable and predictable, and usually brief. It also disproportionately affects those who consider themselves loyalists, fans and enthusiasts -- those of us who bleed six colors, as it were. The sense of a personal relationship, a bargain or a deal with the brand is what makes the perceived offenses feel so personal. They aren't, of course, but that's how we feel. As was the case with the original iPhone's dramatic price cut two months after launch, the company's response is often simply "that's technology." Things are going to change quickly, and from time to time that means early adopters or may experience some mild turbulence. To my mind, that's a different (and lesser) sort of anxiety than the "Apple is messing with my livelihood" freakout over Final Cut Studio's evaporation making way for Final Cut X, but the core feeling is the same: "We had a deal, Apple, and you betrayed us." That sense of betrayal is quite strong right now, as the iPad 4th generation's introduction has set the teeth of some v3 buyers on edge. Apple may or may not be taking a lenient stance on upgrades; we noted yesterday the reports of a discretionary policy in allowing up to 30 days for iPad 3rd-gen exchanges. Early adopter regret is clearly evident in our former TUAW colleague Christina Warren's op-ed for Mashable, where she shares both denial and anger over the introduction of the fourth generation full-size iPad only seven months after she bought a maxed-out 3rd generation Retina iPad. I have nothing but fondness and respect for Christina, and I don't doubt the sincerity of her personal reaction to having her 3rd-gen iPad lose both bragging rights and resale value. But let's recap her relationship to new technology, in her own words: "I'm an early adopter. Most iPad 3 owners won't consider doing anything with their iPad 3; they'll keep using it until it stops working (or the new iPad 5 is released in six months), so I recognize this is a specific rant. Still, people like me are Apple's most loyal customers. Eventually, this sort of thing tends to trickle down to everyone else." Perhaps the "trickle-down" frustration from fans to customers was valid back when Apple sold expensive computers to a tiny fraction of the PC market. Maybe it was even true when iPods began to break out to the wider consumer electronics landscape. For the Apple of today -- the massive, mass-market behemoth -- it's simply irrelevant. The pattern of early adoption, resale and racing on to the next new thing that Christina describes in her piece makes her a stark outlier among Apple's modern-day worldwide customer base; likewise, the angry, frustrated "loyal Apple users" who are now so aggrieved about the quick refresh of the iPad represent a tiny minority of the consumers who have purchased those 100 million iPads (to say nothing of the education and enterprise buyers, who are still buying iPad 2s by the pallet). Most of the argument in favor of feeling aggrieved and shortchanged by the quick iPad turn coalesces around expectations. Apple "always" releases one new iPad per year; it's "always" in the spring; the sun "always" rises in the east. Of course, this attitude confuses patterns with promises; they are different things. Did customer expectations get confounded by the release of a newer iPad model less than a year after the previous one? Yep. Was this yearly tick-tock something Apple ever committed to preserving in perpetuity? Not at all. People make plans and purchases based on certain assumptions (or by asking one of their tech-savvy friends); when those assumptions turn out to be unfounded, they may be upset. But their assumptions are not Apple's problem, except insofar as they express their frustration by not buying Apple products. Which, we must acknowledge, they are free to do -- their protest move will simply lessen the overwhelming pre-order demand and inevitable sellout delays on the 4th gen iPad by a tiny fraction of a percent. Of course, feelings aren't about rational utility and Econ 101; iPad 3 owners are entitled to have the reactions they have, and no amount of arguing will change that. But even a casual review of the engineering and marketing circumstances indicates that the short-cycle iPad refresh was the least evil of Apple's options here. In her frustration over the new iPad, Christina detours into an appraisal of the platonic ideal iPad 3 and a half that Apple "should have released" back in March. "In many ways," she writes, "this [fourth generation iPad] is the product Apple should have released as the iPad 3. I understand chips might not have been ready, pricing might not have been ideal -- but seriously, this is clearly what the iPad 3 should have been." Well, sure, chips might not have been ready. But release it anyway -- engineering be dashed! No, wait, sorry, that doesn't make any sense. We can't on the one hand castigate Apple for releasing an iPad 3rd-gen that was underpowered for its HiDPI display and lacked the Lightning port and then on the other hand admit that those upgraded components weren't actually production-ready. We can wish for things to be ready when we want them, but unfortunately technology doesn't work quite like that. But even if we were to give this position the benefit of every doubt -- assume that Apple had the 4th-gen iPad on the shelf shrinkwrapped and ready to go, but chose to release the 3rd-gen anyway -- there's one huge reason why it had to be that way. Let's suppose that Phil Schiller and his marketing team were well aware of Christina's yet-to-be-realized frustration back in March of this year, and indeed for many months before that (knowing, as we do, that Apple's product development cycles cover years rather than weeks). Assume as well that the iPhone 5 launch date couldn't shift forward to let it hit with the iPad 3/4 in March. What could Apple do? "Let's go ahead and ship the Lightning version of the iPad now," says Phil, "and we'll catch up with the iPhone 5 in September." Our imaginary Phil Schiller is then forcibly removed from Apple's Cupertino campus, never to darken its doors again. Why? Because when you have a single product with revenues that handily surpass the GDP of Ecuador, you do. Not. Mess with that. The iPhone may look like a smartphone, but it is actually a revenue machine. Every single decision Apple makes today has to be framed against the question "is it good for the iPhone?" If not, it simply does not happen. Somewhere down the line the creative destruction instincts will kick back in and Apple will design its own iPhone killer, but right now every quarter's results and more than 2/3rds of Apple's dollars depend on the iPhone's desirability in the market. Introducing a Lightning-based iPad six months before the iPhone 5 announcement fails that test. Showing the new interface port would make every iPhone sale between March and September much, much harder -- consumers could not suspend their disbelief, knowing as they would that they were getting something soon to be outdated. Even though the blogosphere had begun to show convincing examples of the Lightning port as early as May, a tentative hint is worlds away from "Here's the new iPad, and as you may notice it's got a different connector. Hey, where'd you all go?" That's two quarters down the tubes, and millions of customers lost to other mobile ecosystems. iPad sales are nice, but they're not the franchise; iPhone is the franchise. Note that when Apple introduces dramatic new technologies nowadays, they inevitably come to the iPhone first. Siri? iPhone. Lightning? iPhone. Retina? iPhone -- and that's before it got to the MacBook Pro, for goodness' sakes. iCloud and LTE have some wiggle room on this; one reason LTE hit the iPad before the iPhone is that it's much easier to solve power problems if you're engineering a device that is basically a giant battery with a screen glued to it, and it's not an Apple innovation (in fact the iPhone was quite a ways behind the market). Why not just wait, then, and hold back on the iPad refresh more than seven months until after the iPhone 5 is launched? Because if you're going to confound those customer expectations of annual upgrades one way or another, doing it by delaying the new & improved product is the wrong way to go if you're Apple. The iPad 2 had run its course as the flagship by the beginning of 2012, and there was enough value in the 3rd-gen (Siri, LTE, and that luscious Retina display) to retake the tablet lead, especially with Surface, Amazon and Android beginning to sniff at the iPad's heels. Apple would rather give people something good right now and better later, instead of lamely claiming that the iPad 2 is still the best thing going well past its sell-by date. No, given the choice of waiting or pushing out the 3rd-gen, Apple made the right call. Often, when we look to justify our anger, we step to righteousness: it's not about me, it's about how this is bad for Apple. Christina's worry is that consumers now will be gunshy about buying into new iPads if they think the new one is coming within moments. She's not convinced that the quick turn is an aberration; she worries that sub-annual iPad refreshes may now be the norm. "If that upgrade cycle is compressed," she says, "I believe some consumers may just choose to continue waiting. Take iPad 2 owners, for example. Rather than running to upgrade to an iPad 4 this Christmas, I could see some owners choosing to wait. After all, what if Apple releases a new tablet in April? Or June? Why not just wait? Wait too long and you're up against the next refresh cycle. Now Apple has missed recapturing that customer in a fiscal year. That's a bad thing." Another cognitive miss here: a broken pattern can in fact be an exception to the reigning rule rather than an example of a new rule. As one of the commenters on Christina's piece points out, just because this iPad came early that doesn't mean the next one will; in fact, given the lifespan of the original iPod 30-pin connector, it could be a decade before Apple is ready to move past Lightning to the next big thing. Calling a reset and shifting the annual upgrade cycle for the iPad to September from March actually means better uptake for the holiday sales rush, not worse. There are some real fiscal consequences to the early upgrade for those who were not planning to hold onto their iPads indefinitely. Christina rightly points out that iPad 3 owners who were expecting to resell their devices are now facing far lower returns than they "reasonably" might have expected to get. While iPads bought over the past two or four weeks may be exchangeable, people who were depending on resale arbitrage have gotten shorted on their bet. This, too, gets chalked up to the difference between patterns and promises. Nobody guaranteed that your spend on that iPad 3 would be recoverable -- expecting to get some fixed percentage of your money back on the device is entirely on you. It certainly is frustrating, but it's not at all clear that it can be pinned down as Apple's fault. Apple sold you an iPad so you could use it as an iPad, not as an investment vehicle. There are also hints of a valid argument in the notion that the 3rd-gen iPad is actually not a fully baked product, with issues of heat, weight and speed. You can bounce this back and forth, but the fact is that if you were happy with your iPad 3 last week then the failings and flaws you see now are entirely driven by your awareness of the new shiny thing, not by any realistic standard of performance. Again, I don't want to delegitimize the frustration that these folks feel -- feelings are always valid. It's when we reject ownership of our feelings and decide to pin them on something outside our control that things get slippery. Taking the irate stance that Apple's shafted you personally by introducing something new "too soon" may be an understandable reaction. But it's not reasonable to blame Apple for acting in its own best interests, and nothing here suggests that there was something else the company could have done to prevent the marginal pain. Also, in terms of relative utility, if it needs to be said: The iPad 3rd-gen you bought in March, April or May is every bit as functional now as it was last week; it runs the same apps, shows the same videos and docks with the same peripherals (something that the new 4th-gen iPad, for the record, cannot yet do). Christina's argument that the "high-end games" will now target the 4th-gen is a hypothesis, not evidence; iOS and the vast majority of apps will continue to support the 3rd-gen and the iPad 2 for quite some time to come. Millions of users are still happily using their original iPads, and they may not know or care that anyone is torqued about having a 3rd-gen that's no longer top of the charts. Let's also remember that this is an iPad, not a heart transplant. We're talking about something that many may want but nobody needs, after all. Having the luxury of buying a new iPad -- whether it's once a year, every two years, every six months, whenever -- is a remarkable thing in itself, and an opportunity that billions of people will never have. Including, most likely, the people that built the very iPad you're pining for. You can read some other savvy reactions to the 3rd gen/4th gen transition from Don McAllister, Fraser Spiers and Harry Marks.
iPad mini coming to Verizon, AT&T and Sprint in mid-November starting at $459
Today, Apple finally announced its highly anticipated iPad mini. This 7.9-inch "little tablet that could" will be available from Verizon, AT&T and Sprint with shipping starting "a couple of weeks after" WiFi models go on sale on November 2nd. Available in black and white for $459 (16GB), $559 (32GB) and $659 (64GB), the company will begin accepting pre-orders on October 26th. So, if you plan on calling dibs on one of these little guys, we suggest that you plan accordingly.
