T-Mobile Says AT&T Phones Will Be Compatible With 4G Network By Year’s End, 42Mbps HSPA+ Comes To More Cities

Looks like T-Mobile could be using that $4 billion they acquired from AT&T to do more than just roll out a super high-speed LTE network. As it turns out, ‘ol Magenta will also be freeing up a vital part of their spectrum that could finally allow for AT&T customers — no longer on contract — to make the easy transition over to T-Mobile with their current AT&T device.

T-Mobile’s CTO Neville Ray spoke during a dinner event for CTIA saying the company plans to convert a good enough portion of its 1900MHz (2G) spectrum to 4G (although, technically 3G HSPA+), followed by an aggressive campaign to woo AT&T customers who have fulfilled their contract obligations. Normally, because of the way T-Mobile’s network is built, AT&T devices can only take advantage of their 2G “Edge” network. Once we hit the later part of this year, it looks like all of that could change. When asked if the upgraded 2G network had more to do with the absent iPhone on their network, Ray played coy.

This means, if you’ve been eyeballing that AT&T HTC One X — or just about any overseas device — come later this year, they’re all fair game. That is, if you’re willing to pay full retail for the device.

It was also announced that T-Mobile would be going with Ericsson and Nokia Simens Networks’ “Release 10? hardware to help roll out their LTE network later this year and into 2013. When it comes to this year, T-Mobile will continue pushing out their blazing fast HSPA+ 42 network to new markets, which starting today include Little Rock AR, Lake Charles LA and Springfield, MO.

[AllThingsD | Engadget]

ICS ROM Comes to the Viewsonic G-Tablet

The G-Tablet was one of very first Tegra 2 tablets, long before the Motorola Xoom appeared. Unfortunately this also meant that it came with an un-optimized version of Android for tablets. To make matters worse, Google didn’t open source Android 3.0 or Honeycomb, so it wasn’t available for the G-tablet, because only a few manufacturers had early access to it.

Others have tried putting custom versions of Honeycomb on it, but it kept being limited by the performance and bugs of Honeycomb, plus the fact that Honeycomb wasn’t fully open source. The G-Tablet was a decent tablet for its price, so it couldn’t just be forgotten by passionate developers.

Now, thanks to Team DRH you can put a custom ICS ROM that is in beta stage and completely changes how the G-tablet works (for the better). Not everything works perfectly, but the most important stuff seems to work. Here’s the full list of what works and what doesn’t:

WHAT WORKS

WIFIHardware AccelerationSleep!SensorsSoundCapacitive Buttons (work for a bit then crash)Hardware ButtonsHDMI Video (possibly sound?) If you have a dock/cable let me know.USB Flash DrivesProper SD Card MountsHD VideosMore to come…
WHAT’S NOT WORKING

CameraUSB Has IssuesBluetoothMicrophonePossible ROM SlowdownsFor those of you who installed my GPS mod, it is not functioning at the moment but it will be added soon.More to come…

Follow the source below to see how to install it on your G-tablet and get all the necessary files:

SOURCES – SlateDroid

[Review] Floating Widget Brings Widgets To The Foreground, But Comes With Trade-offs

There has been a trend lately of apps being released that act more like traditional floating windows. LilyPad HD, OverSkeen, and AirTerm have all garnered a lot of interest, but they are single use apps. Floating Widget does just what its name suggests: it makes widgets float on top of your apps. The implementation is a little odd at first, but once you learn the rules, Floating Widget is useful in a number of situations.

The actual Floating Widget app isn't the most intuitive, and the instructions it offers at start-up are hard to follow until you actually dive in. The app has a few buttons, but there is little indication where to start. Where you should start, is with the Select Widget button. This will pull up a scrollable list of all the widgets on your device. Go ahead and select one to continue. The app won't do anything once you've selected your widget, but I soon realized you have to hit the Set Location button of your own volition.

  

  

The app will take you back to the home screen to place the widget, which will be highlighted with a red box. This is how you know it's in "move mode." When you release it, the red box will go away, leaving a smaller green bar at the top of the overlay. This is the move bar. Long-press in the green to go back to move mode. This is a handy way to get the widget out of your way without going back to the app itself. You can only have one floating widget at a time, though.

Whichever widget you've chosen will be fully functional - even scrollable widgets work. However, you won't be able to resize them. One bummer you will likely encounter early on; you can't leave you foreground widgets in the black bar at the bottom of Android tablets. This is the only part of the system UI that covers the widgets up.

Floating Widget will let you choose any of your installed widgets, even gigantic ones. Smartly, it shrinks things down a bit so you aren't losing as many pixels (although I'd like an option to keep it full size). This lets you use larger widgets if that's your only option, but some might not scale particularly well. I found that choosing a widget that is 1 or 2 units tall made things look better, and the resulting overlay could be nestled up at the top of the screen on a tablet.

With phones, the tradeoff is a little different. Even smaller widgets will cover a lot of the things you need to access. If you're browsing the web, but want to have a widget hovering on top of the browser, you're going to have to work around it more.

  

Floating Widgets works on Android 2.1 and higher, which means it brings some useful functionality to older devices. Placing music playback controls in a floating overlay is great for phones without notification playback buttons. A small clock could be helpful in games that hide the status bar as well. A small Gmail window is potentially useful of you get a lot of mail like I do. Compact Twitter widgets have also been beneficial in my testing.

I've been running the Reddit is Fun widget over top of my other apps, and I can happily report that it has decreased my productivity to previously unheard of levels. You can probably come up with wiser uses for Floating Widget.

The widgets you place are perfectly responsive; even the scrollable ones. What I have noticed is that Floating Widget seems to cause some noticeable system lag. Any long-time Android user is used to a little bit of hesitation at times, but this is more than that. When an overlay is active, moving through home screens is a slightly laggy, and scrolling in Chrome Beta seems more jerky.

I did this testing on two Ice Cream Sandwich devices, so it is possible that other OS versions won't have this problem, and the developer could issue a bug fix at some point. This issue hasn't been severe enough that I had to ditch Floating Widget, but it's something to consider.

Floating Widget is selling for $1.49 in the Play Store. I would say it's worth it if you have a use case in mind. Perhaps you need playback controls right there while using Google Navigation? Floating Widget is a very cool idea, and it's worth supporting the developer to see what this app can become.

Floating Widget