T-Mobile Working Through a Rebuilding Year

This has been a tough year for T-Mobile, bleeding customers because of the possible merger with AT&T this year, not having the iPhone, and the lack of LTE, when compared to the other carriers. Recently, they announced that they are building a LTE network to compete with the other carriers, which is a big part of the rebuild.

After losing almost 1000 employees in March due to cut backs, another warning memo was issued to employees today. With their new structure, there will be some difficult decisions. They will be notifying some employees this week that they will be laid off in this second round of layoffs. CEO Phillip Humm says that additional details on the matter will come this following week. Hopefully T-Mobile can refocus and get back on track this year for a solid 2013 year, allowing them to get back in the competition strongly.

Source The Verge

T-Mobile Finally Getting in the LTE Market

It has been up in the air on where T-Mobile was headed after the merger with AT&T was denied. They claimed they still have a good 4G network, but everyone knows that LTE is the wave of the future in wireless technology. Today, T-Mobile has announced they are upgrading to a 4 billion dollar LTE network.

With agreements of Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks, they will be installing new equipment in 37,000 of T-Mobiles current 4G towers. T-Mobile finally secured the AWS spectrum that they ended up with in the AT&T fallout and this will help allow them to get their LTE up and running in 75% of the top 25 markets.

The rollout is going to start later this year and is planned to be fully nationwide in 2013. It is very good to know that T-Mobile is not laying down and giving up. After Sprint has announced LTE coming for their network, it only makes sense for T-Mobile to head down the same road to stay competitive with the other carriers to date.

Source T-Mobile

Target Killing All Kindle Devices

Target officially announced today, they will no longer carry any Amazon branded Kindle products, starting in the spring of 2012. Target says they evaluate their products to deliver the best quality, and prices for their customers. Also adding, they will still carry other assorted e-readers for purchase, including the Nook.

Who knows what the real issue here is, maybe they don’t like Amazon competing with them in the retail space, or they don’t agree on pricing of the product. Either way, hopefully more information about this comes out in the future. You know, you can always buy an iPad at Target.

Apple Announces WWDC Dates and Earnings

Today, Apple finally announced the dates for this years World Wide Developers Conference, after a small delay from the normal time they usually announce the dates. It will start on June 11th and go through to the 15th. The tickets sold out in just 2 short hours, so don’t get your hopes up on going if you don’t have admission already.

This will surely be the first time that iOS 6 will be unveiled and all the developers can get up to speed on the new updates and developing their apps. We have yet to see what iOS 6 will bring, but we are excited to see what software updates Apple will be releasing to go on that shiny new iPhone this fall.

Also, yesterday Apple reported their 2012 Q1 earnings, and the trend seems to follow the past recent quarters with large rises. Starting out, 35.1 million iPhones were sold, which is an 88% increase from Q1 2011, 11.8 million iPads were sold up 151%, 4 million Macs were sold, up 7%. The only decrease that was shown is the iPods, 7.7 million units were sold and that is on a consistent decrease of 15%.

So needless to say Apple’s success is huge and is still on the rise. Tim Cook keeps saying that this year we will continue to see amazing innovation from their company. We aren’t sure what that all will intel, but we can only say we are excited to see.

Facebook Paying for Patents from Microsoft

Facebook shelled out $550 million dollars to Microsoft, and why you ask? They are working on keeping their company out of the courtroom as much as possible. With that money Facebook has gained access to 600 patents. Facebook was previously sued by Yahoo for patent infringement, and apparently they want to steer clear of these possibilities in the future.

Interesting enough, Microsoft paid AOL $1 billion dollars earlier this month, for access to their patents and some of these are included in the Facebook deal. Facebook has been after certain AOL patents recently and this deal definitely helped them gain access to some.

(via All Things D)