Samsung co-CEO JK Shin said today that the company has developed a modified Galaxy S4 that supports LTE-Advanced. This next-generation 4G LTE standard supports significantly speedier data rates — theoretically up to three gigabits down and 1.5Gbps up — though real-world speeds are expected to top out between 150 megabits per second and 300Mbps.

“We’ll be the first with the commercial launch of the advanced 4G version of the smartphone,” Shin told Reuters, adding that he expects the device to be a crucial part of its product portfolio. “The new LTE-Advanced (4G) phone will be another addition to our high-end segment offerings that ensure healthy profit margins.”

And there’s certainly a good chance that it will be, someday. But not for a while. A slick LTE-Advanced smartphone isn’t much good without an LTE-Advanced network to run on, and right now such networks are pretty sparse. Russian carrier Yota has one, and AT&T plans to begin rolling one out later this year. Verizon and T-Mobile are working on LTE-Advanced deployments, as well. But it will be some time before we see the sort of ubiquitous coverage necessary to get the best use out of this new Galaxy S4 that Samsung’s planning.

Deal site Daily Steals is offering the Verizon phone for $25. However, buyer beware: You are mostly paying to own a piece of tech history.

The Kin, which was being developed alongside Windows Phone 7, was designed to target the youth market, with much of its power coming from cloud-synced services to make text messages and photos accessible to the Web. But, with no access to apps and competing against more capable phones, it was scrapped after little more than a month on the market.

Microsoft shut down most of the Kin services shortly after it discontinued the phone. So, basically, buyers are getting a feature phone.

P.S.: The Daily Steals ad says “powered by Windows Phone 7” but don’t believe what you read. Windows Phone 7 apps won’t run on the device.

Following the lead of Verizon, AT&T said it will start making customers wait a full two years, rather than 20 months, to get a new phone. The change affects those whose contracts are up in March 2014 or later. Verizon announced a similar move back in April.

“Today, we’re announcing a 24-month upgrade policy across all of AT&T’s wireless products and services,” AT&T said in a blog post. “This aligns device upgrade eligibility with our standard two-year wireless agreement and it applies to any customer whose agreement expires in March 2014 or later.”

The company also helpfully pointed out other options, such as bringing your own phone or paying full retail price for an upgrade.

With the new disclosures, there’s been a lot of focus on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and on the Obama Administration’s secret interpretations of various sections of that law as a legal basis for all this spying.

But a law passed in 1994 and signed by then-president Bill Clinton is worth remembering for what it requires of American telecommunications companies. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act requires telecom carriers and the companies that manufacture the gear they use to modify the design of that equipment to ensure that they have built-in surveillance capabilities.

The point was to make it easier to tap digital phone networks, which were on the rise. Strangely, the law didn’t expressly cover data passing over the Internet.

That changed in 2005, following a petition by the Department of Justice — the FBI’s parent agency — to the Federal Communications Commission. The DOJ asked that the scope of CALEA be expanded to cover the Internet. Broadband Internet companies would be required to open up their networks so that VOIP phone calls could be wiretapped, as well. The FCC agreed, arguing that the Internet had replaced the old telephone exchanges.

This isn’t just a history lesson. In recent years, the FBI has been complaining of “going deaf.” Encrypted communications that use peer-to-peer connections like Skype and FaceTime and other tools like Google Hangouts are difficult to monitor. Now the FBI wants Congress to require that new communications software products that run on the user’s computer or smartphone be built from the ground up to be wiretap-friendly, essentially by inserting backdoor capabilities in the source code. Wiretaps could be executed silently, and without the user knowing. Companies that don’t comply would be subjected to a fine of $25,000 per day. The new proposal is being dubbed CALEA II by some people.

Critics of the proposal — including a group of 20 computer scientists who co-authored a report on it last month — have argued that requiring a back door in all communications products would make that same back door available to attackers — hackers, foreign spies and others.

As Ed Felten, a professor of computer science as Princeton University, put it in a recent post on his blog, the requirement would make it “easier for attackers to capture the very same data that law enforcement wants. Intruders want to capture everything that happens on a compromised computer. They will be happy to see a built-in tool for capturing and extracting large amounts of audio, video, and text traffic.”

Worse, he writes, “… the capability will be stealthy by design, making it difficult for the user to tell that anything is amiss.”

Basically, the government should be careful what it wishes for.

The disclosure this week of an order by a secret U.S. court for Verizon Communications Inc.’s phone records set off the latest public discussion of the program. But people familiar with the NSA’s operations said the initiative also encompasses phone-call data from AT&T Inc. and Sprint Nextel Corp., records from Internet-service providers and purchase information from credit-card providers.

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The information “allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States,” a senior Obama administration official said Thursday. The official stopped short of confirming the practice.

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Carriers like Verizon Communications Inc. are the guardians of sensitive data about their customers, including who they call and where they are located. But it is precisely that information that security officials are interested in as they try to hunt down potential or suspected terrorists.

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Strangely, it took a British newspaper to reveal this fact. The Guardian reported yesterday that it had obtained a copy of an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to the telecom giant Verizon. The order directed the company to hand over what it describes as “telephony metadata” to both the FBI, America’s national law enforcement agency, and the National Security Agency, the super-secret agency tasked with both protecting the sensitive official communications of government officials and spying on the communications of other countries.

The order by the secret FISA Court (calling it a “court” is charitable; it exists in a secret, secure room on the top floor of the the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the U.S. Department of Justice) gives those agencies unfettered access to the calling records of customers on Verizon’s network but within a curiously limited framework of time — between the dates of April 25 and July 19 of this year.

So what is telephony metadata? First and foremost, it’s not recordings or transcripts of phone conversations. Rather it is information about calls. The order describes it like so:

Telephony metadata includes comprehensive communications routing information, including but not limited to session identifying information (e.g., originating and terminating telephone number, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, International Mobile station Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, etc.), trunk identifier, telephone calling card numbers, and time and duration of call. Telephony metadata does not include the substantive content of any communication, as defined by 18 U.S.C. § 2510(8), or the name, address, or financial information of a subscriber or customer

Let’s sort through what each of these things are. The information being collected includes the number of the phone making the call and the number of the phone receiving it, when the call was made and how long the conversation took place. Essentially, the FBI and NSA are being furnished with an incomplete copy of the phone bill of all Verizon customers.

What else is covered under the phrase “telephony metadata”? The IMSI, or International Mobile Subscriber Identity, is a number that associates a phone with a wireless network. Think of it as a Social Security number for your phone. If someone wants to track you by way of your mobile phone, having that number makes the job incrementally easier for anyone with the technical means to do it. (To do it, you would need a piece of equipment called an IMSI catcher, which you can buy.) For that reason, the IMSI number is rarely transmitted on the network itself. Instead, a TMSI, or Temporary Mobile Subscriber Identity number, is randomly generated in its place and assigned to your phone when it joins a wireless network.

IMSI numbers are used to identify phones when they pop up on wireless networks, and as such they can be used to determine a phone’s location. Gather enough information on a particular IMSI number and you can tell with a fair degree of accuracy where the person carrying the phone has been. So there’s a pretty good chance that the FBI and NSA have not only been tracking who you’ve been calling and when, but where you were when you made the calls. Creeped out yet?

This brings us to the second unique number covered in the court order: The IMEI, or International Mobile Station Equipment Identity. In the arcane lingo of radio communications, your phone is a “mobile station,” and it has a unique serial number. It’s easy to look up: Dial *#06# on most phones and the number just appears on the screen. If you have an iPhone, you can also find it in the phone information screen on iTunes when it’s connected to your computer. The IMEI number is specific to your phone, and it has some practical uses: When your phone is reported lost or stolen, the carrier marks the number as “disabled,” so it can’t make any more calls.

So, what might be the logical reasons that these agencies want this information in the first place? Laying aside the limited time range involved — April 25 to July 19 — the most obvious use is pattern recognition and correlation. Wireless phones have become quite literally the most useful indicator of human behavior the world has ever seen. They go everywhere we do and in a sense know us better than we know ourselves, because they create, whether we intend them to or not, an irrefutable record of data that can be used to understand our patterns and habits.

This information can then be analyzed for variances and other interesting correlations. It’s essentially a “big data” problem. Huge troves of data are mined and analyzed for the purpose of finding useful patterns. It’s a fashionable phrase used in business and technology circles, and is meant to convey the idea that there is meaning and understanding lurking within an otherwise meaningless and massive collection of information. Now that we live in an age where data storage is inexpensive and computing power all but limitless, finding that meaning and achieving that understanding is simply a matter of will.

Clearly, the will exists, or the court order would not have been sought or granted. But will implies intent, and we can only guess at that intent. Officials in all branches of federal government have a long history of overstepping their legal authority and of abusing outright the powers granted them by their boss.

That boss, by the way, is us.

At this, it’s worth reminding ourselves what the boss’s policy is. It’s contained within the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

There’s not a lot of wiggle room there. It would seem an explanation is in order. The problem is that the government has given itself secret authority to interpret the law as it sees fit. In 2012, two U.S. senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado (Democrats both), warned about this in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, sharply criticizing the Obama Administration’s use of “secret law” and “secret legal interpretations” of certain sections of the U.S. Patriot Act. (I’ve embedded it below.)

As the senators say in the letter: “There is now a significant gap between what Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.”

If it seems like the government is behaving in an arbitrary and capricious manner, it probably is. Perhaps it’s time to look in on the hired help.

Senators Ron Wyden, Mark Udall Letter to Attorney General Holder

The account provides fresh evidence that NSA’s far-reaching domestic surveillance effort has continued after Congress passed a law five years ago to institutionalize a post-9/11 warrantless surveillance program.

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Next year, the National Football League will begin to show Sunday afternoon games from customers’ home markets on Verizon Wireless phones, adding more of television’s most valuable content to the growing inventory that users can watch on mobile devices. The league is already showing games from Sunday, Monday and Thursday nights on Verizon phones. Typically, only one game is played on those nights, while about 10 to 12 are played across the country on Sunday afternoons.

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“It’s coming,” Verizon said on its Twitter account, adding that it will be available later this summer.

AllThingsD first reported back in March that the HTC flagship would make its way to Verizon, though well after it arrived at the other three carriers. At the time, someone at HTC took to Twitter to deny this, but we reiterated that it was coming.

The move is important for HTC, as it is pinning its turnaround hopes on the success of the One.

In an interview at D11 last week, HTC President Jason Mackenzie talked about the importance of the One in reestablishing HTC in the forefront of consumer minds.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130603/yes-virginia-there-will-be-a-verizon-htc-one/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130522/verizon-wireless-partners-with-jennifer-lopez-to-take-aim-at-latino-mobile-market/ http://allthingsd.com/20130522/verizon-wireless-partners-with-jennifer-lopez-to-take-aim-at-latino-mobile-market/#comments Wed, 22 May 2013 18:26:06 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=324375 Jennifer Lopez is getting into the mobile business.

The star is the chief creative officer and majority owner in Viva Movil, a mobile retailer working with Verizon Wireless to target Latino customers.

Viva Movil will have its own stores, complete with bilingual staff, hands-on time with devices and dedicated play areas for kids. The first store will open in June at “a busy intersection” in New York with at least 15 planned this year in cities including Los Angeles and Miami.

Lopez said the U.S. Latino market represents $1.2 trillion in purchasing power and, on its own, would be equal to the world’s 14th largest country.

“We do things differently, including how we shop for wireless devices,” Lopez said at a press conference with Verizon at the CTIA trade show in Las Vegas. “We will provide a new customer experience.”

In addition to the forthcoming stores, Viva Movil is also selling online, at a website that went live on Wednesday. The site lists a range of devices including top Verizon phones such as the iPhone 5, Galaxy S III and Droid Razr Maxx. The plans are typical Verizon ones, including shared data plans and both contract and no-contract plans.

Lopez also promised a social shopping experience, including integration with Facebook.

And, of course, there will be some JLo-crafted accessories. Down the road, Viva Movil may do custom devices but for now it will use those already carried by Verizon.

In addition to Lopez, Viva Movil is a partnership with wireless company Brightstar and Moorhead Communications — the largest of Verizon’s premium retailers with 850 stores. Verizon is the exclusive wireless provider but doesn’t own a stake in Viva Movil.

Lopez was joined onstage by Verizon COO Marni Walden.

“We hope to be the most exciting thing that comes out of CTIA,” Walden said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130522/verizon-wireless-partners-with-jennifer-lopez-to-take-aim-at-latino-mobile-market/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130521/acting-fcc-chair-regulate-with-a-light-touch-but-touch-when-necessary/ http://allthingsd.com/20130521/acting-fcc-chair-regulate-with-a-light-touch-but-touch-when-necessary/#comments Tue, 21 May 2013 16:36:45 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=323917 The acting head of the Federal Communications Commission said on Tuesday that she wants to work to protect rural carriers and consumers while making sure that efforts to increase available spectrum remain on track.

Mignon Clyburn said healthy competition is key to continued innovation.

“We have taken a light regulatory approach, but have touched when necessary,” Mignon said, speaking at the opening of the CTIA 2013 show in Las Vegas.

The most notable of those touches, of course, was the agency’s opposition to AT&T’s purchase of T-Mobile USA. The agency has since approved other combinations, including Verizon’s partnership with the cable companies, and T-Mobile USA’s acquisition of MetroPCS.

Clyburn had some specific words of praise for smaller, regional carriers that she said provide excellent customer service and help connect rural America.

Speaking in her first week as acting chair, Clyburn said that an incentive spectrum auction remains on track, with rules to be issued this year and the bidding itself to take place next year.

“The agency is doing a lot of creative things to make more spectrum available,” said Clyburn, who will hold the post until confirmation of her successor, Tom Wheeler.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130521/acting-fcc-chair-regulate-with-a-light-touch-but-touch-when-necessary/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130514/nokia-debuts-aluminum-clad-lumia-925-headed-to-t-mobile-usa-and-vodaone/ http://allthingsd.com/20130514/nokia-debuts-aluminum-clad-lumia-925-headed-to-t-mobile-usa-and-vodaone/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 09:30:23 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=321068 At a press event in London on Tuesday, Nokia is showing off the Lumia 925, a new variant of its flagship Windows Phone.

The aluminum-clad phone is similar to the Lumia 920 that has been sold for months at AT&T, as well as the just-introduced Lumia 928 for Verizon. The new phone, being introduced globally and headed here to T-Mobile, features a few new twists.

In addition to its different outer shell, the 925 features an improved camera with a sixth lens (other recent high-end Lumia models have five). The added lens helps better capture natural light.

On the software side, the company is offering what it calls Nokia Smart Camera — a feature that captures 10 images at once, offering the ability to choose the best shot or blend the results into an action shot or one with motion focus. Nokia said the software-based camera features would also be made available for all of Nokia’s other Windows Phone 8 products sometime in the third quarter.

The Lumia 925 is due to go on sale in Europe in June, with T-Mobile’s U.S. launch likely to be the following week. It is priced at 469 euros ($608), though Nokia U.S. head Matt Rothschild said he expected T-Mobile’s upfront price to be under $100.

“We expect really aggressive pricing,” Rothschild said.

With the launch of this phone, the recent announcement of the Lumia 928 at Verizon, as well as the entry-level Lumia 521, also headed for T-Mobile, Rothschild said that Nokia’s U.S. operation has plenty to keep it busy in the months ahead.

Nokia has struggled to make the same kind of inroads in the U.S. market that it has seen in some other places, but Rothschild said he is pleased with where the company finds itself.

“From where we were … basically starting from scratch with Lumia and Windows Phone, I couldn’t be happier with our progress,” Rothschild said.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130514/nokia-debuts-aluminum-clad-lumia-925-headed-to-t-mobile-usa-and-vodaone/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130513/verizon-wireless-plans-7-billion-dividend-to-parent-companies/ http://allthingsd.com/20130513/verizon-wireless-plans-7-billion-dividend-to-parent-companies/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 21:31:31 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=321096 Verizon Wireless said on Monday it plans to pay out $7 billion to its two owners — Verizon Communications, which owns 55 percent of the venture, and Vodafone, which owns 45 percent. The move comes amid renewed talk that Verizon Communications might be interested in buying out its joint venture partner.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130513/verizon-wireless-plans-7-billion-dividend-to-parent-companies/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130513/meet-zact-a-shareable-cell-phone-service-that-changes-on-the-fly/ http://allthingsd.com/20130513/meet-zact-a-shareable-cell-phone-service-that-changes-on-the-fly/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 12:00:47 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=320428 The major carriers have taken baby steps in giving users more control over their data plan. With AT&T and Verizon, for example, users can share a pool of gigabytes across multiple devices.

But imagine a world where you can buy a few hours worth of streaming audio or add unlimited email but only a modest amount of data for other purposes.

That’s just the kind of world being created by a Marc Andreessen-backed startup called ItsOn. The company’s main business plan is selling systems to carriers that would let them offer these kinds of services.

However, to get that business off the ground, ItsOn felt like it needed to create its own service. So on Monday the company is announcing Zact, a consumer cellphone service designed to be cheaper and far more flexible than others on the market.

“We need to do a service and become our own customers to show what’s possible,” ItsOn CEO Greg Raleigh said in an interview.

Whether you want to give your kid more texts, boost your data plan or drop your ex from the account, all these kinds of options can be changed from the phone and on the fly. Want to buy just an hour of video or a month’s worth of email? You can do that, as well.

And if the plan you pick is more than you need, Zact will refund the difference between that plan and the least expensive one that would have matched your usage.

“There’s a way to give people exactly what they want and make a profit,” Raleigh said. Although Zact customers have to pay full price for their phone, they can still save thousands over a two-year contract, Raleigh said.

Another feature is controls that let parents choose not only how much voice, data and texts to give their kids, but also when they can use their device and which apps can run at which times.

Preorders for the service will start on Monday, with devices shipping to consumers by June. Though ItsOn created the service that enabled the flexibility, the underlying network for Zact is Sprint, with ItsOn buying capacity on a wholesale basis.

One big downside initially is Zact’s very limited device portfolio — and that’s putting it mildly. Zact initially only works with two Android phones, the $199 LG Optimus Elite and the $399 LG Viper 4G LTE.

Over time, Zact plans to add phone models as well as tablets and other devices.

But the goal is also to show carriers what’s possible using its service, so that eventually ItsOn can be used by the major operators. And the message is resonating, Raleigh said.

“You see it in their eyes,” he said. “They say, ‘We can be popular.’”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130513/meet-zact-a-shareable-cell-phone-service-that-changes-on-the-fly/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130510/nokia-brings-updated-windows-phone-the-99-lumia-928-to-verizon/ http://allthingsd.com/20130510/nokia-brings-updated-windows-phone-the-99-lumia-928-to-verizon/#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 15:52:11 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=320310 Nokia on Friday announced its long-rumored Lumia 928, a high-end Windows Phone model for Verizon.

The phone will go on sale May 16 for $99 (after a $50 rebate).

It’s a new take on the Lumia 920 that debuted last year. Though generally similar, it features a different screen technology, improved flash and audio recording, and is a bit thinner than the model that has long been on sale at AT&T.

The timing is a bit odd, coming on a Friday and ahead of an event Nokia has next week to talk about what’s next for the Lumia line.

Nokia and Windows Phone as a whole have been slower to bring models to CDMA carriers, focusing much of their time and energy on the more globally used GSM technology at the core of T-Mobile and AT&T’s networks.

Verizon has been selling the Lumia 822, a more midrange model, as well as Windows Phones from Samsung and HTC.

Sprint has said it will offer its first Windows Phone 8 devices this summer.

Meanwhile, two other Nokia models — on sale elsewhere — are just making their way to the U.S. T-Mobile is selling the entry-level Lumia 521 for $150 without subsidies, while AT&T’s new Aio prepaid brand is carrying the Lumia 620.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130510/nokia-brings-updated-windows-phone-the-99-lumia-928-to-verizon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130509/verizon-chief-mobile-industry-needs-a-healthy-blackberry/ http://allthingsd.com/20130509/verizon-chief-mobile-industry-needs-a-healthy-blackberry/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 20:42:24 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=320070 Verizon Wireless CEO Dan Mead is rooting for a BlackBerry comeback. In his view, the Android-iOS duopoly that Google and Apple have established is begging for disruption, and BlackBerry is potentially one company to provide it.

“We think that there is an important place for BlackBerry,” Mead told attendees of the Jefferies 2013 Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference this week. “Three to four operating systems is good for the industry and good for us,” he concluded, noting that Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS is another good candidate.

No disputing that; more diversity in the smartphone market would also benefit consumers. Trouble is, consumers seem pretty happy with the current duopoly. According to recent research from Canaccord Genuity, Apple and Android juggernaut Samsung captured about 100 percent of global smartphone industry profits in the March quarter.

Not that those companies’ domination of the market is unassailable. Mead said Verizon is seeing decent customer interest in BlackBerry’s new handsets and thinks it will only improve with the launch of the QWERTY-keyboarded BlackBerry Q10. “We have a lot of BlackBerry customers on our network,” he said. “There seems to be a hunger for the QWERTY keyboard.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130509/verizon-chief-mobile-industry-needs-a-healthy-blackberry/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130425/verizon-price-gap-30-billion/ http://allthingsd.com/20130425/verizon-price-gap-30-billion/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 23:30:53 +0000 Dana Cimilluca and Spencer E. Ante http://allthingsd.com/?p=315804 Verizon Communications Inc. is eager to buy Vodafone Group PLC out of their massive mobile-phone joint venture — but it will have to get over a $30 billion hurdle.

That amount is roughly the difference between what people on either side of the potential deal say Vodafone’s 45 percent stake in the biggest U.S. mobile operator, Verizon Wireless, is worth.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130425/verizon-price-gap-30-billion/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130425/cell-phone-customers-have-at-least-a-couple-reasons-to-smile/ http://allthingsd.com/20130425/cell-phone-customers-have-at-least-a-couple-reasons-to-smile/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 12:30:16 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=315357 Fewer cellphone calls are being dropped and data speeds are on the rise as all the major carriers expand their LTE networks.

That’s the good news in a report from RootMetrics, which measures real-world cellphone performance nationwide.

Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile all reduced their call failure rates from the first half of the year to the second, according to RootMetrics. Verizon’s rate increased fractionally, but was still an industry-best 0.7 percent for the second half of the year.

“In 2012, we found strong call performances from all carriers: the gap between each carrier’s average rate of call failures (dropped and blocked calls) was relatively minor,” RootMetrics said in its report.

Data speeds, meanwhile, are also showing across-the-board improvement as the major carriers spend billions to expand LTE service nationwide. Verizon was the first, and has the largest LTE network, but all its rivals are working hard to catch up.

A separate report from RootMetrics released earlier this year showed AT&T with the fastest LTE network and Verizon with the broadest LTE coverage.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130425/cell-phone-customers-have-at-least-a-couple-reasons-to-smile/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130424/samsung-blames-overwhelming-demand-for-galaxy-s-4-inventory-issues/ http://allthingsd.com/20130424/samsung-blames-overwhelming-demand-for-galaxy-s-4-inventory-issues/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:55:53 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=315131 Samsung said Wednesday that broad global demand is behind delays in U.S. availability for its new Galaxy S 4.

“Due to overwhelming global demand of Galaxy S 4, the initial supply may be limited,” a Samsung representative told AllThingsD. “We expect to fulfill inventory to meet demands in the coming weeks.”

Earlier on Wednesday, T-Mobile and Sprint both said that full retail availability of the Samsung flagship device would come later than expected.

“We had planned to launch this next generation of the award-winning Samsung Galaxy line-up on Saturday, April 27,” Sprint said in a statement. “Unfortunately, due to unexpected inventory challenges from Samsung, we will be slightly delayed with our full product launch.”

AT&T, meanwhile, said it plans to start selling the S 4 on Saturday, as expected.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130424/samsung-blames-overwhelming-demand-for-galaxy-s-4-inventory-issues/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20130424/sprint-delays-retail-launch-for-samsung-galaxy-s4/ http://allthingsd.com/20130424/sprint-delays-retail-launch-for-samsung-galaxy-s4/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:28:01 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=315038 Sprint said on Wednesday that it won’t have availability of Samsung’s Galaxy S 4 on Saturday, as planned.

“We had planned to launch this next generation of the award-winning Samsung Galaxy line-up on Saturday, April 27,” Sprint said in a statement. “Unfortunately, due to unexpected inventory challenges from Samsung, we will be slightly delayed with our full product launch.”

The No. 3 U.S. carrier still expects to make it available online and via phone sales Saturday, with retail-store launches once supply increases.

Update: T-Mobile said it, too, is pushing things back.

“We know customers are really looking forward to getting their new Samsung Galaxy S 4 soon,” T-Mobile said in a statement. “However, due to an unexpected delay with inventory deliveries, the Galaxy S 4 will not be available on www.T-Mobile.com as planned today. Instead, online availability is expected to begin on Monday, April 29. We apologize for any inconvenience and are working with Samsung to deliver the device to T-Mobile customers as soon as possible.”

As for stores, T-Mobile said the Galaxy S 4 is now expected in selected T-Mobile stores and other retailers on May 8, with nationwide retail availability starting May 15.

AT&T, by contrast, says its planned Saturday launch is on schedule. “We are on track with our planned April 27th in-store launch of the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and are excited to hear what our customers think of this highly anticipated smartphone,” a representative told AllThingsD.

Verizon, meanwhile, has said it will start taking preorders on Thursday but won’t have the Galaxy S 4 available until May 30.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20130424/sprint-delays-retail-launch-for-samsung-galaxy-s4/feed/ 0