Nextbit faced a slight shipping delay with the Robin earlier this year, but for the most part was the rare Kickstarter success story. However, they have announced that they are canceling the CDMA version of their phone. At fault is the slow and pricey carrier approval process that would have meant further delays.
In the somewhat troubled downhill path it entered a couple of years ago, HTC decided to change things up towards the end of last year, introducing a somewhat controversial new mid-range phone, the A9. Despite the lack of its signature front-facing speakers, the phone stood out. With a new, heavily iPhone-inspired design but a nonetheless solid build and decent specs, the Taiwanese company seemed to be onto something. There was even a promise of out of the box compatibility with AT&T and T-Mobile as well as Sprint.
HTC went a step further, however, saying that it would do everything in its power to provide support for Verizon, too, with a future software update. Unfortunately, as the company announced today, plans to make the device compatible with the Big Red’s network have been abandoned after a long period of testing…
Earlier this month, Nextbit announced that its Robin smartphone would ship to their first 1,000 backers in mid-February and everyone else by the end of next month. In an update to their Kickstarter backers today, however, they announced that the CDMA variant of the phone will be delayed through April due to unforeseen issues.
Verizon Wireless has announced its plans to launch support for Voice over LTE service (or VoLTE) on its cellular network later this year, according to FierceWireless. However, the company says it has moved back its plan to release a VoLTE-only phone until 2016, and will continue releasing CDMA-capable phones until that time. Such a device was originally anticipated for the end of 2014.
The carrier originally announced earlier this year that it would support the new voice service, which provides higher-quality phone calls by utilizing high-speed data connections, but declined at the time to say exactly when it would happen. Other U.S. carriers, including T-Mobile and AT&T, have already started rolling the technology out in select markets.
Leading up to the New Year, Sprint is running a limited time promotion that allows customers of the soon-to-be discontinued Premier service to access an early upgrade, according to internal documents obtained by SprintFeed.
The promotion is not advertised, but according to the report – all Sprint CDMA devices are eligible. Sprint will apparently check to make sure your account is in good standing, and this will of course replace your next available upgrade. The promotion is already available now through Sprint brick-and-mortar stores and will expire before the end of the year on Dec. 31.
While we’re at it, check out the sharp decline of RIM’s once powerful BlackBerry platform.
It’s always a good idea to take whatever analysts are predicting with a healthy dose of skepticism. That said, Needham’s Charlie Wolf cites IDC data that portrays Android as losing ground to iOS in America. Android, of course, is the country’s leading smartphone platform which in the first quarter grabbed a whopping 49.5 percent of the smartphone market while Apple’s iPhone had 29.5 percent. The momentum cannot continue forever so it’s little surprise then that Android controlled 52.4 percent of the market in the quarter-ago period. Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt calls this Android’s “first sequential loss ever in any region of the world”, quoting Wolf’s Monday note to clients:
In our opinion, this is just the beginning of Android’s share loss in the US. The migration of subscribers to the iPhone on the Verizon network should accelerate this fall when Apple coordinates the launch of iPhone 5 on the GSM and CDMA networks. The iPhone could also launch on the Sprint and T-Mobile networks.
It looks like ol’ Charlie’s trying to offload some AAPL shares. He argues that…
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