Gadgetoxic – Toxify your tech life

Smartphones , Tablets , Computers , laptop and news on every other gadget

As if upgrading your device didn’t already cost enough, AT&T is upping its ‘upgrade fee’ from the current $18 to a whopping $36. This was confirmed multiple times from various sources over at BGR and appear to be legit and not a hoax. The image below is one of the change announcements sent to retailers across the nation. As it were, customers are also reporting getting courtesy emails from AT&T to alert them of the new fee. Why are they doubling this fee??

Because the overall costs associated with upgrading to a new device have increased, effective Sunday, February 12, 2012, AT&T will change its upgrade fee from $18 to $36

How quaint. I can remember back when T-Mobile first initiated their ‘Upgrade fee,’ it wasn’t met with open arms by customers. I do believe we were the last or the top 4 to implement one though. Expect what ever price you see for a new phone to cast you another $36 to actually own it. Kinda takes the FREE aspect out of the equation doesn’t it. It would have been pretty amazing if this was for iPhone upgrades only though wouldn’t it?

I have yet to ever get a straight answer as to why this fee ever popped up on carriers in the first place. If anyone could give me a real answer other than the tradition corporate answers, that would be appreciated.

Via BGR

There is nothing like a OEM or carrier that lets their babies walk long before they are ready. Looks like the Android 2.3.5 update for AT&T’s Infuse 4G was not quite ready to run in the wild. Here is what was said on the Samsung forums:

AT&T confirmed this foul up to Android Central, so you Infuse users out there must continue to eat that Froyo slowly until your Gingerbread is ready.

Source: Android Central

That’s right, folks! Amazon Wireless is offering a ton of phones from AT&T now for only a penny. The deal requires a new 2-year agreement or an upgrade to an existing line. Included in this special are a handful of some pretty nice devices, so make sure you don’t miss out on the deal. Here’s a few links to get you started:

Samsung Infuse 4G

HTC Inspire 4G

Motorola Atrix 4G

LG Thrill 4G

Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY 4G

Samsung Captivate

Samsung Doubletime

AT&T Impulse 4G

LG Phoenix

With prices like this, Amazon is definitely trying to start 2012 off with a bang. If any of those phones interest you in the least bit, make sure to pick one up while you can get one for only a penny. Happy shopping!

Sprint launched their official “Sprint Zone” mobile iPhone app today.

The app allows Sprint iPhone owners to access and manage their accounts via a dedicated app like other carriers. The app includes news, access promotions, find a store locator as well as help functions including direct access to a care representative. Users can even monitor their iPhone’s performance.

Sprint Zone isn’t as feature filled as AT&T’s and Verizon’s alternatives, but both companies have had the iPhone on their network for considerably more time. Both AT&T

AT&T recently announced its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2011, revealing that the wireless mobile carrier saw record-breaking sales of 9.4 million smartphones. This number is nearly double the previous quarter’s sales and 50% higher than the company’s previous record. The iPhone was clearly the primary driver of smartphone sales for AT&T as the carrier reported 7.6 million iPhone activations during the quarter, with the “majority” of these activations being the iPhone 4S amongst its subscribers.

Here is part of what the carrier said in its financial results for the fourth

Its a Free App with for Kids & this is a 1980 board gamed called Let’s Be Safe.

The game that teaches children about safety when they have to play this ridiculous game that doesn’t make much sense.

Each card in this game have Problem for kids which they regularly face in and out of home. And the Problems which they really need for the Parents to teach their children about Safety.

However, the game does have solution cards that are very funny.

Download this App, if you really want to teach your Kids about Safety

AT&T wants to offer you more data: for just a little bit more money.

Here is an odd turn of events from AT&T – in what seems like a strange move by them, they are going to start offering you higher data caps so that you can use more data per month without overages. The only prerequisite? You’ll have to shell out an extra five dollars per month. Now before you pre-judge the fact that it will cost more, you should take note that for just five dollars, you are getting a rather large data increase. It’s actually a pretty good deal compared to what you’re paying for now if you’re on the

Price: $0.99 ****~ (4/5) Draco the Dragon: iPhone App Written Review As the inner-children that we are, there’s only two things that really get us going: Dragons and arcade games. This is why Draco the Dragon, by developer VAPSSKY, has us so excited, as it combines both of our beloved fascinations into one fancy package. [...]

TeamCarbon has released an update to ADW Theme BloodRed. The latest version is now 1.2.

This release is supported on the following Device(s):

===v1.2===
Coded another 30 icons
Themed default dock bar
Google Search Widget, themed background & voice search button

Head over to TeamCarbon’s CommunityRelease Developer Homepage for more information and downloads.

Register now on Community Release and follow your favorites.

Get instant notifications for:

• Single Releases
• Device Releases
• Developer Releases

It’s so simple and will give you access to new registered user features as they become available.
Click HERE to complete your registration.

Although Apple has gained ground over Android-based tablets in recent quarters, the market research firm IDC Research believes that the iPad’s share of the market will slide in the December quarter due to gains from the low end tablets from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

It was estimated that the iPad held on to a 61.5% worldwide market share in the third quarter and that number is expected to dip below the 60% mark in the upcoming quarter. According to IDC, HP jumped up to second place in the tablet market in the third quarter, capturing a quick 5% share. Its presence was short-lived

Doing what I do all day is like a life long dream. I don’t know how I fit in any time for my family or for messing around with my phone, but I manage it all pretty well. One of the things most of us bloggers end up with after a few months of doing this, is a huge inbox full of information from around various company’s and other sites. One that I follow pretty closely is the Vibrant forum in XDA. Of course this is because I have a Vibrant. One that popped up that I had missed, or was to afraid to mess with at the time, was a great guide by Master&Slave™. He goes through and explains how to edit your build.prop file right on your device and make adjustments to make it even better. You won’t always have to do this though, many devs make a lot of these changes in the ROM prior to you flashing anyways. There are a number of awesome little tweaks that you can implement on your own though that some of you might find useful.

All though this was posted under the Vibrant section, most devices are similar. Although some tweaks might render your device unusable, so make a backup before you start messing with things.

To get started you will need to of course have root access to your device. None of this is do-able on a stock device. You will need to have an app such as Root Explorer installed on your device that allows you to get to the system folder of your device. Once you have it installed open it up and navigate to your system folder. Once inside there is a small button at the top, tap it to change it and make sure it says ‘Mount R/W’. Now long press on the build.prop file and select ‘Open in Text Editor’. Now you are inside the build.prop file that controls a ton of your devices stuff.

Master&Slave goes through a huge list of things you can change or add into that file. Many of the things will already be in that file and you may only need to change a value, others you will need to add an entire line of craziness to take advantage of it. He goes over data speed increases, power saving tweaks, UI tweaks, media tweaks and many many more. For instance -

Boot Tweaks
debug.sf.nobootanimation=1
Gives your phone no boot animation
[B]persist.sys.shutdown.mode=hibernate
Makes phone boot rapidly fast.

To give your phone an HD effect fitting a little more on the screen, look for this in you current build.prop and change the 240 to:
ro.sf.lcd_density=X (225 or 230)

Like I mentioned, not all of the values or tweaks will be present for every device. The thread is fairly large and you are doing all of the adjustments at your own risk. Not our fault if you edit something and break your phone. You may want to do some digging around in the forums for your device and see if there are similar posts located there. I know I easily changed my LCD Density up to 240 from 200 and after a reboot all was good. I will probably give a few more of his tweaks a try later tonight and see how they go.

To take a look at all of the tweaks and see what you might want to tackle on your own, head on over to Master&Slaves XDA thread. You can also head to this LINK, it is a list of all the thread that contain a build.prop tag in XDA. Good place to start looking for your device tweaks.

Good luck and let us know if you have some for your specific device that you use often.

Source: XDA

If you aren’t all about saving money, then have we got an expensive deal for you. I am not sure I know anyone that has an extra $750 lying around, but if you do, how about an unlocked Galaxy Nexus. Orders that have been placed today have already been confirmed shipping out. The model shipping is the 16GB version with bands compatible with AT&T and T-Mobile’s 3G/4G networks.

The stock is very limited and if you don’t mind waiting to get your volume bug fixed, head on over to Expansys now and get your order in before they are gone.

Source: Tmonews

Can’t we just have different carriers to choose from and not have one swallowing up another? Well unfortunately, that is just not how profit hungry businesses work. As for the AT&T and T-Mobile merger, not looking to good. So go away! Leave us alone! If only it were that easy.

According to a report out of Financial Times, a large number of analysts put the probability of the deal passing at under 50%, with some going as low as 20%. Wow. That is pretty bad. People are losing faith. Sure, this was not going to be an easy-going task to merge these two giants, but that is just bad predictions right there. This merger was supposed to take place in March of 2012, one year after it was announced, but AT&T has said that it will most likely be in the middle of 2012. Let’s get this done before the world ends guys.

A lot of the hiccups are due to lawsuits, T-Mobile’s third-quarter customer gains, and analysts predictions. AT&T is really going to have to work hard to get this merger going. Being a T-Mobile customer myself, I’m getting kind of worried about what is to come of all of this. What is going to happen when I try to upgrade? Will I have to start looking at AT&T plans? Is there going to be crazy fees for me to transfer over? I guess we will have to wait and see what happens. It does please me to hear that even after all of this, T-Mobile has increased customer gain. Rock on “T-Mobileians”! Let’s keep it gong!

Source: Android and Me

In the fight for the title of best U.S. cellular carrier, AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon are constantly being put up against each other. An analytics firm by the name of Metrico Wireless Inc. compared the carriers to determine which one of the 3 major carriers had the fastest network and which one had the most reliable network.

What the firm did to perform the test was grab more than 21,000 web pages, 8,000 speed tests, and made over 6,000 voice calls from Apple’s iPhone 4S. The company used a proprietary measurement platform that they used to monitor and measure the performance of the

A developer by the name of Caleb Daniels seems to have discovered a method that will unlock the AT&T version of the iPhone 4S without any software or hardware tweaking. As of right now, the method is reported to work only with the AT&T version with a CDMA iPhone 4S method in the works (according to Daniels).

The unlock will assist you in using your iPhone 4S on T-Mobile’s network as long as you have a T-Mobile SIM card (something you’ll need anyway). Some twitter users have confirmed that this method does work so if you’re interested in giving it a shot, feel free to follow