It seems as if AT&T is gearing up to launch their HSPA 7.2 in the Dallas area, making good on their promise of having it rolled out in 6 major cities 1 major city in the US. (If anyone in Charlotte, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, or Miami is seeing signs of the boost yet, let us know).

This is indeed the right time for AT&T to give their network a boost, especially with image the latest Verizon “map for that” commercials portray.

With these upgrades, you should have a better wireless experience with more capacity on our network and improved coverage inside your home and other buildings throughout the DFW area. Look for improved coverage in area communities like Allen, Arlington, Carrollton, Colleyville, Dallas, Denton, Ft. Worth, Frisco, Garland, Grapevine, Grand Prairie, Irving, Keller, Mesquite, McKinney, Lewisville, Plano, Richardson, Rockwall, Southlake and more. We updated nearly 1,000 cell sites in these areas! The fastest gets faster! AT&T has the fastest network in Dallas/Ft. Worth* and we’re excited to announce that Dallas will be among the first 6 major U.S. cities in which AT&T plans to upgrade its existing 3G technology to HSPA 7.2.** This new upgrade will provide considerably faster mobile broadband speeds, and we plan to make it available by the end of the year.

AT&T claims to have spent 50 million to improve their 850 mhz network in Dallas alone. That should mean pristine service for those enough luck enough to be a resident of the Dallas area. At least you that’s what one would hope…

[Thanks to David for the tip!]

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AT&T Ready to Rollout HSPA 7.2 in Dallas

AT&T has unveiled plans to upgrade their 3G network to 7.2 HSPA in various markets across the US by the end of the year. What cities happen to have all of the luck on their side? Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles and Miami.

If you don’t live in any of those cities don’t worry, I will let you all know how it works here in Chicago. Unfortunately for those who are not so lucky, the wait for HSPA 7.2 will will take a bit longer as AT&T is only planning on having 25 of the nation’s 30 largest markets upgraded by the end of 2010. John Stankey, president and CEO, AT&T Operations:

“Our deployment of HSPA 7.2 and supporting backhaul connectivity will enable our customers to continue to ride the leading edge of emerging devices and thousands of mobile applications, our network is based on the predominant technology platform used by operators worldwide and has been tested by today’s most popular devices. That experience gives us an important advantage in developing and deploying new technologies to meet customers’ future needs.”

Who knows, maybe as these network upgrades are taking place we will slowly start to see apps such as SlingPlayer Mobile get rid of their Wi-Fi-only chains? Only time will tell.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

AT&T Upgrading 6 Major Cities to HSPA 7.2

Macworld is reporting that while the iPhone 3GS chipset does indeed support the new (for North America!) HSPDA download speed of 7.2 Mbps, Apple didn’t see fit to equip it with the matching HSUPA upload speed of 1.4/1.9 Mbps. Indeed, they claim the iPhone 3GS will top out its uploads (sending videos to YouTube, emailing photos, etc.) at a comparatively anemic 384 Kbps.

Perhaps not a big deal in North America where, as noted, the GSM networks are still building out their speed. (Hold your laughter, CDMA, your upload speed is faster but it’s not like you’ve flipped the switch to Rev B yet either — you all have your hidden shames!).

In Europe, however, where HSPA networks are as mature as their coffee is good, well… they’re going to suffer senselessly slower upload speeds.

We’ve asked you in the past how fast your downloads were, now let us know how your uploads are doing, and how much HSUPA — or the lack thereof — matters to you.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3GS Doesn’t Support HSUPA for High Speed 3G Upload

Jeremy and Chad both gave excellent, compelling reasons for why they ARE SO or ARE NOT upgrading to the iPhone 3G S. For certain, intelligent people will have different yet equally valid reasons for choosing to upgrade, or not to upgrade. For myself?

Apple had me at speed.

As anyone who ever managed to snag NetShare before it was yanked off the App Store, or anyone who has ever spun up PDANet, for anyone who has tethered under the iPhone 3.0 beta knows — 3G networks are a lot faster than the iPhone 3G lets on.

See, internet connection speed is only one factor. CPUs (and/or GPUs — where’s my OpenCL ES?) need to render HTML, CSS, and — the killer — JavaScript. Doing that takes a lot of crunch power, and that’s the bottleneck on the current iPhone 3G.

The new iPhone 3G S, however, has 150% of the CPU power and 200% of the RAM.

Remember a few years back when you bought a new laptop or desktop and it had a better CPU and twice as much RAM, remember how that new experience just flew. And remember going back and trying to use your old computer again, and how it just felt so slow?

Yeah, that feeling, that’s what I’m talking about.

Not only will web pages render faster at current 3G speeds, iPhone 3G S will use 3.5G/3.75G 7.2Mbps HSPA to really give them a turbo boost in areas where it’s available (hurry up, AT&T!)

And all of that is in addition to the faster task/app switching, load speeds, OpenGL ES 2.0, and other, tangible, perceptive speed boosts that Apple averages out to being TWICE as fast on the iPhone 3G.

Imagine if your new car suddenly went twice as fast.

For some people it won’t be worth it. For some the iPhone 3G wasn’t worth upgrading from the 2G either. It depends on what you value. On a tiny screen, seconds matter to me. Waiting for a page to render or apps to switch is dead time, and I’m trying to fill the interstitial moments, not just fracture them into smaller bits.

I know expectations were impossibly high for the third generation iPhone’s debut at WWDC 2009. Sites like TiPb and the rumors we all love so much didn’t help. But complaining about the iPhone 3G S not being improved enough — what did you want, a built-in espresso maker?

Apple puts new CPUs, GPUs, and RAM into their iMacs, MacBook Pros, Mac Pros, etc. all the time. Much more often than case changes (hello G5 = Mac Pro!). Fashion is nice when we get it, features perfect when they make sense (I expect that Mobile iChat one year!) but it’s power that will still drive mobile adaption. Performance size matters.

So I’ll be lining up on Friday for a new 32GB iPhone 3G S. (No pre-orders on my carrier). And when I start using it, when web pages just pop up, when apps launch in a heartbeat, when I hit HSPA 7.2, when I load up my first OpenGL ES 7.2 game…

Well, let’s just say I won’t be able to go back.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

The Need for iPhone 3G S Speed. Or, What Did You Want, a Built-In Espresso Maker?!

Looks like DaringFireball.net nailed it: the S in iPhone 3G S stands for speed. Faster processors (we’re guessing both CPU and GPU in line with new ARM and PowerVR chips), new OpenGL ES 2.0 implementation (no word on OpenCL yet, which leverages GPUs and CPUs).

HSPA cell downloads are also boosted up to 7.2 Mbps, where available.

Missing in the speed-boost department, however, was any word on support for 802.11n Wi-Fi according to the Tech Specs.

Guess we’re waiting on fourth gen for that?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

iPhone 3G S – 2x Faster, but Still no 802.11n

Welcome to From the Forums, a regular post here at TiPb that gives you, our readers, the chance to get involved in our ever growing community. To get yourself started please register, it will only take a moment of your time, we promise. Now that’s out of the way, lets dive right into some of the better threads for today.

Our first thread today comes to us from iLoveiPhones and she brought up a good topic regarding data prices for our iPhones. Will the data prices rise, stay the same, or can we possibly see different pricing tiers? Personally we feel we may just start to see different pricing tiers. Granted high data prices don’t seem to be slowing people from buying the iPhone but lower data prices could open the flood gates.

Next thread was started a while back by ExBBUser and he wanted to know, what are you top 5 App Store apps? This one has been highlighted here before but with the App Store hitting the one billion mark, why not toss this thread back into the mix?

Sticking with the theme of iPhone apps, cjvitek started a nice little thread titled iPhone CrApp List. It’s simply a thread that you can go to and relieve your frustration on a app you may have purchased just to find out it is pretty pathetic… we have all had this happen at some point or another so share your experience.

Our last thread today is one that I started a while back but with the rumors of AT&T beefing up their 3G network in preparation for the next iPhone, how fast or slow is your 3G data speed? Test your speed out and feel free to post a screen shot in your reply. (Just make sure you have 10 posts to be sure you can post any images.)

See you on the forums!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

From the Forums: iPhone Data Prices, Top 5 Apps, CrApp List, 3G Data Speed

We’d mentioned previously that AT&T is upgrading the ole rabbit-eared 3G network for Apple’s upcoming next generation iPhone, and WMExperts covered it yesterday, but it’s worth surfacing the details:

AT&T Mobility VP Scott McElroy says software updates will double the downstream speed to 7.2 megabits per second and are already being tested in two markets [...] But AT&T’s looking past that and toward HSPA+, which will increase speeds to 21 Mb/s. And looking even further into the future, tests with the 4G LTE standard should begin sometime next year.

A helpful commenter, Will, gave us the skinny on those phat pipes after the last podcast:

• Plain ‘ol 3G refers to the original WCDMA specs which gives a max throughput of 384 kbps.
• 3.5G in the UMTS world commonly refers to HSDPA which is already up and running.
• “3.75G” – 3GPP Revision 6 – HSDPA (max of 14.4Mbps) and HSUPA (max of 5.76Mbps), known together as HSPA
• “3.9G” – 3GPP Revision 7 – HSDPA (max of 42Mbps) and HSUPA (max of 11Mbps), known as HSPA+

Thanks Will. Well, by any other name, we hope these upgrades not only give iPhone users blazing fast speeds, but better reliability. Doesn’t matter how fast you go if you can’t connect, right?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

More Details on AT&T Upgrading Network in Advance of Next Gen iPhone

Apple Insider reports that AT&T is trying to increase the coverage, reliability, and speed of it’s 3G network in anticipation of Apple’s next gen iPhone hardware coming this summer (perhaps to be introduced, like last year, at WWDC in June?).

AT&T’s current 3G supports up to 3.6Mb/s, though AT&T has said they have the infrastructure to go to 7.2Mb/s, with 14.4 and 20Mb/s feasible within a couple of years. As for the iPhone specifically:

Apple has been evaluating a portion of the network upgrade already accessible to its engineers for testing purposes and is genuinely impressed with its speed. A person familiar with the situation commented that Apple iPhone engineers have “never gotten pages to load as fast as they were loading on the new routers.”

This would follow on AT&T’s EDGE “plus” upgrade before the original iPhone 2G launched, and their acceleration of HSPA last year before the iPhone 3G debuted.

So, stronger, better, faster, longer… Sounds good, but can they deliver?

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

AT&T Supercharging Network in Advance of Next Gen iPhone?

On other mobile platforms (hi Windows Mobile!) we often spend quite a bit of time comparing the processors of different models, seeing which one is faster and seeing what happens when you set the clock speed of a given phone to a higher number. It’s “fun,” see, because not only can clock speed be radically different from phone to phone, but so can performance even on devices with similar clock speeds.

The nice thing about the iPhone: not doing that. Well, until now. MacRumors reports that the 2nd gen iPod Touch, though it sports the same processor as its siblings, actually has a clock speed of 532MHz compared to the rest at 412MHz. The result is that certain apps like TouchSports Tennis run much better on the iPod Touch 2nd Gen. Which ultimately meant that the developer had to optimize their app for the iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPod Touch 1st Gen. All three actually perform differently with the game, with the original iPod touch falling furthest behind.

It’s a bummer, because as apps become more powerful and get closer to testing the limits of the platform, developers will discover that the ’single target’ advantage of the iPhone/iPod Touch platform may go away. We’re not talking about having to code for as many devices as you do with Windows Mobile or BlackBerry, of course, but it’s still worth noting.

Why not clock up the iPhone 3G. In a couple of words: “battery life.” In a lot of words, well, battery life plus when you have WiFi, bluetooth, Quad-band edge and Tri-band WDCMA (that’s GSM 3G to you) all packed together, they have to be finely tuned. Just changing the clock speed could be enough to ruin a whole raft of things beyond battery life. With smartphones, we live in a world where the choice of paint can radically alter signal strength, so it’s no stretch to say the changes in heat, radiation, etc. associated with a faster clock speed could potentially cause problems. Plus, again, battery life people.

It probably wouldn’t completely screw with everything if Apple upped the clock speed — people change clock speeds all the time on WinMo — but it can happen and it’s a bigger deal as they get packed more tightly together. These radios are packed pretty tightly in the iPhone 3G.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

The 2nd Gen iPod Touch is Faster than Your iPhone 3G

Dieter just told us about Crackberry Kevin’s uber-frustrating experiences trying to pit the iPhone 3G and Blackberry Bold head to head in the browser war to end all browser wars. But — silver lining — for iPhone users, not only did we snag bragging rights, but a handy tip as well!

Unlike the Blackberry Bold, the iPhone defaults to having Javascript enabled. As anyone who’s waited — and waited — for an overstuffed Facebook profile to load already knows, Javascript can be heavy lifting for a browser. For WebApps, it’s a necessary sacrifice, but if all you want is casual browsing, you can turn Javascript off and send MobileSafari into turbo mode.

Here’s how:

From the iPhone home screen, tap Settings. Scroll down and tap the Safari button. Under Security, slide Javascript to Off.

There you go, you’ve just switched to light, clean HTML and CSS mode (still technically “just the internet” — unless you’re in the UK…). In Crackberry.com’s tests, it made a big difference on some sites. Let us know how it works for you!

(Thanks to Crackberry Kevin!)

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

How To: Disable Javascript to Speed up MobileSafari on the iPhone