You may want to put down your cell phone if you’re planning on having kids anytime soon. According to an article in the latest Journal of Andrology, recent reports have suggested there is a “possible link between cell phone use and semen quality.” The author of the article, Dr. Sandro La Vignera from the University of Catania, refers to one 2008 report which studied 361 men in an infertility clinic, which concluded that there was a direct link to the “duration of cellular phone posses...

Apple has yet to release a MacBook with an integrated 3G modem, but that doesn’t mean the company hasn’t toyed with the idea. A 2007 15-inch MacBook Pro has surfaced on eBay with a built-in 3G antenna and a SIM-card slot. The seller says he or she originally purchased the 3G-capable MacBook Pro “for parts,” from a former Apple engineer and said “it was immediately clear this was no normal MacBook Pro.” The machine’s SIM card slot is still recognized by OS X 10.6.8 Leo...

Wireless carriers around the world are digging themselves into a deeper hole by neglecting to experiment with innovative pricing models for 4G LTE services. While consumers have exhibited concern surrounding tiered data plans and bandwidth throttling, Ovum believes such models are necessary to combat the growing capacity crunch plaguing cellular service providers. This crunch, of course, is serious enough that AT&T is hoping to soon $39 billion in order to acquire T-Mobile USA and use the carrier’s ...

Mobile data connections are poised grow 11% in 2011, driving global mobile data revenue to $314.7 billion. Market research firm Gartner on Thursday said mobile data connections will reach 5.6 billion this year compared to 5 billion in 2010, driving global revenue from mobile data up 22.5% from the $257 billion earned last year. “Mobile data traffic will increase significantly as more people will have access to mobile data networks, there is a migration toward smartphones and an increase in sales of medi...

As you can see from the above image, the destruction and slow reconstruction of AT&T is quite a story. With the T-Mobile merger currently being debated by Congress, potentially adding another chapter to the saga, we thought it might be a good idea to look at the genesis of AT&T Mobility as it stands today. It all started back in 2001 with AT&T Wireless… (more…)

Details of Samsung’s first official Chrome OS netbook, dubbed Alex, have surfaced in Google’s code repository. According to the Chrome OS development site, the Alex netbook will be powered by a 1.5GHz Intel Atom N550 processor and sport 2GB of RAM. A SanDisk solid-state harddrive of an unknown capacity, a 1280 x 800 pixel display resolution, Wi-Fi, Ethernet port, front-facing webcam, and Bluetooth along with support for 3G cellular connectivity and a Synaptics TouchPad will also be included. Go...

Let all those questioning their open-source smartphone overlord be silent. Responding to the recent ruckus caused by an O’Reilly article and subsequent report by The Wall Street Journal, Google has let it be known that it is not tracking your location… unless you give it permission. In a statement to blog TechCrunch, Google writes:All location sharing on Android is opt-in by the user. We provide users with notice and control over the collection, sharing and use of location in order to provide ...

Several researchers at O’Reilly have discovered an extremely troubling feature of iPhones and 3G iPads running Apple’s iOS 4. In a blog post and accompanying video, the site details that Apple is storing the GPS coordinates of cellular iDevices locally, in an unencrypted and unprotected file. “Ever since iOS 4 arrived, your device has been storing a long list of locations and time stamps,” reads the post. “We’re not sure why Apple is gathering this data, but it’s cle...

The nation’s fifth largest wireless provider — MetroPCS — announced the addition of Tampa, Florida to its LTE portfolio. “As we have built-out our 4G LTE service across the nation, we continue to be dedicated to making our customers’ lives easier by providing them with feature-rich smartphones that let them do more on our network,” said the company’s president, CEO and chairman Roger D. Linquist. Tampa joins Atlanta, Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Detroit, Jacksonville, Las Vega...

4G. It’s everywhere. It’s on the tech sites you read. It’s on the televisions you watch. It’s plastered in advertisements all over the city streets you walk. It was probably in the sandwich you ate for lunch. Cellular carriers around the world are betting the bank on 4G — be it LTE, WiMAX or the newly knighted HSPA+ — and 4G-enabled gear is already starting to flood the market despite the lack of nationwide coverage. (more…)

In a report titled Emerging Wireless Consumer Devices published this month by Berg Insight, the firm claims that sales of connected consumer devices will grow 77% in 2011. Berg estimates that 22 million consumer devices with embedded cellular connectivity were sold in 2010, and that number will nearly double in 2011 to 39 million. In 2015, Berg thinks over 270 million connected consumer devices will be sold globally, representing a compound annual growth rate of 65%. The category, as defined by Berg, includes...

Today, U.S. wireless provider Sprint published a press release outlining its “Network Vision” to be implemented over the next several years. As the PR reads:Today, Sprint uses separate equipment to deploy services on 800MHz spectrum, 1.9GHz spectrum and, through its relationship with Clearwire, 2.5GHz spectrum. Under the terms of the new contracts, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Samsung will install new network equipment and software that brings together multiple spectrum bands, or airwaves, on a si...

GigaOM is reporting that T-Mobile is testing a completely solar-powered cell phone tower here in the States. The single tower — located in Chalfont, PA — generates enough power to keep the site off the grid and, at times, feed power back into the country’s aging electrical system. Pike Research estimates that 4.5% of all cellular stations worldwide will use solar or wind energy by 2014. The report indicates that although the tower does cost 2 to 3 times more than the standard, grid-powered e...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that mobile location company Skyhook Wireless is suing Google, alleging that the search giant “interfered with a contract, announced in April, to put its location technology on Motorola Inc. phones.” Skyhook, for those not familiar, is a company that created a system — call XPS — that uses GPS, cellular, and Wi-Fi data to help triangulate the location of a device quickly. The company’s technologies were in previous iterations of iOS and c...