Repairs to Android smartphones cost wireless carriers $2 billion per year according to a new year-long WDS study that tracked 600,000 support calls around the globe. Android’s popularity and the introduction of a number of low-cost smartphones has put a strain on the wireless business model, WDS noted in its report. “Deployment by more than 25 OEMs and lower-cost product coming to market is leading to higher than average rates of hardware failures and, in turn, return and repair costs.” 12.6...

When Apple first launched its iPhone in 2007, the odds were against it. Pundits, bloggers and even competitors found countless faults in the iPhone’s design and in Apple’s strategy. A new report from Reuters notes that one such competitor was BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. The report quotes an anonymous RIM employee as saying RIM thought the iPhone was “so badly flawed from day one,” and “users wanted great battery life, great security, great mail handling, minimal network...

After last year’s embarrassment at SXSW, AT&T is going overboard to ensure a similar wireless network meltdown does not happen again this year at the annual technology conference in Austin, Texas. To avoid a second such disaster, AT&T is throwing a ton of cash and bringing in an equal amount of equipment for the SXSW conference including:Installing a Distributed Antenna System (DAS) at the Austin Convention Center. The DAS is comprised of 50 antenna nodes that provide the equivalent coverage of ...

Yep, looks like it’s that time of the month again. Comments and emails are pouring in about another BlackBerry network outage, this time apparently affecting all carriers across the US and Canada. BIS appears to be dead while BES users seem to be rolling along just fine. From what we can gather using our time line of “good lord, BIS is *&%!@#* again!” emails, it looks like problems were intermittent at first — delays and such — and now we’ve moved on to a full-on outage...

Here we go again, people — you know the drill. Tips are flooding our inboxes from users across the US and Canada reporting some major BIS issues. Namely, it’s not working. We’ve heard from several Rogers users up in Canada as well as tons of AT&T and Verizon customers here in the US. Claims range from intermittent service interruptions to full-on “all is lost, my ‘Berry is dead” reports. Roll call… Is your ‘Berry alive?

The past month or so have not been kind to AT&T’s wireless networks. Constant and often major network outages have been rolling across the country for the better part of a month now and these mounting issues come on top of ongoing complaints regarding AT&T’s ever-slowing 3G network. Not good. An anonymous tipster brings news of this latest major network issue, affecting Philadelphia and the surrounding area. The symptoms this time around include the inability to hear the party on the other...

Just one short week after AT&T suffered a major network outage across much of the northeast and beyond, reports are flooding our inbox yet again complaining of problems. This time, only data seems to be affected but reports are coming in from up and down the east coast. We’re still sitting pretty in the NYC area with no problems connecting via 3G, but plenty of readers are complaining of repeated error messages when attempting to connect. Voice seems to be unaffected but if you live on the east coas...

Yesterday we broke the news of a massive AT&T network outage that came at one of the worst possible times – right smack in the middle of Wal-Mart’s iPhone 3G launch. Users from various regions throughout the eastern United States were reporting communication interruptions ranging from dropped calls to the complete inability to send/receive any voice or data. According to a later report from Chicago’s Sun Times, the cause of the massive network trauma was a power outage originating in Blo...

Word is out on the T-Mobile forums that POP3/IMAP email on the G1 is a big fail. People are reporting that they experience connection errors 95% of the time they check their email, email is not sending or sending as null, and forget about receiving — not happening. The problem looks to be across the board and is not tied any single email provider. Some people report that resetting the phone will re-establish the email connection for a single time before it fails again. Not surprisingly, Gmail is reporte...