Tag: T-Mobile

OnePlus appears to be poised to start talks with US carriers about finding a home for its devices in the US market.  The company’s CEO, Pete Lau, said in a recent interview with CNET that exploring a US carrier deal is of interest if the timing and terms are right.

With purchasing plans and far reaching marketing arms, the US carrier market amongst the top four of AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint is a lucrative and attractive opportunity for phone manufactures.  Getting even one phone into a carrier’s store will almost certainly bump sales up for that phone.  But, as other manufactures have found, it is a tough sell to get in with a US carrier.

Following in the footsteps of Verizon from last week, T-Mobile has released the Android Oreo update for the Moto Z2 Force on their network.  The update, which is just shy of 1GB in size, brings all of the goodness of Oreo to the 2017 flagship device as well as the December Android Security Update.  The new build, like Verizon, is ODX27.

With the size of this update, you will need to download it via WiFi and will need to have 80% battery life on your phone before you can install it.  The install process will take about 10-15 minutes after it is downloaded.

T-Mobile customers who are carrying the Samsung Galaxy S8 or S8 Plus, there is a new software update that has been released for you.  The update brings the December Android Security Update to the devices but nothing else is mentioned in the release notes by T-Mobile.  It likely contains some performance fixes and bug fixes, especially given the size of the update files.

For the Galaxy S8, your new build is G950USQS2BQL1 and is 130.66MB in size.  For S8 Plus owners, you are getting build G955USQS2BQL1 and it is slightly smaller at 127.11MB.  The updates have been released by T-Mobile so you should start seeing the OTA updates for them as soon as today.

Good news this morning for those of you who have the HTC U11 Life on T-Mobile – Today is Android Oreo day for you.

HTC took to Twitter yesterday to announced that starting today, U11 Life owners on T-Mobile will start getting the hefty update pushed to them to move them from Nougat 7.1 to Oreo 8.0.

The Android 8.0 Oreo update is now available for T-Mobile editions of the HTC U11 life. It’s a big update, so you must be on WiFi before attempting to download. Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/FMd1CO28pJ

— HTC USA (@HTCUSA) December 18, 2017

HTC has, to their credit, been open about which devices would see the Oreo update and they had committed to having the update out for the U11 Life before the end of 2017.

T-Mobile has begun sending out an OTA update for the Galaxy Note8 on their network that brings a handful of improvements and fixes to the phablet.  The new version is build N950USQU1AQ15 for those keeping score at home and the over-the-air updates have already begun.  It is a small download, just 198MB.

The update brings the August Android Security Update to the Note8 along with a lot of stability improvements.  Most of the improvements are aimed at individual apps but there are also general improvements to be found in the update.

T-Mobile has released an update for the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge on their network that is aimed at improving roaming on the devices.  Build G930TUVU4BQH7  for the S7 and build G935TUVU4BQH7 for the S7 Edge are the updates you are looking for on these respective devices and they should be hitting your device over the course of the next few days.

The biggest change in this smallish 200MB update is improved IMS Roaming.  What is IMS Roaming you ask?  Essentially it is an interconnect between T-Mobile and other carriers to allow you to make VoLTE calls, video calls and media sessions to someone on another carrier in another country.  It isn’t super sexy and unless you do international travel, it isn’t a big deal frankly.  But it is good to see T-Mobile improving support for it (and Samsung for that matter).