Telstra has announced at a Macquarie Bank’s Equities Conference that it has garnered a really serious number of 4G customers. After being the first carrier to enable the LTE network in Australia, we could all expect that they’d be number one. However, the 2.1 million figure was not expected this quickly and it is a great triumph for Australia’s largest carrier.

Telstra’s CFO, Mark Hall, said:

Our 4G network supremacy is delivering mobile market share to Telstra. Since launch in September 2011: we have grown our 4G customer base to 2.1 million customers. This includes: 1.4 million handsets; 150,000 tablets; 370,000 dongles and 225,000 wifi hotspots.

It’s interesting to see how much of the number is made up by dongles …

Ladies and gentlemen, the day is here. For a long time us down under have had a subpar Play Store experience. We’ve lived a year covered by the almighty shadow of the USA’s full content selection.

With the addition of Music, we can now join it to the rest of the ranks. This makes it Google Play Books, Magazines, Apps, Movies and Music to make an appearance down under. In fact, this makes us Aussies have one of the most comprehensive Play catalogues out there!

For those of you who haven’t heard what the US has been enjoying, I’ll run over a fun of the key points. Google Play Music acts as both a music storage locker and a store …

The announcements today from both the CEO of Vodafone Australia, Bill Morrow and Vodafone’s blog have all but confirmed a June release for their all new 4G network.

Morrow addressed the media, stating the service will initially roll-out to the cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Darwin and Brisbane. Currently, the service undergoing a trial use by staff in order to determine whether any further adjustments need to be made before they make the service available to consumers.

Whilst Morrow didn’t confirm the pricing strategy for Vodafone when their 4G lands, he did appear to shut-down the possibility of more affordable plans:

        “The right value doesn’t always mean the cheapest.”

So while we’re on the cusp of experiencing 4G LTE – …

Some unfortunate news has been released, confirming  that Samsung’s top-tier Galaxy S4 will be launching with the quad-core Qualcomm 600 processor, instead of the octa-core Exynos 5 Octa chip that will be available on the global 3G model. 

As the market for 4G LTE grows in Australia, it seems Samsung have pushed in favour of the 1.9Ghz quad-core chip that will be available in a number of other 4G markets. This news comes as a slight shock, particularly when we’ve yet to see 4G roll-out on Vodafone’s network – a network who have confirmed the Galaxy S4 will be available, while their launch of 4G is scheduled for June.

Though we’ll be missing out on the big.LITTLE octa-core …

Great news for all you readers out there who have been wondering when HTC’s new flagship One will be ending up on the shelves at your local carrier store.

It’s been confirmed by HTC’s Facebook page that the unibody aluminium wonder we had a hands-on with a little while back will in fact be available from  April 23rd, following concerns of delays with components from HTC’s suppliers.

The One will be available for pre-order tomorrow (April 5th), thankfully on all three major carriers (as well as Virgin Mobile), unlike in the U.S. where customers on Verizon, the country’s largest carrier are stuck with HTC’s alternate offering – the Droid DNA.

Carrier exclusivity for devices are always bound to make some …

Have you been (im)patiently waiting around for the Sony Xperia Tablet Z? Our very own Norman Ma has taken a voyage down to the Sydney Chatswood Sony Centre and lay his eyes on Sony’s latest and greatest tablet, the Xperia Tablet Z. From the looks of things it has a similar form factor to the Xperia Z and standard with the same waterproofing – you can now indulge in the guilty pleasure of ‘tablet on the toilet’ in peace.

Some major specifications are:

• 1200 x 1920 pixels, 10.1 inches (~224 ppi pixel density) display
• Quad-core 1.5 GHz Krait Snapdragon processor
• 2GB RAM
• 16GB internal memory, expandable up to 64GB microSD
• Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean
• 8.1 megapixel camera
• 266 x 172

…

Ladies and gentlemen, today is one of my favourite days. Today is the day that Chromebooks officially launch in Australia!

Google and partners have initially brought two devices to stores, with a third to be following suit shortly thereafter. The Samsung Chromebook and Acer Chromebook can be found right now in select JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores, with the HP Chromebook “on its way.” Hooray!

If you’re not a tech aficionado, then I’ll jump into what exactly Chromebooks are for a little. Chromebooks are Google’s own self-developed laptops. They run a custom Google-built operating system called Chrome OS. This OS is built to be fast, secure and provide an always new experience for your computer. It updates automatically when …

We’ve been thinking this for a while and Kogan has finally brought out something that may just change the game. In their traditional form, Kogan has sent out a long-winded press release telling us all about their brand new offering. In this case, it’s all about their new carrier service. After selling mobile phones and other electronics on the cheaper side of things for so long, Kogan has decided to unveil Kogan Mobile – their self-branded carrier service.

Kogan mobile features two very exciting things. First up, it’s by far the cheapest and most data-heavy network packs that we’ve ever seen in Australia. Secondly, it’s powered by Australia’s biggest and arguably(?) best network – Telstra. A mix made in heaven, …

Research has grounded today from firm Telsyte, that has analysed the difference in numbers of Android vs iOS running phones in Australia. And, well, the numbers are likely to put a smile on your dial.

It appears as though Android has finally toppled iOS in Australia, bringing Apple fans to their knees – kind of. The numbers suggest that of the 10 million smartphones in Australia (almost one for every two people!) 44% are running Android and 43% are running iOS. As TheAge points out, it’s a huge increase from the 6% that Android held back in 2010.

Foad Fadaghi, Telsyte analyst said:

Lower prices, faster product cycles and carrier support has helped Android become the leading platform.

There’s no …

Update: It’s official! From Vodafone:

We’re really excited to be bringing the TX to Vodafone.
We can confirm we’ll be ranging it exclusively in Australia.
We’ll be announcing full pricing tomorrow but can confirm it will be available on our $50 Plan.

Update 2: Sony confirms too. I just received the official press release from Sony Mobile Australia and the Xperia TX will be available from Vodafone Australia or from Sony Centres outright ($629) from November 28.

The new Bond movie, Skyfall, comes out tomorrow. As many of us already know, he’ll be wielding a shiny new Xperia TX as his phone of choice for the movie. It’s sleek lines, black colour and appeal factor are apparently enough for Mr …

When Sony announced the Xperia Tablet S it was an exciting/confusing moment. I loved the original Tablet S, but have struggled to think of a place where the newer edition could slip into general use. After consulting the team we’ve come up with the idea that it is a perfect device for non Android enthusiasts or Sony enthusiasts.

The Xperia Tablet S has some decent specs under the hood, but can’t compete in a hardware sense with Samsung’s Nexus 10 offerings. It has less RAM, a slower processor and a much lower resolution (and smaller) screen. However, the Xperia Tablet S does have a few things going for it – one of them is Sony’s custom UI skin. While there’s …

Although the Android 4.2 update for the Nexus 7 went out in the last couple of days internationally, many Australians were still left without any update. We’ve been tipped off by a few people that their Nexus 7s in Australia have been receiving the update, which leads us to believe that the majority of us Aussies are now privy to enjoy some lovely second round Jelly Bean goodness.

So, you know the drill. Head over to Settings -> About Device -> Software Update -> Check Now to see if your device has the update ready. Otherwise, you’ll likely wake up to a lovely notification alerting you to the update over the next few days.

Stay tuned and let us know …