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Softbank , the owner of Sprint, may soon approach T-Mobile US owner Deutsche Telekom for a merger proposal. One concession the Japanese conglomerate might cede is control of the combined company, sources to  Reuters  say. The meeting has not happened as FTC rules bar such communications between rivals as  the 600MHz spectrum auction is set to go on through April . Back in 2013, it was  Softbank that led a failed merger  attempt between the two service providers.  AT&T tried to buy T-Mobile in 2011 . Both transactions faced intense regulatory scrutiny. Enter the presidency of Donald Trump, one seemingly concerned less with antitrust laws, and a new age of business in the telecom industry.  AT&T  and  Verizon  have been picking up media properties while T-Mobile CEO John Legere has suggested that he would be open to  a power play of service companies . An overall stronger T-Mobile that has grown its user base by the millions over the past four years has emboldened Deutsche Tel

According to various reports on Twitter and elsewhere, T-Mobile this evening has stared rolling out  Android 7.0 Nougat  to its Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge models. The update comes complete with the February 1st security patches in place. It appears that T-Mobile and Samsung are starting the rollout with users who had been beta testing the software and will expand it from there. The update comes in at 117MB and brings all of the features you’ve come to  expect with Nougat updates . New features include things such as various user interface tweaks, notification tweaks, improvements to Multi-Window, and more. At this point, it’s unclear when exactly the update will start rolling out to everyone, but in the notice sent to beta users this evening, T-Moible explained that it is simply starting with beta users and that this is the final build (via  TmoNews ): Android 7.0 Nougat official software version (T-Mobile has been distributed hence we are opening the new version first with the c

Photo by  Mike Mozart . Verizon shocked everyone when it announced it was  bringing back unlimited data . For a brief moment, it looked like it  might be a decent deal . Then T-Mobile responded. T-Mobile CEO John Legere announced that the carrier would be responding by updating its ONE plan. This plan, which previously featured unlimited calls, text, and data, had some stipulations that made it a questionable deal. You were limited to low-quality video unless you bought daily HD video passes, and it didn’t include tethering. Now, T-Mobile is fixing both of those. T-Mobile ONE will now allow unlimited HD video streaming. They’ll also get a 10GB allotment of tethered LTE data that they can share with their laptops or other devices. After that, users can still tether on 3G as much as they want. This plan starts at $70/month for a single line, so it’s not a bad deal compared to Verizon’s new plan. None of these are  the cheapest plans around , but if you’re a data glutton, they might