All four national US wireless carriers announced last week that they'll sell Samsung 's  Android-based tablet this fall, and Samsung disclosed a series of media partnerships aimed at making its Galaxy Tab a viable competitor to Apple's iPad.

Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile in separate announcements said they will offer the 7-inch tablet based on the latest release of Google's Android mobile OS, though none offered details on pricing or specific release dates. Verizon said it will launch the tablet in the "coming weeks," AT&T in the "coming months," Sprint by "this fall," and T-Mobile said "for the holiday season." At a press conference in New York, Samsung said it would launch a Media Hub services with partners including MTV, NBC, Paramount and Universal Home Entertainment, designed to be competitive with Apple's recently revamped Apple TV service.

So much for "antennagate" having any significant impact. Two days after Apple surprised Wall Street by posting a $3.25 billion quarterly profit on $15.7 billion of revenue, AT&T reported that it gained a net 1.6 million subscribers in the second quarter on the strength of a record 3.2 million iPhones activated in the quarter.

Of the 3.2 million iPhone activations, about 27 percent of those were new AT&T subscribers, the company said Thursday, helping boost its second-quarter earnings 26 percent over the same quarter last year, prompting the company to increase its outlook for the full year.

In an acknowledgment that it must move quicker to solve the network speed and capacity issues created by the iPhone and increasingly popular mobile data applications, AT&T is reversing course and planning interim upgrades to its network designed to improve performance for 250 million people this year.

Instead of moving straight from 3G to 4G starting in 2011, as it said it would last fall, AT&T now plans to upgrade its current wireless network in certain markets to support the intermediate HSPA+ technology, which is capable of offering 14.4Mbps speeds, twice what its current 3G network provides.