This looks awesome.

HTC announced the J Butterfly, the world’s first smartphone to boast a 1080p display, back in October, and fans have been itching to get their hands on the Taiwanese company’s latest handset. The thing is, the J Butterfly is exclusive to Japan. Those in the U.S. now have an equivalent in the Droid DNA, but what about the rest of the world?

Well, HTC just announced the Butterfly (without the ‘J’) — the international version of its full HD smartphone. It’s very similar to the J Butterfly — both in design and specifications — and it’s going global over the coming weeks and months.

AT&T "toll free" plans will provide free access to some online content

Unlimited data plans are becoming scarce options for smartphone and tablet users. Sprint remains the only carrier to offer an unlimited data plans. Most Verizon and AT&T customers, however, need to make do with tiered data plans. Tiered data plans get more cash from customers and deter customers from overloading mobile networks with excessive data use.

As a result, a lot of us try to avoid excessive data use by limiting the types and amount of content that we access when using a device’s 3G or LTE connection. That, in turn, blocks many content companies from capturing ad or subscription revenue from mobile users. That reality is leading major content companies to complain to the carriers and which AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson recently said may lead to “toll free” data plans.

Just about every major carrier seems to boast the “fastest network speeds,” while bombarding us with acronyms like LTE and buzzwords such as “lightning fast.” When it’s all said and done, we’re left confused and none the closer to the truth of which network actually has the fastest speeds. So how do we find out the truth? Well, it’s not as simple as we’d like it to be and there are near infinite variables to the equation, but one way to get a general idea of how fast a network’s speeds will be in a real-world environment is to test them out.

In the latest patent war saga, a Dutch court ruled that Samsung cannot assert 3G patents against Apple products using Qualcomm’s baseband chips — as Samsung has a licensing deal with the U.S. chipmaker — thus denying their bid to ban the sales of the iPhone and iPad in the Netherlands. However, Samsung didn’t consider the ruling a complete loss as the Hague court also ruled that Samsung could seek damages over the use of Intel chips. While Apple doesn’t use Intel chips, this gives Samsung ammunition against those that do.

One day we’ll all look back and say “Hey, remember when we used to have 3G phones?” Of course our kids won’t have any idea of what we’re talking about, in fact, they’ll probably be calling them communicators by then. It seems Verizon is set in making 4G LTE the future of their network, so much, that they have announced from here on out, 4G LTE connectivity is a “hard requirement” for any manufacturer looking to have their phone on Big Red’s network. Of course for now, they will be making a few exceptions for “dumb” phones and phone’s that work on their push-to-talk network.