Verizon long ago finished building out its network in the major metro markets, so its expansion is now making its way to smaller bergs. The new markets are:

Selma, Ala.; Flagstaff, Prescott and Yuma, Ariz.; Eureka, Calif.; Burlington, Marshalltown, Mason City and Oskaloosa, Iowa; Ashland, Ky.; Bangor and Lewiston/Auburn, Maine; Menominee and Petoskey, Mich.; McComb/Brookhaven, Miss.; Cape Girardeau, Mo.; Hastings and McCook, Neb.; Farmington, Gallup and Roswell, N.M.; Portsmouth, Ohio; Muskogee, Okla.; Klamath Falls and Roseburg, Ore.; Sumter, S.C.; Tri Cities and Port Angeles, Wash.; and Clarksburg, W.Va.

Verizon also said it has expanded its LTE footprint in 36 existing markets from Los Angeles to Cleveland. In total, its 4G service was available in 440 markets, and at its last official count in October the network touched more than 250 million people. Verizon’s end of year of year goal is 260 million people covered, so its either pretty close to its target or has already reached it.

AT&T added LTE coverage in Green Bay, Wis.; Springfield, Mass.; Tucson, Ariz.; Melbourne, Fla.; and Oxford, Miss.; and it expanded its current 4G footprint in Los Angeles, Phoenix, New York and Salt Lake City. Its network is now in 125 markets, so it’s already well past its goal of 100 markets in 2012. In addition Ma Bell also expanded its Wi-Fi data network in Chicago, adding shopping mecca Michigan Avenue to its growing number of outdoor Wi-Fi hotzones.

Sprint launched announced two major launches earlier this week: Chicago and Indianapolis. Sprint had already seeded Chicago’s suburbs with 4G towers, but on Wednesday the city proper went live. In addition, it turned on networks in Santa Rosa/Petaluma and Vallejo/Fairfield, Calif.; in southern Puerto Rico; York/Hanover, and Franklin County, Pa.

Sprint’s LTE network is now in 49 markets, so it’s well behind its two larger competitors. But Sprint says work is going on in hundreds of cities and in the coming months it will triple the number of cities and towns where LTE is available.

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Verizon also said it would expand its existing coverage on Thursday in 38 other market, and though it didn’t reveal an exact number of POPs covered, the U.S. Census pegs the current population at 314 million, meaning Verizon has placed at least 235 million people under its 4G umbrella. The carrier’s year-end target is 260 million POPs covered.

Verizon remains well ahead of the competition. AT&T has launched LTE in 51 markets. By its last official count AT&T was covering 74 million people, though it’s launched in several new cities since and plans to double its coverage by year-end. Sprint just rolled out its first five LTE regional clusters in July and plans to add a sixth city, Baltimore, by the end of August. It expects to have a 123 million people covered by the end of the year. T-Mobile won’t launch until 2013.

The new Verizon markets are: Hot Springs, Ark.; Redding, Calif.; Valdosta and Waycross, Ga.; Centralia and Danville, Ill.; Parsons, Salina and Topeka, Kan.; Alexandria and Monroe, La.; Pittsfield, Mass.; Battle Creek and Muskegon, Mich.; Mankato and Worthington, Minn.; Joplin and Sedalia, Mo.; Bismarck, Grand Forks and Minot, N.D.; Chillicothe, Ohio; Reading, Pa.; Aberdeen, S.D.; Laredo, Odessa and Texarkana, Texas; Brattleboro and White River Junction, Vt.; Charlottesville, Va.; Longview, Wash.; and Eau Claire, La Crosse and Manitowoc, Wis.

The markets in which Verizon has expanded its 4G coverage are: Los Angeles and Santa Barbara/Santa Maria, Calif.; Orlando, Fla.; Macon/Warner Robins, Ga.; Bloomington, Champaign/Urbana, Decatur/Effingham and Springfield, Ill.; Elkhart, Ind.; Des Moines, Iowa City and Sioux City, Iowa; Dodge City, Garden City and Great Bend, Kan.; Lexington and Louisville, Ky.; New Orleans; Boston; Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minn.; Missoula, Mont.; Las Vegas; Manchester/Nashua, N.H.; Las Cruces, N.M.; New York City; Cincinnati; Greenville/Spartanburg, S.C.; Sioux Falls, S.D.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; and Salt Lake City/Ogden, Utah; Roanoke, Va.; Charleston, W.Va.; and Green Bay, Wis.  Additional areas include: Little Rock, Ark., expanding into Batesville, Ark.; Tallahassee, Fla., expanding into Thomasville, Ga.; Burley, Idaho, expanding into Twin Falls, Idaho; Chicago, expanding into DeKalb, Ill.; and Cedar City, Utah, expanding into St. George, Utah.

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Verizon is targeting smaller markets and closing the remaining gaps in its already existing metro footprint, bringing LTE service to regions so far overlooked by mobile broadband and providing more consistent and persistent data connections to areas that already have access to it. According to Verizon spokesman Tom Pica, Verizon is adding more LTE cell sites in big and small cities, expanding its existing metro footprints to incorporate outlying suburbs and exurbs and adding coverage along highways between nearby cities and towns. In some cases, it’s filling in gaps between cities entirely, creating dense clusters of 4G coverage, particularly along the Eastern seaboard.

Those efforts have already begun to show in its recent network speed tests. In an analysis for GigaOM, mobile testing firm RootMetrics found that while AT&T’s LTE network has begun to surpass Verizon’s in overall average connection speeds, Big Red’s NETWORK is providing far more reliable access to LTE than AT&T in 15 cities surveyed.

With the 27 new markets, Verizon will have LTE in 230 metro areas and towns, Those, coupled with its recent upgrades in 44 existing cities, will officially put it over the two-thirds population coverage mark. Verizon doesn’t plan to stop there, though. By the end of the year, it plans to have 4G whirring away in 400 markets, covering a total population of 260 million.

The markets launching Thursday are: Auburn and Tuscaloosa, Ala.; Pine Bluff, Siloam Springs and Van Buren, Ark.; Visalia/Porterville, Calif.; Fort Walton Beach and Ocala, Fla.; Brunswick, LaGrange and Macon/Warner Robins, Ga.; Peoria, Ill.; Kokomo/Logansport and Marion, Ind.; Dodge City, Garden City, Great Bend and Hays, Kan.; Salisbury, Md.; Cattaraugus/Allegany, N.Y.; Sandusky, Ohio; Ardmore and Ponca City, Okla.; Salem/Albany/Corvallis, Ore.; Pierre, S.D.; and Big Springs and Tyler, Texas.

The markets receiving expanded LTE coverage are: Phoenix and Tucson, Ariz.; Bakersfield, Fresno, Modesto, Sacramento, Salinas/Monterey, San Diego, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo and Stockton, Calif.; Colorado Springs and Fort Collins/Loveland, Colo.; Sarasota/Bradenton, Fla.; Boise/Nampa, Idaho; Carbondale/Marion and Rockford, Ill.; Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, Ind.; Des Moines, Iowa; Boston and Worcester, Mass.; Detroit, Mich.; St. Louis, Mo.; Las Vegas and Reno, Nev.; Manchester/Nashua, N.H.; Albuquerque and Santa Fe, N.M.; Buffalo/Niagara Falls and New York, N.Y.; Akron, Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio; Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Okla.; Portland, Ore.; Providence/Pawtucket, R.I.; Nashville, Tenn.; El Paso, Texas; Provo/Orem and Salt Lake City/Ogden, Utah; and Olympia/Centralia and Spokane, Wash.

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Magma’s three-slot expansion chassis for Thunderbolt, the ExpressBox 3T announced by the company on Wednesday, is a perfect example of how Intel’s high-speed I/O port, which ships on nearly all new Macs, could bring back a greater range of customization options for owners of Apple computers. The accessory will allow you to use any PCIe 2.0 cards with Thunderbolt-equipped Macs, including video capture devices, media transcoding tools and high-speed data storage.

The ExpressBox 3T can be daisy-chained with up to six Thunderbolt devices, including the new 27-inch Cinema Display that Apple just recently began shipping to stores. It also could mean that PCIe graphics cards will let less powerful machines like the MacBook Air keep up with higher end devices for gaming and video editing applications.

It’s another step along the path of Thunderbolt allowing Mac notebooks to become powerful workstations through single-cable plug-in solutions, something which can’t come fast enough in my opinion. Portable computers already account for the bulk of PC sales, and if tech like Thunderbolt can ensure that we can have portability without sacrificing power, storage or speed when settling in to performing demanding tasks, we should be able to move closer still to Jobs’ Post-PC era.

Magma hasn’t announced pricing or availability info for the ExpressBox 3T yet, but the company will be showing off the device, and possibly releasing more information at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, which runs Sept. 13 – 15. Sonnet, which makes the upcoming ExpressCard/34 Thunderbolt adapter, has also announced PCIe expansion chassis products, but no details about its release timeline have yet been unveiled. Let’s hope they all hurry up and get here so we can see what Thunderbolt is really capable of.

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PowerBook Duo: A hint of things to come?

PC Mag’s Sascha Segan posed an intriguing question the other day: “If you put a smartphone in a dock, it could replace a netbook. So why hasn’t anyone succeeded at doing that?”

Good question.

Now that I’ve been thinking about it, the idea of a dock into which you could pop an iPhone or an iPod touch, thereby quickly connecting it to a decent-sized external display, keyboard and mouse, some USB ports, Ethernet, and maybe an SD Card slot, you would have, if not best of both worlds, at least an attractive hybrid.

A dockable smartphone/Internet computer would no doubt cost more than a PC netbook, but it could also be much more versatile, and arguably a better overall value.

Indeed, external input device support over Bluetooth alone would make handhelds much more appealing to me. As Segan observes, with “65,000 apps for the iPhone alone, it’s hard to believe that there aren’t thousands of people who would want to use those apps with a nice big keyboard and screen.”

Of course, to make a docked iPhone or iPod touch truly competitive with the netbook segment, it would require driver tweaking and some re-engineering to support the necessary hardware inputs and outputs. There’s also the issue of what Segan refers to as “the OS problem,” specifically: The iPhone OS as presently configured is not really up to the job of supporting the kind of robust productivity apps that can run on a netbook under Linux, Windows, or OS X.

I’ve long been a fan and admirer of the Apple PowerBook Duo concept from the early to mid ’90s. It combined a subcompact laptop module that could be used as a freestanding notebook, and a Duo Dock with a full-size CRT monitor, a full set contemporary of I/O ports, and internal expansion slots for desktop power with few compromises.

Toward the end of the ’90s, laptop computers became powerful, versatile, and gained improved connectivity and display options. Many of the the Duo’s advantages were negated, but it seems to me quite logical that the PowerBook Duo concept could be successfully updated, using a handheld instead as its “core module.”

Indeed, it’s so logical that it seems a wonder no one has yet acted on the idea. Segan thinks the reason is that Apple and the wireless carriers don’t want it to happen. Presently, folks who have both a smartphone and a netbook need two wireless service subscriptions, whereas our proposed dockable handheld hybrid device would theoretically only require one. As for keyboard-supporting iPhones, he thinks that won’t happen because Apple doesn’t want to erode MacBook sales.

All that sounds a bit conspiratorial, but also lamentably plausible. Even so, look at the issue from the angle of a similar new product category. While Microsoft has a complicated relationship with the netbook phenomenon, and Apple is downright contemptuous, consumers voted with their wallets and made the netbook the hottest-selling category in computers. Now that the dam has burst as it were, Microsoft is playing ball with the netbook-optimized edition of Windows 7.

I think platform convergence and rationalization between the smartphone and netbook spaces could likewise catch the consumer imagination and take on a life of its own. It seems just too good an idea to be able to keep suppressed indefinitely.

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