Hasta La Gadget!

Sprint on Thursday said it would launch its first 4G WiMAX handset before the second half of 2010, according to Forbes. Not much it known about the phone itself, but online reports suggested it may be a new Google Android device designed by HTC.

Sprint’s WiMAX wireless network is currently available in Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Las Vegas, Atlanta, and many Texas and North Carolina cities. The service supposedly can obtain an average of 3-6 megabits/sec speeds, with peaks up to 10 megabits/sec. PCMag analyst Sascha Segan was unable to get speeds this fast during testing, but he did see speeds that were twice the normal 3G speeds.

For more about WiMAX and its rival high-speed wireless network HSPA+, check out PCMag’s full story on testing the two networks.

Apple’s secrecy around their products is famous, paranoiac, and frequently infuriating. Some of it makes sense: they stop leaks to maximize the surprise potential of new product announcements. But some of it doesn’t make as much sense, for instance refusing to release basic details about the capabilities of their existing products.

For instance, take the iPad. The iPad has an “Apple 1Ghz” processor in it, and it’s running iPhone OS 3.2. The iPhone OS, at least up until now, has been written for ARM processors; Samsung makes the one in the iPhone 3GS. So the iPad also has an ARM, right? Right?

ARM executives interviewed today at Mobile World Congress not only wouldn’t confirm that there’s an ARM processor in the iPad, they wouldn’t even confirm that Apple is an ARM licensee, or that Apple acquisition PA Semi was.

The reason the iPad’s processor architecture is important is because it directly impacts performance. Apple quotes it as a “1 Ghz” processor. But 1 Ghz ARM11, Cortex-A8 or Cortex-A9 processors would be very different speeds – and we’re not even talking about the graphics hardware yet.

I guess we’ll just have to wait until the teardown firms get iPads and tear them apart with an electron microscope. Of course, things could be much worse. Unlike the Reuters investigative reporter checking out Apple’s suppliers, I wasn’t actually assaulted by any guards.

The mobile world breathed a quiet sigh of relief Monday when
Intel and Nokia merged their mobile Linux-based OS platforms, turning Maemo and
Moblin into MeeGo. It’s not necessarily because the platform is great – it’s because all of these little, fragmented mobile Linux variants can’t survive on
their own.

At Mobile World Congress today, I asked LiMo executive director Morgan
Gillis if he’d be interested in joining forces with MeeGo. LiMo, or Linux
Mobile, is a mobile middleware platform run by a broad industry association
that’s been spinning out a range of phones recently, mostly in Asia.

In many ways, LiMo and MeeGo would be complimentary. MeeGo
is an X86-based platform focusing on MIDs and tablets; the only MeeGo phone we’ve
seen so far, the LG GW990, is pretty huge. LiMo is a low-footprint ARM-based
platform that scales all the way down to quasi-feature phones. Together, they
would have a solution for a full range of mobile devices.

“That could be very logical and beneficial for the market,”
Gillis said.

But MeeGo’s governance model may prevent LiMo from joining
up with them, Gillis said. MeeGo is basically shepherded by Intel and Nokia,
while LiMo goes for a much more open structure.

“If the governance model is properly open, if the decision
making rules are published and if the decision making outcomes are published,”
LiMo would consider joining forces, Gillis said. The two organizations would
also have to resolve their very different tool chains; MeeGo uses Nokia’s QT,
while LiMo uses GTK.

In any case, platform consolidation is coming to the
smartphone market, Gillis said.

“You have to ask, what is the ideal number of platforms? It’s
certainly no more than five,” he said.

The upcoming Apple iPad will use an unusual kind of SIM card – a “Micro-SIM,” or 3FF (third form factor) SIM, which was designed for tiny devices. The 3FF SIM actually includes the same chip as a regular SIM, just with less plastic around it; I’ve heard that people can actually cut down big SIMs with sharp knives to make 3FF cards, although they risk damaging both their SIM and the SIM slpot if they do so.

At Mobile World Congress today, Gemalto showed off a generic, white-label 3FF SIM – and helpfully put it next to a “real” SIM for reference. The actual iPad SIM will probably have an AT&T logo on it, but this is the first time we’ve seen one of the little chippies in reality.

Apple may hate Adobe Flash, but the rest of the mobile world seems to have come to terms with the ubiquitous Web technology. We recently saw Flash running on a Google Nexus One and a Motorola Droid, and while it won’t run on Windows Phone 7 Series at launch, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said he has nothing against the technology.

Adobe’s booth here at Mobile World Congress is running a bunch of Flash demos, including Flash on a Palm Pre. The implementation runs both video and games, and once the video or game is running, it runs smoothly – but getting there felt sluggish. The Palm presenter blamed it on a very slow Internet connection. But Flash on the Nexus One definitely loaded more quickly and felt snappier. We’re still potentially several months from this Flash implementation going live, but at least they’re coming along.