Hasta La Gadget!

It’s official: Sprint’s first WiMax/4G phone is everything we hoped it would be. The HTC Evo combines the “perfect specimen” hardware of the Touch HD2, the Sense-on-Android smoothness of the Legend, and unprecedented download speeds. It’s a beast. UPDATED: Hands on! More »

Your existing iPhone (yeah, even the original) can surf the information superhighway at 4G speeds. Today. Who knew, right? Sprint’s Overdrive — which creates a WiFi hotspot that enables nearby devices to cruise on Clear’s 4G (or 3G, if you’re not in a 4G locale) network — can theoretically enable any WiFi-capable phone to surf on WiMAX, but Sprint’s taking a pretty bold approach by actually touting the feature in a new spot. Befuddled? Hop on past the break and mash play. Too bad this is about as close the iPhone will ever get to Sprint’s shelves…

Continue reading New Sprint ad shows iPhone using WiMAX… via Overdrive

New Sprint ad shows iPhone using WiMAX… via Overdrive originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 21 Mar 2010 03:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There’s hardly anything here that we didn’t already know, but an unveiling date of “next week” sure catches our eye. A new report over at The Wall Street Journal confirms earlier details that were fed to us over Sprint’s first-ever WiMAX smartphone, and now we’re learning that the HTC Supersonic will be officially revealed to the world at CTIA next week. We’ve heard before that the carrier anticipates selling a 4G phone “this summer,” but you can bet we’ll be digging for a hard ship date and price tag when we hit the scene in Las Vegas in just five short days.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

WiMAX-enabled HTC Supersonic rumored to debut on Sprint at CTIA originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The life of a gadget lover tends to involve a lot of waiting, so it’s always nice to be surprised by a roadmap getting shorter rather than longer. Sprint has told Forbes that its very first WiMAX phone will be arriving in the first half of this year, which will be somewhat earlier than many had expected. We’re likely talking about that A9292 “bar handset” from HTC that was spotted in January, as Forbes goes on to note that it’s likely to be a HTC-built Android device. The aptly-titled Supersonic seems like the obvious, albeit unconfirmed, prime candidate here. Further word from Paget Alves, Sprint’s president of Business Markets, indicates that businesses and government agencies might be the first adopters, which must mean whatever handset’s being discussed will be at least somewhat business-friendly. Finally, CEO Dan Hesse himself is cited as saying Sprint will be bringing out “dozens of devices” with embedded WiMAX this year, so even if you don’t like the first one, there should be plenty of options come the holidays.

[Thanks, Douglas]

Sprint promises its first WiMAX handset by this summer, could be the Supersonic originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If consistently pulling down a fistful of megabits per second isn’t causing the hair on the back of your neck to stand on end… well, first, we strongly recommend you get that looked at by a professional. Secondly, though, you might have a bit of a wait before you get another hair-raising boost in throughput, because Clearwire — you know, the company that runs the WiMAX network shared by Clear and Sprint — is looking to take a laid-back approach on the migration to WiMAX Release 2. The underlying standard, 802.16m, looks destined for IEEE approval some time this year with the promise of 120Mbps down and 60Mbps up in an effort to wage 4G war with LTE Advanced, but Clearwire’s CTO is saying that he’s not looking to trial the tech this year — even though Russian carrier Yota is on track to make it happen using Samsung hardware. Instead, 2011 is a “much more likely” target for these guys, apparently, with commercial deployment plausible by ’12. With the updated standard capable of speeds that put even high-end cable and fiber broadband connections to shame, you’ve got to wonder if backhaul isn’t the real concern here — or, even juicier, if they’re not just trying to keep all the options on the table for a little while longer.

Clearwire in no rush to move to next-gen WiMAX Release 2 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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