Verizon’s BlackBerry Curve 8530 isn’t quite on sale yet – you’ll have to wait until November 20th for that – but Sprint would like you to know that they’ll also be offering the QWERTY smartphone. The Sprint BlackBerry Curve 8530 gets the same WiFi, GPS, 2-megapixel camera and EVDO Rev.A connectivity, which means the only thing really lacking right now is a price and a release date.
With the holidays fast approaching cell phone carriers are stocking up on inventory and amongst the new Motorola DROIDs, HTC Heroes, and Palm Pixies are a slightly larger, yet unfamiliar crop of devices – netbooks. AT&T is all giddy about its exclusive availability of the Nokia Booklet 3G and Sprint announced just yesterday that it will be selling the Dell Inspiron Mini 10V. Verizon already has three netbooks in its arsenal, including HP’s new powerful Mini 311. Clearly, lining up the selection isn’t a problem, but what the carriers haven’t figured out yet is that selling netbooks requires a totally different approach than selling phones. The deals and the subsidized model, in my mind, make as much sense for netbooks as building and then plowing a virtual Farmville farm!
Sprint have announced their first EVDO-enabled netbook, though they don’t quite seem to have figured out the magic tipping point that really pulls in the customers. The carrier is offering a Dell Inspiron Mini 10 with integrated EVDO Rev.A, but rather than do the sensible thing and hack great chunks off the up-front price (while knowing you’ll make it back with the mandatory two-year agreement) their netbook is in fact $199.99, and that’s after the rebate.
Samsung caught our Android attention with their Galaxy, a slender smartphone with a gorgeous AMOLED touchscreen, and now they’re back with the keyboard-toting follow-up. The Samsung Moment on Sprint is a phone with a few firsts of its own – the first QWERTY Android device to offer an AMOLED display, the first to have an 800MHz processor – but it seems the company stopped their innovation before reaching the software: unlike other Android handsets we’re seeing, there’s no reworked UI and no expansive social network integration. Can a well-turned spec sheet make up for it? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
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One of the things that many users of 3G enabled smartphones buy their devices for is so they can use them as modems for their notebooks and netbooks for Internet access on the go. Most mobile phone providers frown on this and some like AT&T outright block the capability for high-end devices like the iPhone.
Sprint and Palm have announced launch details for the second webOS smartphone, the Palm Pixi. The candybar handset – which we played with back in September – will arrive on the CDMA network in the US come November 15th, priced from $99.99 after $150-worth of instant and mail-in rebates, and presuming a new, two-year agreement.
MiFi 2200 owners in the US have a treat in store, with a new firmware update available seemingly for both the Verizon and Sprint versions of the intelligent mobile hotspot. The new firmware addresses WiFi compatibility issues with the Nintendo DS and BlackBerry Curve, as well as – for the Sprint MiFi 2200 at least – enabling “international roaming”. However don’t get too excited; that doesn’t mean Novatel have suddenly unlocked GSM support in the hitherto CDMA-only hotspot.
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Sprint continues its acquisitions process, with the latest to be gobbled up being affiliate iPCS. Currently sold as Sprint service in the carrier's own stores, Sprint envisage the transition process to be pretty much seamless; even better, the $831m acquisition will see the end of ongoing litigation between them and iPCS, and Sprint will no longer be required to divest its iDEN network in certain iPCS territories.
Sprint has announced a new handset supporting push to talk on its nationwide mobile network. The handset is called the Motorola Debut i856. You might recognize the name of that handset, Boost Mobile added it to its lineup back in September. The Debit is the first handset for Sprint to offer a slider form factor and PTT service.
Last week rumors and scuttlebutt started popping up that perennial fourth place wireless provider T-Mobile had a new trick up its sleeve that would shoot it into third place passing Sprint. Exactly what the cryptic Project Black (or Project Dark as it’s also known) was and still is unknown.
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