The Register®

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/17/sprint_wimax_htc_supersonic/

First WiMAX phone to debut next week?

Sprint to punt HTC Supersonic

By Rik Myslewski in San Francisco

Posted in Networks, 17th March 2010 21:24 GMT

Watch Now : Virtual Machine Movement with Hyper-V

The first WiMAX-capable smartphone is said to be slated for introduction next week by Sprint Nextel.

The phone will be the widely rumored HTC Supersonic [1], according to a report [2] in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal citing the ever-loquacious "people familiar with the matter".

The introductory honors will be borne by Sprint Nextel chief executive Dan Hesse at next week's CTIA Wireless [3] show in Las Vegas, Nevada, perhaps in a presentation during the The Path to 4G [4] all-day session on Tuesday. Hesse is also expected to pump the Supersonic during his keynote presentation [5] on Wednesday.

As The Reg has repeatedly reported [6], the race to 4G between WiMAX and LTE continues to accelerate. WiMAX may have a head start - Sprint partner Clearwire is busily building out its WiMAX network, with the goal of covering 120 million potential customers [7] by the end of this year - but LTE is rapidly gaining support from such mobile-service heavyweights as AT&T, Verizon, Orange, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, and others.

Sprint is betting heavily on Clearwire. Witness not only its $7.4bn stake in a $14.5bn Clearwire joint venture in May of 2008, but also the additional $1.18bn it pumped into the company last November [8].

It can be argued that the introduction of the HTC Supersonic now - it had originally been rumored to appear later this year - is an effort to entice customers hungry for high-speed mobile broadband to sign long-term contracts before the LTE tsumani swamps the market late this year and into 2011.

If so, the Supersonic appears to be a good phone upon which to bet the farm - at least if leaked details turn out to be correct. The smartphone is reported to have a 4.3-inch 480x800 display, a 1GHz Snapdragon processor running the HTC Sense UI on top of Android 2.1, and to be equipped with such now-standard smartphone niceties as a touch interface, compass, accelerometer, Bluetooth, five-megapixel camera, and GPS.

We'll find out more next week - that is, if those "people familiar with the matter" prove to be correct. ®