Sprint Gets its LTE On  

I had an upset stomach earlier today so I skipped tonight’s HTC/Sprint event. I’m only disappointed because this meant I couldn’t grill the Sprint people on their LTE timetable.

Look, I’m glad Dan Hesse and his creepy commercials are finally getting religion and giving up on WiMax, the last thing we needed was another GSM/CDMA 3G debate…the 4G lingo is hard enough to decipher.

From Pete Pachal’s post at Mashable

Sprint so far hasn’t deployed a high-speed LTE network, and it didn’t announce an official launch at this evening’s event. But the frequencies are settled, the chips are ready and the network will begin rollout later this year (first in Texas, Atlanta, and Baltimore). The Evo 4G LTE will be ready for that network when it arrives.

Still, I can’t help but think pre-announcing a phone before you even tell us when you’re rolling out the network is stupid.

I was at CES 2011 when Verizon announced their first LTE phone, the Motorola Droid Bionic…a phone that was supposed to be out by March, then April and then shipped in September. (which meant the first LTE device i got to test was some Samsung phone that had the Droid moniker but sucked)

Pre-announcing a phone that is at least four or five months away from release just to get some ink seems silly. That phone better ship with ICS.

For what it is worth – while I have no need for a 4G LTE handset (battery life isn’t worth it), my 4G LTE iPad is the shit. It’s faster than Cablevision in Brooklyn.