New
York – Cellphones at the low and high ends are making their debut, including
Motorola’s Photon 4G for Sprint, Boost Mobile’s first flip-style BlackBerry
phone, and a new low-end Huawei smartphone for Leap Wireless.
Verizon
Wireless unveiled the LG-made Cosmos 2, a low-priced messaging phone.
In smartphones, Sprint announced
July 31 availability of its
Motorola Photon 4G and priced it at $199. The device, which
features 1GHz dual-core processor and Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS, is Sprint’s first
4G phone with widespread international roaming capability, thanks to the
inclusion of GSM voice, GPRS/EDGE data, and W-CDMA voice and data technologies
for use in foreign GSM/W-CDMA bands. It’s also the first U.S.-market 3G-CDMA/4G
phone with such international roaming capabilities.
The Photon 4G is Sprint’s seventh
Sprint ID-capable device.
service lets users download a package of apps, widgets, shortcuts, ringtones
and wallpapers tailored to a specific theme or interest. A Professional package,
for example, includes tools to help busy professionals with travel plans,
organization, and communication.
The Photon will be available with
optional $99 HD Station dock to connect it to a large display, USB keyboard and
two other USB devices, turning the Photon into a desktop computing device.
Users can browse the web using a Firefox browser, view smartphone-stored
content such as video, and edit and create Microsoft Office documents. The dock
will also display smartphone video via HDMI on a TV screen.
Motorola is also offering two
other accessories for the Photon. One is a thin full-size Bluetooth keyboard at
$69. The other is a $59 Vehicle Navigation Dock, which positions the Photon in
the car for use as a portable navigation device. The dock also features 3.5mm
audio jack to stream Photon-stored music to a car audio system.
For its part, Sprint prepaid
brand Boost Mobile plans July 20 availability of the
, which is Boost’s first flip-style BlackBerry phone and Boost’s
first BlackBerry with BlackBerry 6 OS. It’s priced at $199 through Boost Mobile-exclusive
stores, select independent wireless dealers, and through
.
The CDMA-network Style 9670
features full QWERTY BlackBerry keyboard, real-time chats with BlackBerry
Messenger, 5-megapixel camera, optical trackpad, GPS and Wi-Fi. Its BlackBerry 6
OS provides faster, richer web browsing, multimedia tools, social feeds and universal
search, among other things.
Another prepaid carrier, Leap
Wireless, also launched a smartphone, but Leap’s Huawei-made Ascend II uses the
Android OS. The Ascend II is the successor to Leap’s first low-cost Android
device, the Huawei Ascend, launched last October for the company’s
Cricket-branded network. The new model at $179 steps up to the Android 2.3 OS, a
600MHz processor, and a 5-megapixel camera. Like its predecessor, the Ascend 2
features 3.5-inch HVGA touch-screen with virtual keyboard and Wi-Fi. It’s
available through Cricket-branded retail stores, select dealers and
.
Meanwhile, Verizon launched the
$29 messaging-focused LG Cosmos 2, which features slide-from-the-side QWERTY
keyboard, a new optional $5/month mobile email app to access POP3/IPAMP4 email
accounts, and access to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. It also comes with
document viewer to view documents in the DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, PDF
and TXT formats.
