New York – Sprint
and Motorola came to a sweltering city to announce that their relationship is
heating up to embrace Sprint’s first Motorola-made 4G smartphone and the first
Motorola phone for Sprint’s Virgin Mobile prepaid brand.
Both phones are
due sometime this summer at an unannounced price as part of a closer
relationship that will give birth to more than 10 Motorola products by year’s
end for Sprint and its Boost and Virgin Mobile prepaid brands. Some of the
products have already been announced, including the 3G Android-based XPRT and
the Wi-Fi-only Xoom tablet.
The 3G/4G phone,
dubbed the Motorola Photon 4G, is Sprint’s first 4G phone with widespread
international roaming capability, thanks to the inclusion of GSM technology. It’s
also the first U.S.-market 3G-CDMA/4G phone with such international roaming
capabilities. For Sprint, its also the carrier’s fifth 4G phone available or
announced to date.
The Android phone,
available exclusively to Virgin, is the Motorola Triumph, which will be
Virgin’s third Android phone.
The Photon, like
Motorola’s Atrix 4G for Verizon, will come with optional HD Multimedia Dock
that connects the phone via Bluetooth to a larger display, keyboard and mouse
to browse the web, view smartphone-stored content, and edit and create Microsoft
Office documents. The dock will also display smartphone video via HDMI on a TV
screen. Later on, the carrier plans to launch a laptop-like dock into which a
docked Photon will act as the device’s engine, said Sprint product chief Fareb
Adib.
The Photon features
1GHz dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, 4.3-inch qHD display, kickstand,
Android 2.3 OS, enterprise-grade security, 3G/4G mobile hot spot capability for
up to eight Wi-Fi devices, MS Exchange ActiveSync and personal email access,
8-megapixel camera/camcorder with 720p HD video capture, 1080p output, VGA
front-facing camera for video chats, 16GB of embedded memory, MircoSD card
slot, Bluetooth 2.1 and Wi-Fi b/g/n. It also features Sprint ID service, which
lets users customize apps, widgets ringtones and other features with one
download.
For Virgin Mobile customers, the 3G Motorola
Triumph features 1.9GHz CDMA 1x EV-DO Rev. A 3G technology, 4.1-inch WVGA
screen, Android 2.2 OS, 1GHz processor, 720p HD video capture, HDMI output,
slim 0.4-inch depth, 512MB embedded memory, Wi-Fi b/g/n, 5-megapixel
rear-facing camera and front-facing VGA camera for video chats.
The Triumph will
be the first phone preloaded with Virgin Mobile Live 2.0 app to access Virgin’s
free music stream, which is hosted by DJ Abbey Braden and includes live music
performances on video.
In other
announcements, Adib noted that more than half of the carrier’s sales are
smartphones and that more than 70 percent of those are Android smartphones.
