The Scoop on Sprint's Announcements

Sprint has made several announcements today at the CTIA event about what they are planning on releasing in the year of 2010 and everyone can safely agree that the company has been trying to advance in the field of wireless technology quite aggressively. Keep reading for some of the announcements made earlier today.

Moving ahead with the ambitious plan of bringing WiMax to 120 Americns by the end of the year, Sprint added seven new cities to their original list. The new list of cities along with the ones previously announced that Sprint has mentioned coverage for include:

• Boston
• Cincinnati
• Cleveland
• Denver
• Houston
• Kansas City
• Los Angeles
• Miami
• Minneapolis
• New York
• Pittsburgh
• Salt Lake City
• San Francisco
• St. Louis
• Washington D.C

Unlike the "concepts" and "lab tests" from other wireless companies, Sprint is the first national wireless carrier to actually test, launch, and market 4G technology for its customers. The strength of Sprint's 4G lies in its all-IP backbone, common architecture, and 4G spectrum depth, which gives the company considerable flexibility to ensure that customers have a top mobile experience and the most advanced 4G series available well into the future.

Following up with yesterday's alert that Sprint customers had received about a "groundbreaking new device," which was rumored to be the HTC Supersonic phone, everyone guessed right. Sprint announced the HTC Evo (which is the Supersonic's official name) today, the first ever WiMax / 4G phone. The Evo comes packed with the much-loved 4.3-inch screen (480x800 TFT LCD), a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, a sleek Android 2.1 OS, and a stepped up camera which is now 8MP (as opposed to the rumored 5MP) as well as a front-facing 1.3MP camera capable of HD video recording. The emphasis on video is clear as the Evo comes packed with an HDMI out and a kickstand for full enjoyment of the 720p video of which it's capable. The phone also comes with 1GB of built-in storage, along with 512MB of RAM.

The demo that Sprint showed the audience was one which included video playback and Google Goggles, both of which showed impressive download speeds. The phone also seemed to run Flash seamlessly, a mandatory point these days to differentiate from the Apple mobile products which don't support Flash and won't be. The HTC Evo was also announced to work as a hotspot for up to eight devices. No word on the pricing for the hotspot feature, but it's pretty remarkable that you can run 4G speed internet from one phone that broadly. In another demo, the phone enabled the streaming of a scene from Transformers 2 through a Roku. Sprint was also happy to point out that it will work on an iPhone or Droid. The phone was mentioned to be released this upcoming summer, no word on pricing but we'd assume it'll set you back a hefty amount.

The announcements today were all historic moments for Sprint. First and foremost, the Evo will bet he first 4G phone in the United States (while still being capable of a 3G signal). While the WiMax feature only reaches 34 million people as of right now, Sprint's partner Clearwire, hopes to expand coverage to up to 120 million people by the end of the year (as mentioned earlier in this article) and those that are covered can expect download speeds far beyond the accustomed speeds of the 3G. The announcement of the Evo, in combination with the recent addition of the Nexus One to their network also puts Sprint in an unusual position of hardware leadership. In just a few weeks, they have gone from a middling smartphone line-up to arguably the two best Android phones on the market. Time for Android fans to rejoice along with the good news of Android app's gaining popularity.

SlashGear has an excellent hands-on video which you can find below:

Share your thought's and opinion's on Sprint's new announcements with us in the comments below.