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Sprint and Google's Other Deal Revs Phone Speed

Posted on: Friday, 9 May 2008, 09:00 CDT

A closer working relationship between Sprint and Google was overlooked amid Wednesday's hoopla surrounding the $14.5 billion partnership to promote the high-octane WiMax wireless technology.

In a separate agreement announced later Wednesday, Google and Sprint plan to integrate maps, GPS-enabled local searches, YouTube and other Google products more deeply into Sprint phones. But that's not too newsy, since you already can get much of that stuff today.

So here's how I'm reading between the lines:

Starting as soon as this summer but no later than early fall, Sprint will be the first U.S. home to an emerging crop of Google's Android-based phones.

Android is the open-platform operating system Google announced last year with its own consortium of partners, called the Open Handset Alliance. A founding member of the alliance is Sprint.

Not in the alliance: the nation's top two wireless carriers, AT&T and Verizon. T-Mobile is in the alliance, but it is just beginning to roll out a faster network.

That network is not WiMax, however. So here's where it gets really interesting for Chicago, among the first markets to get a taste of WiMax: mobile phones with the ability to go online at speeds that rival a home's cable modem connection.

Handsetmakers in the alliance include HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung. All of them, even Motorola, have a type of touch-screen phone on the market, and more are coming.

The second half of this year already promised to be interesting in the mobile phone space thanks to the software flexibility Google is pushing. Now with Google's investment in speed, it just got more interesting.

Source: Chicago Tribune

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