Some of us are still waiting for Sprint’s “any day now” Galaxy Nexus. The current Google reference phone is more than a neat bit of hardware — it represents Sprint’s first shift from a high-speed WiMax network to one based on LTE. While Wimax continues to work for those who picked up earlier 4G Sprint phones, the deployment of LTE makes us wonder what handset is coming next?
I was assuming the second LTE handset would be revealed today at the joint Sprint-HTC event (with Techcitement in attendance). While I still look forward to that, phone manufacturer LG has now beaten them to the punch. The Viper 4G will be available for pre-sale on April 12th for a mere $99 after a $50 mail-in-rebate and has 50 GB of storage from Box included. That’s a great price for a phone with a dual-core processor and NFC chip.
The Fast and the Eventual
What it doesn’t have is Android 4.0. Instead it’s running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). I give bonus points to LG for leaving the phone free of any annoying skins, but the lack of Google’s latest mobile OS is slightly frustrating. Even more frustrating is the fact that there’s no release date. Like the aforementioned Galaxy Nexus, the release date for the Viper is a mysterious “soon.” Sprint claims that it”ll lay that information on us at the end of the month. If the new HTC device gets the same kind of nebulous release date, we may have to make a “coming soon” drinking game.
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