Sprint Takes Another Page From Nintendo With 3D Devices
posted Saturday Mar 26, 2011 by Scott Ertz
Since International CES 2011 is over, I bet you didn't think you were going to have to hear about 3D again until next year (except Sunday's launch of the Nintendo 3DS). You were wrong! Sprint announced at CTIA Wireless in Orlando two new devices - a 3D smartphone, named the HTC Evo 3D, and a 7" tablet, the HTC Evo View 4G.
Both devices will offer a Nintendo-style glasses free 3D experience running on surprisingly different hardware. Clearly eating lunch off of HTC's Evo name, which CEO Dan Hesse says is Sprint's most successful smartphone to date, they hope to have better success with these devices than they did with the Evo Shift, which was a downgrade to the original.
Both devices will run on Sprint and Clearwire's joint 4G WiMax network, the first and only WiMax network in the US, bringing the 4G lineup to 22 devices for Sprint Nextel. Dan took a swipe at AT&T and T-Mobile's rebranding of their 3G+ networks as 4G by calling his network, "4G and not faux G." No wonder they keep putting him in front of cameras and crowds.
To get the details on the devices and to see a video of the Evo View 4G, hit the break.
The cleverly named Evo 3D will pack a powerful 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor and be loaded with Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). You will be able to take advantage of 3D content on the screen without the need for silly glasses, but if you want your content to be bigger or feel the need to look like a moron, you can connect it to a 3D-capable television via HDMI and watch your content on the big screen.
The Evo View 4G will be a larger device, therefore designed for larger tasks, so it will naturally come with a smaller 1.5GHz processor and be running the same version of Android - the one not designed for tablets. Luckily, Sprint and HTC know that is a mistake and will be upgrading it to 3.0 (Honeycomb) as soon as possible. I wouldn't be surprised if it ended up launching with 3.0.
The tablet has dual cameras - 1.3MP front-facing and 5.0MP rear-facing (a downgrade from the Evo 4G phone). It will also ship with a Scribe digital pen used for handwriting recognition and on-screen scribblings. There is a pretty cool feature that the pen adds to eBooks - the ability to highlight and write directly into the books. This also bookmarks those spots for future ease-of-finding. Words can't quite describe it, so let's go to the tape.
So, what do you think? Is this cool technology or is Sprint becoming the cellular Nintendo? Let us know in the comments section below.