Sprint, the network that prides on its long line of firsts in the mobile industry, held a press event in NYC today showing off their latest handsets. What’s special about this particular event is that it marks a re-kindling of a dormant relationship between Motorola and Sprint. While Sprint isn’t the industry first this time, they are winding up to deliver their first NVIDIA powered Tegra 2 handset with Motorola. This afternoon, Sprint is announcing the Motorola Photon 4G!
On a network that has been dominated by the HTC Evo 4G–and with all of the commotion that has surrounded the sequel, the Evo 3D– Motorola has some pretty severe competition on Sprint. Fortunately, the Photon 4G is no slouch. This 4.3″ monster is packing a 540 x 960 resolution quarter High Definition (qHD) display to show off the power generated by the NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor and 1GB of RAM. It’s also bringing to the table a few things the EVO 3D seems to have lost along the way, like a kickstand and an 8MP camera. Throw in a Front Facing Camera, 16GB onboard with a microSD slot hungry for 32 more and polish it off with Android 2.3, and you’ve got a really impressive piece of hardware that is sure to serve as a proper competitor for the EVO 3D come launch day (sometime this summer).
Since it’s a shiny new Motorola device with a striking resemblance to its AT&T brother, the Atrix, it stands to reason that you’ll be able to snatch up such goodies as the Multimedia Dock and the Laptop Dock, both of which will allow you to turn your phone into the Motorola Webtop. With the Webtop, you are given the “proper operating system” look and feel with a legit version of Mozilla Firefox for Ubuntu to surf the web on, essentially making your Photon a fantastic smartphone and a chromebook in a single device.
Naturally, pricing isn’t yet available, but given Sprint’s recent activities, I’m sure you can expect the Photon to live right around the $200 range, with pricing on the docks to be comparable to what is already on the market. With Sprint regaining Motorola as a partner, I have a feeling Sprint customers all over have been given a front row seat to one of the hardest decisions of the summer – Motorola Photon or HTC EVO 3D?
