LTE 4G Phones are Springing Up Like Weeds Here at CES 2012

January 10, 2012 6:30 AM Text Size: A . A . A On the phone front, 2012 is the year that LTE cements its place as the 4G standard. The Consumer Electronics Show is silly with LTE phones this year. Now that AT&T has finally rolled out enough its LTE 4G network in enough cities (26 so far, but the company is expanding quickly these days) to plausibly market these devices, it announced seven phones and one tablet to take advantage of it. Five of these phones and the tablet will be running on the Android OS, including the positively gargantuan Samsung Galaxy Note, which, despite having a 5.3-inch 1280 x 800 pixel AMOLED screen with handwriting recognition, is not the tablet.

The other two are Windows Phone devices, the most important of which is the Nokia Lumia 900. Nokia embraced Windows Phone as the company's sole operating system platform last year, and the LTE-capable 4.3-inch screen Lumia 900 is the halo device for Nokia in the U.S. It shares a sleek design with the 3G Lumia 800, but has a bigger 1840 mAH battery to give better performance on the power-hungry 4G network. It also sports killer front and back cameras, the back camera has a wide-angle 28mm f/2.2 lens; the front-facing lens is f/2.8. The other Windows Phone, the HTC Titan II, is also boasting some impressive camera stats. The Titan II claims a 16-megapixel sensor, although for the life of us, we can't imagine why that might be necessary in a phone.

The other LTE phones were introduced by Sprint, a company that only three years ago seemed to be betting the farm on WiMax, a competing 4G standard. Now Sprint has changed course, and this year plans to roll out an LTE network. Only four cities have even been announced so far (Atlanta, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston) but that hasn't stopped Sprint from revealing three LTE devices at CES. The company will sell the Samsung Galaxy Nexus (the pure Android phone from Google), the LG Viper, and the Sierra Wireless Tri-Network Hotspot, which reconciles Sprint's many cellular flavors with radios for LTE, WiMax and 3G CDMA.

This most definitely means the eventual death of WiMax, and it will leave T-Mobile as the only network left in America not using the broadband-fast LTE standard. However, if our experience with Verizon's LTE network here at CES is any guide, even the highest-capacity networks can get overwhelmed when you throw enough bandwidth-gulping nerds at them.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/news/lte-4g-phones-are-springing-up-like-weeds-here-at-ces-2012-6636520?src=rss

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