I popped over to the Sprint.com site and had a look.

I’m a customer, dontcha know?

Not a very good one, because I’m sat in the UK at the moment — but Sprint, controversially, is my network of choice whilst I’m in San Francisco. Despite the utterly shite reputation that the company seems to enjoy from the locals, I actually found the service pretty good.

Although I don’t generally like CDMA.

Anyway.

Frontpage of Sprint.com… here’s what it says:

Nice.

Click in and you get this:

Yup.

I bet Alfie from Moblog is wetting himself by now. He’s been sending love notes to the Palm Pre on his twitter for weeks.

You can read the tech specs online — there’s a little ‘tech specs’ link.

And of course it’s all flash. So I can’t link you direct. Tsch. Marketing people, eh?

The key specs for me were the on-device memory and the camera. Both OK.

I’m not blown away.

But I’ll be really interested to see just how the webOS actually functions in the hand.

The rest of the specs look pretty nifty. Nice screen, Microsoft Direct Push/Sync. It DOES do MMS. 3 megapixel camera has an LED flash. 3.5mm headphone jack. Good man!

MPEG-4 H.263 video; MP3 and whatnot. WiFi b/g.

Cool.

Cool.

Let’s see how they perform.

The direct Sprint link is here.

A “credible source” tells WebOS Arena, that Best Buy would be hosting a 60 days exclusive deal for retailing the Palm Pre. The Pre, which will be launched on Sprint’s network in the US would be the second phone to be available exclusively at Best Buy, following the Samsung Instinct which was touted to be highly anticipated and better than the iPhone.

Of course, as it is with the tons of rumors floating out there, there’s a huge cloud of uncertainty surrounding this one too.

[Via PhoneArena]

Phew.

It was looking like a totally wasted purchase. But they haven’t locked it, it seems.

That’ll do nicely.

Here’s the announcement:

Blue Systems, a London-based provider of global financial information software, today announced that it has entered an agreement with Sprint, one of North America’s premier mobile carriers, to offer its real-time financial market data application, blue mobile™, to Sprint’s customers.

blue mobileâ„¢ provides professional and retail investors with the fastest, smartest way to analyze global stock market information in their offices, at home, or on the move, 24/7. The application runs on the latest Web-enabled phones and requires a data tariff. Sprint, with its high speed network, is perfectly positioned to offer blue mobileâ„¢ to its customers and is the first US mobile operator to certify the application.

Congratulations to Sulim and all at Blue Systems. Next stop, the world!

Sprint has really been struggling all round for some time and a sale of a network that was superceded in both technology and popularity terms a while back makes a lot of sense – the only question is who would buy it? The same reasons that Sprint would want to get rid of the iDen network are reasons why it would be hard to find a potential buyer.

In a recent filing, Sprint said it wants will consider “”improving operations, making additional investments, entering into strategic partnerships and considering potential divestitures” when it comes to iDen. I suspect Sprint would rather favour the latter two options.

Sprint said that it’s now finished commercial testing of its Xohm network, alongside buddy Samsung, and the WiMax network is now meeting all the necessary criteria on “overall performance, handoff performance and handoff delay” after trials in Washington DC and Baltimore, as well as in Sprint’s labs. The two cities will be the first to get to try the service commercially later this year, according to the operator.

It’s now starting to look like Sprint really is going to bring a WiMax network to the US (it was looking shaky there for a while, especially after the departure of former CEO Gary Forsee) but the fuzziness around the timing of the launch – “later this year” – still hints that there could be some quirks to be ironed out yet.

They’ve got some powerful friends on board too: Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks have agreed to finance the new company to the tune of $3.2 billion. Sprint will remain the biggest shareholder in the company with 51 percent.

After all the trouble with its Xohm WiMax network Sprint has been having lately, a lot of people had predicted a swift death for the technology. Not so. It seems Google and Intel, both of whom have a lot of clout and a vested interested in seeing the technology succeed, are determined to keep the network going. Hopefully this is the shot in the arm mobile WiMax needs.

It’s a fascinating rumour but I’m not entirely convinced that this isn’t just an idle ‘what if?’ scenario from some Deutsche Telekom exec. Granted, for anyone considering an acquisition of Sprint, it’s a great time – the company’s been struggling of late, its share price is down and it could be snapped up for a bit of a bargain price. It would mean a big step up for T-Mobile in the US, catapulting it into the top tier of operators.

But the major reason to say no to such a deal? The tech. T-Mobile uses GSM, while Sprint Nextel uses CDMA and is trying to get a WiMax network up and running at the same time. The integration problems don’t put any acquisition in a favourable light.

MySpace users will get all the usual goodies – including being able to edit MySpace profiles, view and add friends, post blogs and bulletins and send and receive MySpace messages – by clicking through from Sprint’s web portal on their mobiles. It’s worth noting it’s only free to Sprint’s data subscribers though.

MySpace has been signing with all manner of operators as it faces tough competition from the likes of Facebook. It doesn’t seem to be doing too badly though – it’s had one million visitors a day to its MySpace mobile site even though it’s still been in beta til now.

According to the carrier, Sprint customers will be able to “get faster, more user-friendly renderings of internet sites, even those not optimized for the mobile device” regardless of the spec of their phone. Even better – taking advantage of the system won’t necessitate any action on the user’s behalf. Phew.

It’s good to see more operators looking at the non-iPhone owning public as a source of mobile data consumption and trying to make their web experience a bit better. Of course, the other way to do that would be better interfaces and better designed devices, but smarter browsing is a start.

In short, users will be able to get an average downlink of up to 1.4Mbps – almost double what plain old EV-DO was able to deliver, while the average uplink will go from 50 to 70 Kbps to 350 to 500 Kbps.

However, users will still have to have the right postcode to take advantage of Rev A. According to the operator, the Sprint Mobile Broadband Network covers more than 234 million people across the US, 13,453 cities and 1,321 airports, with the vast majority upgraded to EV-DO Rev A.

As a compulsive user of mobile data, this is great news. Let’s hope of flood of similarly speedy software upgrades follows very soon for all the other devices out there.

The first rumour comes from suggestions by analysts that T-Mobile parent Deutsche Telekom might be interesting in buying Sprint to stave off pressuring resulting from the US price cutting frenzy. It doesn’t sound an altogether likely scenario to me. There’s the question of all the incompatible technologies – T-Mobile’s GSM, and Sprint’s CDMA and WiMax. Granted, T-Mobile would get some more customers, but Sprint it losing those at a rate of knots and would land itself in a technological and regulatory minefield.

The other rumour, courtesy of Seeking Alpha is that Sprint has hired Morgan Stanley with a view to spinning off Nextel, with an announcement due shortly. While this would seem equally daft at first glance – Sprint would lose all the investment it put into Nextel not long after acquiring it – there could be some sense here. After the massive writedown Nextel generated in the last set of Sprint’s results, why not admit it didn’t work out, give up trying to merge the two companies and their networks and just focus on CDMA and WiMax?