We don’t like to step on the toes of our sister publication Wireless Watch and we know that many readers are fed up with Faultline’s love affair with mobile, but the tablet wars and the gradual shift of entertainment options onto hand held devices makes it of at least passing interest. So when we see one of our predictions from just a couple of weeks ago come true, it’s gratifying, which was that when the iPhone arrives at Verizon, it will not mean a sudden fall in Motorola and HTC US shipments.
At the time we pointed out two things, that Motorola and other handset vendors have contracts to provide LTE devices to Verizon, which will be high cost and high margin, and the iPhone is NOT an LTE phone, and secondly that after almost three years of touting its iPhone exclusive AT&T would have to sign up new phones from these suppliers and feature then in new advertising campaigns, or risk losing all the new customers it has gathered with the iPhone.
Already the HTC Inspire has been lined up for February 13 at AT&T, so as iPhone sales sideline the Droid ranges at Verizon ((both Motorola and HTC make Droids) AT&T pushing similar phones may easily make up the slack.
The HTC Inspire runs Android 2.2 and the AT&T Mobile Hotspot application and is billed as a 4G mobile phone because it works with HSPA+, the final version of HSPA which can go up to 84 Mbps at each radio. In HSPA the bandwidth is shared among all the phones within reach, but even so these speeds are being marketed as 4G by AT&T.
The phone comes with the classic HTC LCD screen, up at 4.3 inches, uses HTC Sense UI and costs just $100 with a two-year agreement ‘ half of what an iPhone costs.
AT&T says it is now committed to lead the industry in Android phones this year and will add 20 of these 4G phones – running either HSPA+ or LTE ‘ and will add the hot new dual core Motorola Atrix into the mix shortly. AT&T says it plans to launch commercial LTE by mid-2011, and will cover between 70 million and 75 million POPs by year-end.