Sprint held a special event for journalists and analysts alike at the
TAO nightclub in the Venetian Hotel Tuesday night. The main event? The
carrier's brand new LTE Android smartphones. I managed to get my hands
on both the LG Viper 4G and Sprint Galaxy Nexus at the event; while this
is by no means a full review, I liked what I saw from Sprint's newest
offerings.
Aside from support for Google Wallet, the Sprint Galaxy Nexus is
identical to the version found on Verizon. You still have a dual-core
1.2GHz processor and the phone still comes with Android 4.0 (aka Ice
Cream Sandwich). We weren’t able to test outits LTE performance, so
we’ll have to wait until the phone launches in mid-2012 to test that
aspect.
Unlike the Galaxy Nexus, the LG Viper is a new LTE phone that LG announced Monday morning.
The Viper has a brushed-metal back, and it felt lightweight yet sturdy
in hand. LG says it's an eco-friendly phone--35 percent of the plastic
on the phone is recycled. The Viper has a 4-inch WVGA NOVA screen (a
type of display technology), which Sprint tells me is brighter than what
is on the Galaxy Nexus.
LG Viper--the side view.
The Viper will ship with Android Gingerbread, but Sprint assured me
it would be updated to Ice Cream Sandwich soon after it gets released.
The Viper is built around a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor and
has 512MB of RAM. The model Sprint had on display didn’t have any games I
could use to test the phone, but opening up several apps (Google Maps,
Gmail, and the Camera) at once did little to slow the phone down. The
Viper will run on Sprint’s LTE network, but as is the case with the
Nexus, I wan’t able to test out the Viper’s LTE performance.
Speaking of the camera, the Viper has two: a VGA front-facing camera
for video calls and chats, and a 5-megapixel camera on the rear of the
phone. In the dimly lit nightclub, the photos I took came out looking
great. Unlike other phones I have seen, the LED flash did a good job in
the low light and didn’t over-expose any of my subjects.
The Viper has an onboard NFC chip and, much like the Galaxy S and Galaxy Nexus, the Viper will support Google Wallet.
Both phones should launch around the middle of this year, but we
couldn’t get an official launch date or price for either device. We’ll
be sure to keep you updated as we find out more about these phones and
Sprint’s new LTE network.
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