sprint

UPDATE: As promised, Sprint and Clearwire held a news conference this morning regarding the recently approved merger between the two companies.

All of Sprint's XOHM service will be rolled into the new company, and the new WiMAX venture will go by the name "Clear." And that's the main news we got.

Otherwise, they're looking at providing an all-IP WiMAX network with average download speeds of an initial 2 to 4 megabits per second.

There's plenty of glad-handing to be had in the official press release, and click here to listen to the news conference, if you're into that sort of thing. (Warning: You have to "register" with a name and e-mail. Whether it's yours is up to you.)

You know that Sprint-Clearwire deal that we’ve been waiting on forever? It’s about to become officially official. Officially.

The FCC already blessed the merger that will help get WiMAX off the ground, for realz. And with the details all worked out, we’ll learn more in a conference call on Monday morning, thanks to the long holiday weekend.

The short version: Clearwire now has a boatload of cash — like, $3.2 billion (said with a raised pinky) — to get things going. It also now has all of Sprint’s 2.5 gigahertz spectrum and its XOHM business, which has already been up and running in Baltimore.

The short, short version: Here comes some sweet 4G goodness

No phone is perfect, and the Sprint Treo Pro has some hiccups as well. One that has been documented by many is an issue with the ringer where essentially the settings get corrupted in the registry, resulting in "silent" incoming calls:

The root cause of the Treo Pro No Ringer issue is related to a rare corruption of the Treo Pro’s registry key. This can lead to the smart phone not ringing and causing the user to miss an incoming call.

If you see a Software Version that is T850EWW-1.04-SPT you should install this update.

Interestingly this "update" looks to be an old fix for the Treo 750 found here and brought to Palm's attention here, though a complete tear-down of the official .cab fix needs to be done to confirm.

This also does not address the other missed-call problem associated with fringe reception (documented and addressed here), that is the one where you get no notification at all about a missed call as opposed to just a silent ringer.

Get the official patch/update from Palm here.  For those on the go, here is the OTA update link. And remember that you'll have to re-apply the fix if you hard-reset your phone.

Well lookie what the cat dragged in. If our powers of reason and deduction are correct, we appear to be looking at a Sprint-branded HTC "Willow," courtesy of PPCGeeks user OrionsBuckle. This should be the S511 we've been expecting and will be Sprint's variant of the slightly more sexy Snap.

It's got the almost-standard 528MHz Qualcomm processor, a 2MP camera and what looks like 256 megabytes of  ROM (storage) and 128 RAM, with about 70MB available. Also note the Inner Circle button on the lower right of the keyboard. And as for the battery, well, OB puts it this way:

i wish i woulda took a picture of the battery on this thing...its GIGANTIC!! its 1500mah or however you spell that lol.... bigger then the TP battery and the screen is smaller.

OrionsBuckle says it'd have a June 7 release date, which falls in line with Sprint's usual Sunday launches, and it also matches up with that leaked Sprint roadmap we saw. Price should be $149, about $50 under the Treo Pro.

Loads more pictures after the break.

Quick note: this is not a new ROM update, but rather one that flashes to the currently available 1.04 ROMs.  If you have a 1.04 ROM then no need to do this!

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Most people who have bought Sprint Treo Pro's are getting the current 1.04 ROM (see Settings --> System --> About --> Phone --> T850EWW-1.04-SPT).  However, many people who are buying on eBay are coming away with T850EWW-1.03-SPT ROMs (for a full back story on this issue, check out Dieter's write-up here).

So is there a difference between 1.03 and 1.04? Outside of 2 more MBs of RAM in the latter, no there seems to be no difference.  From forum member zbop:

I compared a 1.03 registry snapshot and a 1.04 snapshot and after eliminating all the device-specific differences, and live-state differences, I can't find anything significant. There are a few minor changes, but nothing that looks like a bugfix.

But if you have a 1.03 ROM and would like to flash it to 1.04 and gain peace of mind, then hop right over to TreoCentral where member kronium managed to finagle the file from a Sprint tech.  Score!

Hey, maybe at least now we'll start to get some custom ROM work?  Hmm...

If you've been following our series "Why does Sprint not have MMS (aka PictureMail) on its WM phones", you would have known that Sprint was on record as saying they were bringing this function to their WM lineup "soon".

Well soon has come what with the launch of the much anticipated HTC Touch Diamond yesterday. It was known from the leaked manual that this device would be the first WM phone on Sprint to have native PictureMail. ZOMG.

And sure enough not less than 24 hrs after the announcement of the Touch Diamond's availability, the .cab to install PictureMail is floating around the 'nets, thanks in part to no2chem¹, well known from the ROM cooking fellas at PPCGeeks.

Click the link to see some screen shots, get the download and hear about some lingering issues before you install...

All is not great yet, however. Some are successfully installing this on their devices (including yours truly) but are getting odd "G66: There was an error trying to register your phone" errors (despite having PictureMail enabled on the account) to problems with high memory requirements. That latter part is especially pertinent to the memory anemic HTC Mogul. Users have had to reportedly shut down all their plugins and running apps just to get this bugger up and running. On the 800w, this has not been an issue.

Easter egg: It appears that there may be some type of additional functionality not yet enabled--Photobucket and MySpace support. At least the registry strings are there...

So hackers and tweakers: put your nerd caps back on and lets get down to brass tacks to get this thing running on all WM devices (that is, unless Sprint wants to lend a hand?).

¹: [link removed by Verisign's request]

Some bad news folks, word from CNet is that the much anticipated HTC Touch Pro which was set to be released on October 19th has been pushed back to the end of October/beginning of November.

Doesn't look to be anything serious in the way of problems outside of Sprint trying to make sure they have enough supply on launch.

Sprint expects to slightly delay launch of the Touch Pro by HTC to ensure we have adequate inventory in all channels before making the device commercially available. Customers can expect the device to become available in select national retailers by the end of the month and then in all Sprint sales channels including online at www.sprint.com and Sprint Stores by early November.

Upside? You have a few more weeks to save for the $299 (w/ 2 year agreement + MIR; $579 OTD) device! Might as well give Dieter's walk through vid with the Touch Pro another whirl too...

Thanks Inimical and Patrick for the heads up!

Oh Sprint, how I love thee. Especially with simple programming errors.

As noted below, Sprint has finally rolled out Picture Mail (MMS) for their Windows Mobile devices.

I chimed in how it didn't work on the 800w, but alas I was wrong (see comments). I had to choose my device from their selection picker and download the special 800w version.

But what is listed on the device selector? How about the Treo Pro. LMAO

Noyce.