Looking for one more excuse to stay inside and avoid that sweltering Las Vegas heat this summer? Good news, gamblers -- Clearwire's CLEAR WiMAX service has officially gone live across 638 square miles in the greater Las Vegas area. By the books, that's serving right around 1.7 million residents, not including the influx of tourists from other WiMAX-equipped cities that will undoubtedly take advantage. To coincide with the launch, Samsung has also announced that its QWERTY-packin', DivX-friendly Mondi -- which we toyed with back at CTIA -- will be available in Vegas-area Best Buy and Clearwire outlets starting August 1st. Said MID arrives with 4G support, WiFi, GPS, 3 megapixel camera, a QWERTY keypad, a 4.3-inch touchscreen, Opera 9.5 and a customizable set of widgets on top of Windows Mobile. The device is supposedly available now through Samsung's website and "select Samsung authorized distributors," but we're having no lucky hunting one down at present time.

Read - CLEAR in Las Vegas
Read - Samsung Mondi shipping

Clearwire's been slowly planting its WiMAX seeds around the country, and with nary a peep, it's rolled out the service into the Las Vegas area, designated by the image above. According to a company rep, the "official" launch -- including new store openings and a marketing blitz -- will begin this summer, but for now, it's operational and ready for those in the know. Portland and Atlanta vacationers, you can now watch your online bank account dwindle faster than you ever could before.

[Via Fierce Wireless; thanks, Zachery]

Read - Clearwire Goes Soft in Vegas
Read - Clear coverage map

The XOHM label may be gone, but the potency of Sprint's WiMAX network is still kickin' in and around Baltimore. For those itching for wicked fast mobile broadband outside of The Charm City, Sprint has just unveiled a slew of expansion areas that'll get gifted in 2009 and 2010. As for the rest of this year, folks in Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Ft. Worth, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Portland and Seattle can expect Sprint 4G rollouts, while residents of Boston, Houston, New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. can be on the lookout in 2010. In related news, the carrier is also taking this opportunity to reveal that it has "several new 4G devices planned for 2009 and 2010, including a single-mode 4G data card, embedded laptops, a small-office-home-office broadband modem and a tri-mode phone." Lovely.

Usually, it's Apple who has the problem with a potential app. Now, it's The Man taking issue with one that Cupertino deemed fit for distribution. Nevada gaming officials have been tipped off a card counting application that can be installed on the iPhone and iPod touch, which would obviously give Blackjack gamers an upper-hand over the system. According to control board member Randy Sayre, using a device to "aid in the counting of cards is considered a felony under Nevada laws governing cheating," and considering that the program can even be used in "stealth mode," it could be easy to miss unless you're really on the lookout. Of course, it's up to individual casinos to determine their policies on cellphones, but if you were planning to counter this recession by racking up on ten straight 21s this weekend, you might want to seriously consider the consequences first.

[Via TUAW]

That's right, kids, T-Mobile launched 3G data in Vegas this morning. The 1700MHz AWS 3G network went live for phones that can hit the UMTS 3G data stream, and if your phone is one of those, you may want to look for the pretty little icon and start doing some Intertron browsing. T-Mobile still expects to hit another 20 markets this year (along with some new handsets), so if you're not in Sin City, be patient -- 3G is coming.

RCR had the opportunity to fiddle around with the live, fully functional DVB-H trial Hiwire is running in cooperation with T-Mobile in Las Vegas, and if the phrase "ready for prime time" is any indication, it sounds like they liked what they saw. Using an LG U900 for service, RCR ran around Sin City comparing Hiwire's efforts to Verizon's MediaFLO-based VCAST TV -- a service that's been live for much of this year -- and found that the two were pretty much a wash for user experience. Hiwire's 24 channels of mind-numbing entertainment bests VCAST TV's lineup by a wide margin, but VCAST TV took significantly less time to switch between those channels (2 seconds compared to about 5); interestingly, though, VCAST TV seemed to be about 5 seconds delayed behind Hiwire, so it's a tradeoff. Of course, as RCR points out, Hiwire suffers from the same fundamental problem as VCAST TV -- subscribers would be paying for pretty much exactly the same content they're already paying for on their home televisions, albeit on a heck of a lot smaller screen -- so even if the service looks ready for commercial launch, is anyone ready to buy?

It's been a few months since we've heard anything about these guys, but it seems that Hiwire is still going full throttle in its efforts to compete with Modeo and the MediaFLO juggernaut to win the hearts and minds of American mobile TV watchers-to-be. Following a joint trial with T-Mobile late last year, Hiwire's back for more action in Sin City (sans carrier this time, it seems) rocking a full 24-channel lineup on its swath of 700MHz bandwidth, besting Verizon's MediaFLO-based offering by a healthy sixteen. There's still no word on when -- if ever -- Hiwire's going to go commercial with this thing, but it's good to hear they're still kicking around nonetheless.

So we're here in Vegas for the opening ceremonies of CTIA, which officially opens its doors tomorrow. We checked out Samsung tonight at the Official CTIA Press Rception; they didn't have a whole lot of anything to play around with that we haven't already seen before (the D807 and T719 were present), but we also caught a quick glance of the A930 from the last time we were in Vegas: CES. More hands on pics after the break, but unfortunately we couldn't snag the new T509 and there just wasn't a whole lot new to show you from Sammy (at least not right now, anyway).