Don't you just love it when a plan comes together? Or better yet, when a leaked roadmap doesn't get delayed in the slightest? After months upon months of waiting, broadband-lovin' citizens in the North Carolina Triangle and Triad will be celebrating alongside DFW residents and Chicago natives as Sprint's 4G WiMAX service rolls into town. As of right now (that's today, junior), consumers in Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point and Charlotte, NC; Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas and Chicago, Illinois can roll into a Sprint store and snag a U300 3G / 4G WWAN modem on a $69.99 monthly data plan. We're told that San Antonio and Austin will get lit up later this month, while Honolulu and Maui, Hawaii; Salem, Oregon and Seattle, Washington will join the fray before 2010. Oh, and did we mention that Palm's favorite carrier finally snagged itself a WWAN-equipped netbook? 'Cause the Dell Mini 10 is available starting today for $199.99 at select Sprint stores in the metropolitan Baltimore area.

Update: Looks like Sprint changed "Baltimore" to "Bay Area." Odd.

Read - Sprint WiMAX in the Triangle
Read - Sprint WiMAX in the Triad
Read - Sprint WiMAX in Charlotte, NC
Read - Sprint WiMAX in Dallas-Ft. Worth, TX
Read - Sprint WiMAX in Chicago, IL
Read - Sprint's first netbook is Dell Mini 10

Looking for some LTE news that's harder than those wishy-washy vibes you've been getting thus far? Listen up. On a recent conference call, Verizon Wireless President and CEO Lowell McAdam (shown) stated that its LTE network would launch commercially in around 20 to 30 US markets during "the second half of 2010." He continued by noting that a "nationwide buildout would be complete in late 2013 to early 2014," but failed to elaborate on the whens, whos and whys in between. For those locked into the 4G movement, you'll notice that these dates are slightly different than ones tossed out in April by the outfit's CFO, which leads us to believe that we could hear something else in just a few month's time if things don't go perfectly to plan. At any rate, McAdam did confirm that a tiny group of VZW testers would have access to 4G this year, with one "pre-commercial" network per US coast being activated during 2009. Bring on the bytes, baby.

[Via phoneArena]

We already heard Nokia's head man in charge, Mr. Olli Pekka Kallasvuo, gloat about how awesome 5800 XpressMusic sales have been, but what hasn't been mentioned yet is his take on S60 deployment and its future definition of a smartphone. He commented during the outfit's Q4 earnings call that "smartphones are not only for the high end," and he elaborated by saying that "internet services" and the like would soon be delivered at "a number of attractive price points." Which makes sense given that Nokia's planning to "expand its Symbian S60 investment relative to S40," wouldn't you say? Potentially most interesting was this tidbit: "[Nokia is] expanding smartphones to categories and form factors that have not yet been covered." Not yet been covered? Seriously? Way to make our imaginations work overtime here, Olli.

With Nokia bidding Japan a fond farewell and the national handset market at large expected to shrink, Sharp is laying out plans to expand elsewhere in Asia in order to keep its profits from hitting undesirably low levels. At a recent press event in Tokyo, Sharp's Masafumi Matsumoto explained that "it is our solid policy to expand our overseas business," noting that it was "aiming for an overwhelmingly large share of about 30% in the Japanese market." Moreover, he proclaimed that it was hoping to "increase overseas unit sales to a level on par with domestic unit sales over time," pointing to nations like China and other "emerging markets." Reportedly, the company is hoping to leverage existing sales channels for its AQUOS TVs in order to move more handsets abroad, and not surprisingly, it'll probably look to low-cost devices for most of the growth. Good luck out there, Sharp -- it's a vicious world.

[Via WMPowerUser]

Oh sure, Telstra's Next G HSDPA network is pretty swank, but what's the use in having a potent high-speed infrastructure if it's too expensive for anyone to use? Thankfully, said carrier is finally loosening up a bit on its data pricing by giving Aussies more megabytes for the same price that they're currently paying. Starting now, $10 mobile data packages include 150MB per month (up from 20MB), while the $29 pack includes 300MB per month (up from 80MB). Additionally, excess data rates have been "reduced" on both packs, though dollars and cents weren't mentioned on that. Best of all, customers already subscribed to one of the aforesaid plans won't have to do a thing in order to see their capacities bumped.

Just a day after we heard that Vodafone was taking the iPhone on a world tour, in comes word that Apple's darling will be headed to Latin America via America Movil. We aren't told if the deal is one of exclusive nature, nor were we given a specific launch date, but residents of 16 countries in Latin America will have their shot at latching onto an iPhone sometime "this year." Huzzah!

[Thanks, Jesus]

Just how much GSM does one billion US dollars buy you? Nineteen Chinese regions' worth, apparently. The deal to provide oodles and oodles of hardware to significantly beef up China's GSM network is so freaking big, in fact, that Chinese president Hu Jintao attended the signing ceremony in Sweden at the invitation of King Carl XVI Gustaf alongside Sweden's prime minister and the heads of Ericsson and China Mobile. The deal, which covers "core and radio network equipment, along with related technical support and services," is already rolling with deliveries in full swing -- so if you happen to reside in one of the 19 affected regions of the country, get ready for some more signal bars.

[Via Slashphone]

Wow, it seems like we were just marveling over the introduction of the world's first 8GB SD card a few moons back. Ah, that's right, we were. Alas, Samsung took it to heart that SD doesn't cut it for your average cellphone (they run a bumpin' mobile business, after all), announcing that it has managed to pack a full eight gigabytes into the microSD form factor for mid-2008 production. That's particularly timely considering that 4GB examples haven't even gotten into widespread circulation yet -- "8GB" just has a nicer ring to it -- not to mention that the new card handily surpasses SDHC guidelines with 16MB/s reads and 6MB/s writes. For the record, a microSD card rocks a little over 20 percent of the surface area of its SD counterpart, so does this mean we can expect 40GB SD cards, like, now? Not quite.