CES 2008: UTStarcom's Surprise Texting Phone

Wednesday January 9, 2008

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CES 2008, Cell Phones & Services

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There were several surprises at UTStarcom's booth at CES this year, most notably this text-centric phone. The previously unannounced TXT 8010 is a dual-band CDMA phone with BREW, a VGA camera, and MicroSD removable memory. It has a full QWERTY keyboard that slides out from below its 2.2" screen. UTStarcom provides a lot of phones to smaller, more youth-oriented CDMA carriers like Cricket, MetroPCS and Virgin, as well as some Sprint and Verizon phones, but I expect this phone to show up on regional or smaller carriers.

UTStarcom also had the only full array of phones on the AWS frequency band at the show. AWS is going to be used by T-Mobile for 3G, but also by Cricket and MetroPCS for expanding their coverage, and the low-end CDMA AWS phones UTStarcom has looked like they were custom-made for the Cricket/MetroPCS crowd. I'm not going to list UTStarcom's various low-end models here - frankly, these are the kinds of phones people pick up because they're free with contract - but if you're curious, click over to Phone Scoop for a more in-depth rundown of those devices.

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Posted By: Sascha Segan

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