It's actually quite popular over in Europe already.

It's fits in because it's for tower maintenance Chris. The outsourcing does not imply transfer of ownership. It's basically sending a guy up to the tower to fix something - thats it.

WSJ has a very good article explaining what exactly outsourcing in this case means.

Fair enough from a technical perspective. To the average consumer though - its a signal booster.

You are wrong sir. It is a signal booster. My friend has it at his house. He had no bars in his basement and now he has full bars - works amazingly well.

So when does this thing actually go on sale? I want to buy one for my domicile in my castle in the nether regions of England.

It's actually not totally uncommon to do so. All carriers own some towers and lease others. In this case Sprint needed the cash so it got rid of basically all of them.

I bet they got a sweetheart lease deal out of too.

When you actually get a decent photo that shows the phones in a good light I'll let you know.

Looks nice but it's bigger than what i was expecting. It's definitely 8800 size and not 8300

No 3G radio if you're on GSM... get on CDMA with some evdo love and have your GPS too... it just makes too much sense.

@Garcia

You completely missed my point Garcia. In fact you completely breezed over the fact that I gave GSM props in places like Korea where it lives up to it's potential.

But that does you no good here. You don't live in Korea and you don't live in Europe where in some cases you can get speeds up to 8 megs with GSM. You live in the USA where EDGE (i mean it's like freaking aol) is predominant and HSDPA is fleeting and under supported in the spots where you can find it.

So if you think buying a GSM phone will somehow encourage ATT or T-Mobile to all of the sudden properly support some kind of high speed technology then so be it. But the only thing that is influencing them to upgrade at all is the fact that EVDO by Sprint and Verizon is much faster here in the USA even though the theoretical speeds of GSM could be much faster on a properly (this is key) supported network.

So therefore, since i live in a country where CDMA is king with data I choose CDMA. I don't choose GSM because it's king in Europe or Asia. Back to my original point - it's all about where you live.

And no I don't buy american cars because I live in usa. It's obvious in many cases they build inferior cars (but they are getting better...) so therefore I currently own two japanese cars becuase they are better products in the country where i live.

My gosh just give a CDMA phone with full EVDO a try ... I guarantee it will change your perception of the price value you pay your provider. And for the record I am not a Verizon fan boy... more of a Sprint one due to their incredible prices and generally faster EVDO network.