Dual-Mode CDMA/WiMAX Handsets Later This Year, Sprint CEO Hesse Tells Investors

There hasn’t been much word on Sprint’s upcoming WiMAX network, better known as XOHM, in a while now—other than the breakup with Clearwire that has yet to be re-sparked. Yesterday morning during Sprint’s 2007 fourth quarter earnings conference call, Dan Hesse, Sprint’s CEO began discussing dual-mode WiMAX handsets, Phone Scoop reports. He began by giving a nod to the Simply Everything $99 plan that Sprint announced yesterday, and comparing handsets to Swiss Army knives now—referring to the way a phone can be used to do many things like GPS and video—you know, everything but picking you teeth with the antenna. But then it got juicy when he branched off of that statement and said, “Later this year we plan to introduce dual-mode CDMA WiMAX devices…” Unlimited data paired with a high-speed fourth generation network certainly sounds like something that could flip Sprint’s ship and attract a lot of fresh subscriber faces, but we’ll have to wait it out to see what comes later this year and how well it performs. Hesse went on to tell investors that smaller, soft WiMAX launches had gone well, that he’d discuss XOHM in depth at a later date, and that there wasn’t any news on whether Sprint had made up with Clearwire yet.