19 replies to this topic

[marioc21]

Quote

LG Viper 4G LTE with Eco-Friendly Features from Sprint Launches for Less than $100



Pairing innovative technology with the Sprint 4G LTE network and unlimited data plans, LG Viper 4G LTE helps manage work and personal time for people on the go, like today’s “Power Parents”; Pre-order begins Thursday, April 12, at sprint.com/viper

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
In an exclusive media event to tip off NBA Green Week presented by Sprint, Sprint’s CEO Dan Hesse (NYSE:S - News) today announced pricing and pre-order availability date for the highly anticipated LG Viper™ 4G LTE, the first 4G LTE device with eco-friendly features to be offered by Sprint.
LG Viper will be available later this month in all Sprint sales channels, including www.sprint.com, 1-800-SPRINT1, Best Buyand RadioShack for $99.99 with a new two-year service agreement and $50 mail-in rebate via reward card¹ (excludes taxes and surcharges). New and existing customers can pre-order LG Viper beginning Thursday, April 12 at www.sprint.com/viper.

http://finance.yahoo...-170000801.html

[P_M_G]

Meh....4.0" WVGA sceren and Gingerbread are so 2011....LOL

Not a bad entry level device though.

[ericdabbs]

 P_M_G, on 03 April 2012 - 10:29 AM, said:

Meh....4.0" WVGA sceren and Gingerbread are so 2011....LOL

Not a bad entry level device though.

Yeah but I believe that the LG Viper will get the ICS update later on this year hopefully before Jelly Bean comes out.

[MacinJosh]

 ericdabbs, on 03 April 2012 - 10:33 AM, said:

Yeah but I believe that the LG Viper will get the ICS update later on this year hopefully before Jelly Bean comes out.

Yeah, hopefully it will. I still can't believe that Jelly Bean is already coming out. ICS just launched last year.

[ericdabbs]

 MacinJosh, on 03 April 2012 - 10:37 AM, said:

Yeah, hopefully it will. I still can't believe that Jelly Bean is already coming out. ICS just launched last year.

Well when you mean coming out, I don't think its any time soon. I am thinking Jelly Bean won't come until Q4 2012 probably Oct or Nov. Reason being is that one of Jelly Bean's key features will be Android Assistant which will rival Siri which is coming out on Q4 2012. Plus we know that Google likes to take their sweet time on these things.

[marioc21]

 MacinJosh, on 03 April 2012 - 10:37 AM, said:

Yeah, hopefully it will. I still can't believe that Jelly Bean is already coming out. ICS just launched last year.

Don't really get this criticism. It's been a year. Annual updates are the norm. Apple updates IOS on a yearly cycle why is it bad for google? Now the fact that Google doesn't work with manufacturers come out with jelly bean phones at the same time as they release it is another matter entirely.

[MacinJosh]

 marioc21, on 03 April 2012 - 10:51 AM, said:

Don't really get this criticism. It's been a year. Annual updates are the norm. Apple updates IOS on a yearly cycle why is it bad for google? Now the fact that Google doesn't work with manufacturers come out with jelly bean phones at the same time as they release it is another matter entirely.

In terms of market penetration, ICS still doesn't have very much market share compared to Gingerbread.

[marioc21]

 MacinJosh, on 03 April 2012 - 10:56 AM, said:

In terms of market penetration, ICS still doesn't have very much market share compared to Gingerbread.

That's about to shift though. All of the top end phones that will be released in the spring and summer will have ICS. Tomorrow Sprint and HTC annouce the EVO One which will have ICS. HTC's other One series phones are all ICS and of course the Galaxy S III will have ICS. I have to believe that whatever Motorola/Google has on the drawing board will be ICS. By the end of the summer you'll probably have ICS on 30 to 40% of all android phones.

[JeffDTD]

Awww, LG. Cute and I know folks entirely satisfied by them, as a brand. I swore them off years ago due to wild lack of quality control.... but I will be waiting with baited breath for reviews of this baby in LTE markets!!!

[pyroscott]

 MacinJosh, on 03 April 2012 - 10:56 AM, said:

In terms of market penetration, ICS still doesn't have very much market share compared to Gingerbread.

2.9% according to this article http://www.zdnet.com...id-devices/7351 published today at that...

as far as ICS being "ready for an annual update, The SDK for Android 4.0.1 was publicly released on 19 October 2011 and the source code for Android 4.0 became available on 14 November 2011 according to Wikipedia. That is not even 6 months ago that the SDK was published. The first ICS phone came out on 17 November. Google would only infuriate the OEMs that have worked feverishly to push ICS out to their handsets if they released a new version of Android this soon.

[marioc21]

 pyroscott, on 03 April 2012 - 11:05 AM, said:

2.9% according to this article http://www.zdnet.com...id-devices/7351 published today at that...

as far as ICS being "ready for an annual update, The SDK for Android 4.0.1 was publicly released on 19 October 2011 and the source code for Android 4.0 became available on 14 November 2011 according to Wikipedia. That is not even 6 months ago that the SDK was published. The first ICS phone came out on 17 November. Google would only infuriate the OEMs that have worked feverishly to push ICS out to their handsets if they released a new version of Android this soon.

It won't "this soon". It'll probably be a full year from the last update. Google said a few years ago that they were moving to an annual update cycle in order to let people catch up. Before that they would update android 2 or 3 times in a year. And they've held to that with Froyo followed by gingerbread and then ICS. Jelly bean will probably be talked about in July at Google I/O and then fully released in the fall.

[ericdabbs]

 pyroscott, on 03 April 2012 - 11:05 AM, said:

2.9% according to this article http://www.zdnet.com...id-devices/7351 published today at that...

as far as ICS being "ready for an annual update, The SDK for Android 4.0.1 was publicly released on 19 October 2011 and the source code for Android 4.0 became available on 14 November 2011 according to Wikipedia. That is not even 6 months ago that the SDK was published. The first ICS phone came out on 17 November. Google would only infuriate the OEMs that have worked feverishly to push ICS out to their handsets if they released a new version of Android this soon.

Personally I think Google is not doing a good job in working with the manufacturers in providing the next version of Android sooner. I know manufacturers share the blame in this but I think Google deserves some blame as well. So far their Handset Alliance group that they announced last year at Google I/O has done nothing to provide speedier updates.

IMO, I think that Google should be providing the manufacturers a beta build 2-3 months before the official release of that Android version so that they can start developing driver, add their UI layer skins and the carriers can put their bloatware on top of it and start doing some preliminary testing. Then once the official Android version is out, the manufacturers would simply do a sync up of the latest Android baseline and do regression testing to see what broke and fix those items. If this were to happen, I could see manufacturers start providing the latest software updates for the phones within 3 months of the source code release.

The way I think of it is if custom rom groups like CyanogenMod can take the ICS source code and produce a pretty stable ICS rom in less than 3 months and this is without knowing the source code of the chipsets, think about how much faster the manufacturers could pump out ROMS with their expertise.

[pyroscott]

 marioc21, on 03 April 2012 - 11:09 AM, said:

It won't "this soon". It'll probably be a full year from the last update. Google said a few years ago that they were moving to an annual update cycle in order to let people catch up. Before that they would update android 2 or 3 times in a year. And they've held to that with Froyo followed by gingerbread and then ICS. Jelly bean will probably be talked about in July at Google I/O and then fully released in the fall.

OK, I had heard rumblings before about June and really can't see that happening. The yearly update, yes, I can see that happening.

[MacinJosh]

 ericdabbs, on 03 April 2012 - 11:14 AM, said:

Personally I think Google is not doing a good job in working with the manufacturers in providing the next version of Android sooner. I know manufacturers share the blame in this but I think Google deserves some blame as well. So far their Handset Alliance group that they announced last year at Google I/O has done nothing to provide speedier updates.

IMO, I think that Google should be providing the manufacturers a beta build 2-3 months before the official release of that Android version so that they can start developing driver, add their UI layer skins and the carriers can put their bloatware on top of it and start doing some preliminary testing. Then once the official Android version is out, the manufacturers would simply do a sync up of the latest Android baseline and do regression testing. If this were to happen, I could see phones with the latest software update come out within 3 months of the source code release.

The way I think of it is if custom rom groups like CyanogenMod can take the ICS source code and produce a pretty stable ICS rom in less than 3 months and this is without knowing the source code of the chipsets, think about how much faster the manufacturers could pump out ROMS with their expertise.

I agree with Eric. The advantage Apple has is that they build their own hardware and software, so annual updates are easy to do since it's all in-house.

[pyroscott]

 ericdabbs, on 03 April 2012 - 11:14 AM, said:

The way I think of it is if custom rom groups like CyanogenMod can take the ICS source code and produce a pretty stable ICS rom in less than 3 months and this is without knowing the source code of the chipsets, think about how much faster the manufacturers could pump out ROMS with their expertise.

And groups like CyanogenMod do it unpaid, in their spare time, to many phone models. They really make the manufacturers look poor with their upgrades. Especially when CyanogenMod builds their ROMs, they have to reverse engineer everything because they are not privvy to the propriatary information used to write the drivers for that model.

[marioc21]

 MacinJosh, on 03 April 2012 - 11:20 AM, said:

I agree with Eric. The advantage Apple has is that they build their own hardware and software, so annual updates are easy to do since it's all in-house.

You would hope that Google now owning Motorola would help alleviate that. Regardless of what Google says about Motorola being "independent". There's no excuse for a Motorola phone to ever come out without the latest version of android installed.

[pyroscott]

 MacinJosh, on 03 April 2012 - 11:20 AM, said:

I agree with Eric. The advantage Apple has is that they build their own hardware and software, so annual updates are easy to do since it's all in-house.

One of the reasons why the OEMs have a tougher time than Apple is because they all have to throw their bloat (improved user experience as they call it) on there. We would be seeing updates a lot faster without this.

Unless Windows Phone caves and starts allowing OEMs to insert their "custom UI" they will be pushing updates out faster and more efficiently. Especially since they have taken steps to reduce the amount of different hardware used in the manufacture of their phones.

[marioc21]

 pyroscott, on 03 April 2012 - 11:24 AM, said:

One of the reasons why the OEMs have a tougher time than Apple is because they all have to throw their bloat (improved user experience as they call it) on there. We would be seeing updates a lot faster without this.

Unless Windows Phone caves and starts allowing OEMs to insert their "custom UI" they will be pushing updates out faster and more efficiently. Especially since they have taken steps to reduce the amount of different hardware used in the manufacture of their phones.

Ahh, but even windows phone has its problems. It's not just the manufactures it's the carriers. Microsoft allows the carriers to decide on whether or not to push out an update. AT&T has been very slow to approve updates for the windows phones it sold. In fact the carrier can deny a phone update entirely.

[4ringsnbr]

I knew this phone would be first when I wrote about it on Sprint Users back in January when it was approved by the FCC.

[MacinJosh]

 marioc21, on 03 April 2012 - 11:29 AM, said:

Ahh, but even windows phone has its problems. It's not just the manufactures it's the carriers. Microsoft allows the carriers to decide on whether or not to push out an update. AT&T has been very slow to approve updates for the windows phones it sold. In fact the carrier can deny a phone update entirely.

at&t is slow on a lot of things, especially network upgrades in rural areas, not just Windows Phone updates. They should be kicked for their stupidity.