Budget carrier Cricket has an aggressive smartphone lineup for 2011. We checked some of them out.
The world is turning towards smartphones, and low-cost wireless carrier Cricket is turning with it. Cricket showed me new Android-powered phones from Huawei and LG, a Viewsonic tablet, and a new Samsung texting phone coming to the carrier later this year.
As a low-cost, prepaid carrier, Cricket had to wait for smartphone prices to come down before it could fully participate in the smartphone revolution, vice president and general manager of devices Matt Stoiber said. But affordable Android phones are now the norm, and Cricket's customers are demanding them, he said. Cricket's Android service plan runs only $55/month, less than the major carriers charge.
The LG Optimus is coming to Cricket during the first quarter of this year, Stoiber said. Cricket's version of the Optimus is just like the hot-selling Optimus for Sprint, T-Mobile, and MetroPCS: a perfectly finished, beautifully performing low-end Android phone that has similar specs to other affordable phones, yet somehow feels smoother than they do. Cricket's version is silver, with a 3.2-inch, 320x480 screen and a 3.2-megapixel camera. It's going to be more expensive than the $129 Huawei Ascend, Stoiber said, but I know that I'll be recommending people spend the extra cash.
A little later in the year comes the Huawei X5, which I saw at Huawei's booth earlier this week. This Android phone will replace the Ascend with "similar retail pricing," Stoiber said. If that means consumers are getting an 800Mhz smartphone with a 5-megapixel camera for $129, that's going to be a stellar deal. When I handled the X5, I was more impressed by Huawei's upcoming higher-tier U9000. But if the X5 comes in below the Optimus on price, Cricket users are going to have an interesting choice between Huawei's better specs and LG's reliable finish.
I didn't see this next smartphone, but Cricket plans to carry a Samsung Android phone with a 3.2-inch screen within the next few months as well, Stoiber said.
"Smartphones will be a good, better, best scenario," he said. Stoiber also pulled out a dual-core, Viewsonic Android tablet that the carrier will be bundling with a Wi-Fi hotspot. The tablet will be Wi-Fi only – you have to use it with the hotspot. That's because Cricket wanted to bring the tablet to market quickly, Stoiber said. The tablet uses a 1.2Ghz dual-core Qualcomm processor and will run the Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" OS, not the recently announced "Honeycomb" tablet OS. The tablet has a 1024x600 screen and will have a 3-megapixel camera, Stoiber said.
Other new Cricket phones for the first quarter include the sub-$99 Pinger 3 (no, there was no Pinger 1 or 2), a classy, BlackBerry-like texting phone from Samsung, and a simple flip phone from Kyocera. Cricket will have two simple clamshell phones and a bar phone for sale at all times, although the carrier's focus now is on texting and smart phones.
I also got an update on some other Cricket products. The carrier's groundbreaking Muve Music service—which is as close as we're going to get to Spotify in the US, at least for now—is going to appear only on the Samsung Suede for a few months, and then will come to at least one Android phone by midyear. Cricket will be able to upgrade at least some existing Android phones with Muve.
Speaking of upgrades, the Sanyo Zio—which runs an unforgivably old version 1.6 of Android—will get a boost to 2.2 soon, Stoiber said.
Looking forward, Cricket is definitely heading towards 4G LTE. While the carrier won't introduce LTE until later this year, they're already thinking about what kinds of smartphones and service they want to offer—maybe phones with bigger screens and streaming media, Stoiber said. The "cost curve" of LTE phones is coming down faster than expected, which is speeding up Cricket's LTE efforts, he said.
Cricket, the nation's seventh-largest carrier, currently has about 5.4 million customers.