Mobile Phone Pipeline For A Carrier Near You

There are a number of smartphones coming to various carriers in the next few months. See if anything of interest is coming to your carrier, or if there is anything desirable enough to get you to switch carriers.InfoSyncWorld wrote a nice roundup of what is coming. I'll comment on a few of the biggies as I see it.

AT&T is going to be getting the HTC Touch Pro2, and it is likely going to be called the AT&T Tilt 2. Information Week's Marion Perez has written a review of the device on T-Mobile's network. I am sure the AT&T version will be very similar, though with better 3G coverage. The Garmin Nuviphone 60, something very long in development, will finally arrive as well.

It seems Sprint will also be getting the HTC Touch Pro2. I've also heard Verizon is getting it as well, so this could be one of HTC's most popular Windows Mobile devices to date. I'll be curious to see how many of the carriers follow through with the WinMo 6.5 update that HTC has said it will provide. Just because HTC provides it doesn't mean the carriers will polish it off and deliver it to the consumer. While there are no real details, the InfoSyncWorld article says that Sprint has an Android device in final stages of development and should be out soon. After T-Mobile launched the Android based G1 last fall, I expected a flurry of devices within a few months. The devices are coming out, just a year later. Verizon should have an Android phone as well.

The Samsung Omnia II should be on Verizon's network in short order, replacing the original Omnia. This is a Windows Mobile device but the UI is so heavily customized you'd be hard pressed to know that unless you looked for the Windows flag. Rumors continue to persist on a Verizon iPhone, but I don't see that happening until late 2010 at best.

T-Mobile of course is the first to launch the Touch Pro2, and will also have the HTC Click, another Android based device. The key for T-Mobile will be for them to get their 3G network coverage on par with the other carriers. In fact, T-Mobile really needs to work on overall coverage. I recently took a cross country trip (literally - New York to LA) armed with our T-Mobile phones, an AT&T Blackberry for work and a Verizon MiFi for serious surfing while on the interstate. I rarely lost signal with AT&T or Verizon, but with T-Mobile, I really think I had no coverage more often than I had it. Once we settled in on the west coast, I reluctantly canceled our eight year old family T-Mobile contract and replaced it with Verizon because we just couldn't be moving around town with spotty coverage.

Check out the InfoSyncWorld article for more details, including a number of feature phones from the major carriers, and see if there is anything that will be appearing on your "Dear Santa" letter this year.