NXTcomm: Sprint's Hesse Unveils the Instinct During Keynote

Dan Hesse, CEO at Sprint-Nextel Corp., took the stage on day two of NXTcomm08, joking about his move from wireline-centric EMBARQ to being the head at Sprint by quipping, “I’ve gone over to the dark side.”

But the dark side actually is quite the bright side when one considers how much of the future of communications lies in the promise of mobile broadband. This was his theme during the 25-minute keynote, during which he announced that Sprint will on Friday launch an iPhone competitor, the Instinct, from Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.

The Instinct, available Friday, will retail for $130 (versus the iPhone’s price of $199), and ticks all the iPhone boxes, including a full-panel touch screen with tile navigation, visual voice mail, true Internet and 3G.

Hesse, expectedly, spent some time talking about WiMAX and its efforts with Clearwire Corp., going over the well-messaged territory of WiMAX’s time-to-market advantage over rival 4G technology LTE, which will be adopted by AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless. He noted that commercial service will begin in Baltimore in September, followed by Chicago and Washington, D.C.

Hesse also spent some time addressing the 800-pound gorilla — how it is evolving its core wireless business, which has been losing money and subscribers in recent quarters. He didn’t acknowledge the carrier's rocky problems specifically, but he did run video clips of commercials and discussed Sprint’s speed advantage over AT&T, noting Sprint’s 3G coverage is five times that of AT&T.

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