Earlier this week it was announced by Sprint that the wireless carrier would be offering two Windows Phone 8 devices later this year, one from HTC and one from Samsung. Apart from a tentative release date of "summer" and the OEMs involved, no other details about the devices were announced or even hinted at.
At CES 2013, PCMag managed to squeeze out a little more info about Sprint"s Windows Phone 8 plans, speaking to their director of device delivery, Ryan Sullivan. He said:
We"re working for current product launches, and not necessarily to launch on six-month-old hardware. We"re trying to work with Microsoft to make sure what we deliver is very high quality. The platform integration and the services that we want to bring aren"t the only things we want to make fresh.
The fact that he mentioned that Sprint is "working for current product launches" as well as "not necessarily" looking to bring out six-month-old hardware is a little bit cryptic, but it does seem to say that Sprint is looking to bring "fresh" devices to the market. In the interview he also referred to Sprint"s upcoming Windows Phone line-up as a "generation", which seems to further suggest that two new devices are on the way.
If we"re lucky, Sprint won"t simply be re-releasing the HTC 8X or Samsung ATIV S (if these are indeed their phones of choice) into the market, but bringing something entirely different. It"s possible that, like the Lumia 822 is a carrier-specific version of the Luima 820, these potentially new devices could simply be new iterations of old devices, but something in the statement seems to lead us to believe that something completely new is in the works.
Regardless of this statement at CES, it"s clear that Sprint is not completely ready to say anything further about their device plans, as they"re still quite a way off from bringing anything to the market.