The star at this year's CTIA show also happens to be the world's first 4G Android phone. Billed as the HTC Evo, the feature-heavy smartphone will be the first handset using Sprint's 4G network in the US.

According to Sprint, their network will offer download speeds that are ten times faster than existing 3G networks, a capability that the device will competently handle. Combining HD2-style hardware, the software stylings of Sense over Android and unprecented bandwidth speeds, it's easily the most exciting phone of the year. Well, so far.

Core hardware consists of a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 512MB of RAM and 1GB of onboard storage. Details of the Evo include a 4.3-inch touchscreen (480 x 800 resolution), two cameras (a 1.3 megapixel in front and an 8 megapixel module in the rear), aGPS, HDMI out, WiFi, microSD card expansion and mobile hotspot capability. That last one allows up to eight different WiFi-enabled devices to connect to it for tethering.

As you can tell from the specs, this will be a multimedia-heavy phone, a fact reiterated with a kickstand on the back (so you can plop it down a table for viewing). Not only can it process HD video (and output it via an HDMI receiver), it can record them in full 720p too. Plus, it supposedly runs Flash seamlessly. We don't know whether that "seamless" part refers to games too, but streaming video should be a no-brainer.

The HTC Evo will ship with Android 2.1, along with the slew of Google's latest mobile software suite. Expect it to come out in the summer, although pricing isn't clear yet.

[via Gizmodo]

Inspired, perhaps, by the Palm Pre's brilliant Synergy feature, which gathered web services all in one place, CTIA saw a number of apps that tried to accomplish the same.  Two titles, the Yahoo Mobile and 3deep, particularly made their mark.

Yahoo Mobile

It's pretty much the concensus that Yahoo Mobile is possibly the best social networking platform shown off at the show.   Revamped and redesigned, it's been transformed into an easy-to-use and customizable one-stop shop for staying connected across numerous web facilities. Yahoo's Mobile Apps And Portals provide users a single UI for a wide variety of content and services, including:

• Search engine
• Email (not just Yahoo, but also Gmail and a host of other providers)
• Yahoo messenger
• RSS feeds
• Social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter and more)
• Yahoo contacts

The facility is accessible via browser from all web-enabled handsets or through a standalone app for the iPhone and Yahoo's Go app for other major mobile platforms.

3deep

While Yahoo Mobile won audiences over with their social networking support, 3deep took the cake as the most innovative of the social-based apps presented in the show (despite the unfortunate monicker).  What it does is allow other users to get multi-dimensional status updates about you (your location, availability, schedule and such).  Instead of having to call you up to know if you're coming to work, for instance, your supervisor can open the app and see that you're already on the road, five minutes away.

It manages to gather all that information by analyzing a variety of sources, including email, calendar, contacts, social networking sites and GPS.  Of course, you can control what kind of information you're willing to share so you don't have to worry about compromising too much of your privacy without needing to.  Currently in beta, the app will be available as a free download for Windows Mobile sometime during the next two weeks.