by Robert Herron

Sprint 4G Rollout Updates

Saturday, March 17, 2012 - 4:09 AM MDT

There have been a lot of rumors and guessing about Sprint's launch of the Galaxy Nexus. Some folks guessed dates that already have passed by. Some others were guessing it would be July 1st or later. However, lately, most reasonably intelligent people who follow this stuff closely have settled on April 15th. And they would be right!

Sprint has set April 15th as the targeted launch date of the Galaxy Nexus

S4GRU.com recently received a tip from a Sprint source from within their Product Development division who confirmed the Galaxy Nexus expected launch date. Sprint internally is holding the April 15, 2012 schedule date for its management of the GNex program. However, the 15th is on a Sunday. That seems like a highly unlikely date to start offering the device in stores. It is much more likely that Sprint will start selling the Galaxy Nexus on Friday the 13th, Saturday the 14th, or possibly even the following weekend.

Sprint has a Galaxy Nexus contest that ends on April 14th and is also running several promotions on WiMax devices that end on April 14th and there abouts. So there have been many people who have reasonably concluded that April 15th was likely the targeted launch date for the new Galaxy Nexus. This turned out to be pretty good deductions.

Other interesting points

Sprint will be taking delivery of their GNex's from Samsung with LTE turned off. Don't worry, the LTE is still capable. It just will not be on by default like many Verizon devices. When you boot up your Sprint Galaxy Nexus it is going to go into 3G mode. You will then be able to toggle into WiFi, 3G or 4G LTE. This is largely because at launch, the Sprint 4G LTE network will not be mature enough to support a 4G LTE always-on connection. Sprint will likely have less than 200 LTE sites live nationwide when the GNex goes on sale.

It is anticipated that Sprint will offer sometime in June the ability for the Galaxy Nexus to go into LTE Self Discovery mode, where the device will be able to search for a LTE signal on it is own, and turn LTE off itself automatically if it cannot connect to LTE 1900. This would be a pretty desirable setting. Keeping a LTE signal when at all possible, but minimizing the battery drain of just leaving the LTE on all the time. This will be particularly important during the phase while Sprint is in the process of adding service in your area. Self discovery mode is likely to be added via an OTA.

Another aspect of the Galaxy Nexus is that it fully supports eHRPD. This is the protocol established to allow 3G EVDO to seamlessly handoff to 4G LTE. Back and forth. This will be especially helpful in travelling in and out of LTE service while it is under deployment. The eHRPD will be a welcome improvement over the handoff failures that customers often complained about between 3G EVDO and 4G WiMax. Let's hope that Sprint's eHRPD is more successful than Verizon's. Which is often one of the culprits heard blamed for Verizon's LTE outages that keep occurring.

We will be bringing you more articles this weekend about Sprint LTE devices due in the next few months. Stay tuned!

EDIT: Pardon my ignorance, but I guess it is quite common for Sprint to release devices on Sundays. So maybe Sprint will actually release on Sunday, April 15th? Thanks to all our readers who brought this Sprint trivia to my attention!

Galaxy Nexus teardown photo courtesy of ifixit.com

See also our LG Viper launch story, here: http://s4gru.com/index.php?/blog/1/entry-118-lg-viper-to-see-launch-on-april-15th-alongside-the-galaxy-nexus/