Sidecut Reports

While we still don’t have any concrete details on how many HTC EVO 4G smartphones Sprint has sold so far, it’s safe to assume that a lot of them have gone out the door — and according to a Sprint exec at a WiMAX symposium Tuesday, some 40,000 of those devices are now using the Fring application for mobile video and voice calls, spending an average of eight logged-in hours per day.

Nathan Smith, with Sprint’s developer program, dropped the Fring-usage nugget on a crowd of about 150 or so developer and VC types who each paid $25 to attend a full-day WiMAX symposium at the engineering school on the verdant Stanford campus here in Palo Alto, Calif. While introductory keynotes from execs at Sprint and Clearwire didn’t do much than reiterate already known facts about the partners’ nascent national WiMAX network, Smith’s presentation and a related one from Clearwire’s products and services VP Dow Draper got a little more in-depth on where network use is headed, and why the EVO launch was so important to getting developers interested.

Draper said that in talking to developers about WiMAX, they would say “that’s great, but where’s the phone?” With the EVO already commercially available and more 4G phones promised from Clearwire before the end of the year, it’s a safe bet that Draper’s contention that “4G will enable video to become the ‘new normal’ ” may be a conservative statement before too long.

The immediate jump of users to Fring, a Skype-like program that is already available on Android platforms like the HTC EVO 4G, is proof that “people are using the devices for video,” Smith said. Sprint has also signed up streaming-video provider Qik as a partner for the HTC EVO.

Does WiMAX work inside buildings? Sure does here at Stanford, where we are attending a WiMAX symposium… courtesy of a loaner USB dongle from Clearwire, here’s our download speed deep inside the engineering classrooms here on campus:

More from the symposium later today.

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from our just-released Clearwire NTK, or “Clearwire Need To Know” report for June 2009, a $4.95 research report that delivers the most up-to-date information available about the nation’s nascent national WiMax provider. In this excerpt we take a closer look at the recent Clearwire-Cisco partnership, and what it may mean for the visibility of WiMax in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Business Update: Cisco Deal, Silicon Valley Testbed are Big Steps Forward in the Partnership Game

After Cisco bought WiMax radio supplier Navini in October 2007, industry watchers have waited and wondered why the biggest networking vendor wasn’t doing more with WiMax in the U.S. market. Now after the mid-May announcement of a multi-year deal between Cisco and Clearwire, the waiting is over — and you have to think Cisco just delivered a wake-up call about WiMax to Silicon Valley and Wall Street in one big move.

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