Beginning in April, Cellular South will get the HTC Merge smart phone,which is HTC’s very first CDMA world phone that uses the Android operating system.
The phone will come with the Amazon Appstore for Android installed on it, and Alltel Wireless, who was the first to announce they would be offering the phone, intends to sell it starting April 7 in both stores and online. The price is expected to be $124.99 with a $50 rebate and if customers sign up for a two-year contract.
The price for the Cellular South version has yet to be released, but they too will start selling it in April.
The Amazon Appstore for Android allows Android applications to be downloaded from Amazon or from Google’s Android Market.
The phone will use the Android 2.2 operating system, and operates in the U.S. with a frequency of 850/1900MHz 3G CDMA Rev. A networks, and in other parts of the world it works on the 2.1GHz 3G HSPA networks, and in U.S. and overseas GSM/EDGE networks.
The phone’s features include a slide-from-the-side QWERTY keyboard, a 3.8-inch capacitive touchscreen with haptic feedback and pinch-to- zoom capability, 720p video capture, GPS, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, a 5-megapixel camera with flash and autofocus, HTC’s Sense user interface, and HTC’s FriendStream social-media aggregation service, which brings users Facebook, Twitter and Flickr updates in a combined view.
It also has a 800MHz Qualcomm processor, 2GB embedded memory, comes ith an 8GB MicroSD card, stereo Bluetooth 2.1, and it will integrate with the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync
Using the phone’s preloaded Amazon Appstore app, or from any web-browsing device including PCs, users can locate, try the app and buy the Android apps and will also be able to use Amazon features like personalized recommendations, customer reviews, one-click payment options and product descriptions that include screenshots and video content showing the apps in action.
