<p>Just heard this from Sprint/Nextel folks - have been expecting it for some time, as our family uses Nextel.</p>
<p>Sprint-Nextel will start selling hybrid cell phones next month. These units supposedly will use the cell phone feature from Sprint (which has excellent audio quality) and the Direct-Connect feature from Nextel’s iDEN infrastructure (which is the best in the cellular business for walkie-talkie).</p>
<p>The hybrid units would be multi-band, multi-mode (CDMA and TDMA-iDEN) to make it work.</p>
<p>Pretty cool from a technical perspective.</p>
<p>My contract with Verizon has been up for a while. Should I consider switching to Sprint-Nextel? What would this new technology mean to me? Is the quality likely to be good in the NY area, and up and down the East Coast?</p>
<p>Verizon is highly rated…I’d suggest waiting for a bit to see how this works out. Go month-to-month for a while on Verizon and see how Sprint-Nextel deploys the new equipment.</p>
<p>Once it’s out (and de-bugged) you can get 30-days of S-N service on approval without obligation. You never really know how it’ll work for you unless you try it in the areas you want.</p>
<p>If it were up to me, I’d ban the use of the walkie-talkie feature. It’s bad enough to have everyone talking into their cell phones at normal volumes but with Nextel you hear both sides of the conversation at exagerated volumes. I really don’t understand what the attraction of this is.</p>