CES 2007: First live demo of mobile Wimax

Las Vegas (NV) - Sprint-Nextel, Samsung, Motorola and Intel are offering a glimpse at mobile Wimax, also known as 802.16e or - in Sprint terms - 4G, with a first public demonstration of the technology at CES 2007.

The demonstration consists of a video conference between 802.16e devices located at the booths of Samsung, Intel and Motorola. The demonstration includes two new Samsung Wimax devices, which are expected to be launched during the first half of this year in South Korea. Samsung stressed that there are no launch plans for these devices in the U.S.

First up there is the SPH-P9000, a next-generation UMPC, which runs on Windows XP, a not specified 1 GHz processor (we suspect a Via C7-M ULV 770), 256 MB of memory, a 30 GB hard drive a 1.3 megapixel camera, a 5" screen as well as Intel's "Rosedale" Wimax chip.

Samsung SPH-M8100

More interesting is the second device, which, according to Samsung, is the world's first mobile Wimax PDA phone. The CDMA2000/802.16e slider phone runs videoconferences via T-DMB, integrates a 2.8" color screen and a 2-megapixel camera and comes with a TV-out port. The "SPH-M8100" PDA phone runs on Microsoft's Windows Mobile 5.0 PPC PE operating system.