Motorola brought a bunch of Sprint phones to New York today, in advance of a big product reveal tomorrow at lunchtime. Today was for already-announced devices, though, and we got our first hands-on time with the Motorola Theory, XPRT and Titanium, three new phones for Sprint and its Boost Mobile brand.

The Titanium is the smartphone for which the Nextel faithful have been waiting. There are still millions of business users stuck on the Nextel network, in part because of its still-unmatched walkie-talkie capabilities. It has had a lousy choice of smartphones so far: the Motorola i1 , which is forever stuck at Android 1.5, or a pretty hoary BlackBerry Curve . Ugh.

The Titanium, on the other hand, looks and feels like a clone of Verizon's classy Motorola Droid Pro . Yes, it's still far from cutting-edge—it has a mere 320-by-480 screen and is stuck on Android 2.1, when phones nowadays always come with Android 2.2 or later. But it has a nice little front keyboard, a serious look to its beveled edges, lots of enterprise management and security stuff, and it integrates Nextel features like Direct Talk well into its Android OS. It also feels fast, which is great—until you hit Nextel's super-slow data network. Using the Opera Mini browser, which compresses data, is the only decent way to get around Nextel's glacial speeds.

Source: PC Magazine