With Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon all offering 4G in dozens of cities by now, AT&T may be the last to flip the switch, but customers won’t have to wait long for hardware when the towers finally do go live. On Wednesday, Samsung officially unveiled the Infuse, a 4G superphone ultimately destined for AT&T that may have iPhone 4 owners thinking twice about which phone rules the network.
In a word, it’s big. Samsung reached for the same Super AMOLED sceen technology found in the Galaxy S for the Infuse, but stretched it out to a whopping 4.5 inches, dwarfing even previous pocket weights like the 4.3-inch Motorola Droid X. That’s only one dimension, though: Samsung also claims the Infuse is also the thinnest phone in AT&T’s portfolio.
All that real estate left plenty of room to pack in other goodies, and Samsung obliged, most notably with a 8-megapixel rear camera that also shoots full 1080p HD video, a significant technical feat beside the current crop of 720p shooters. It’s made by possible by Samsung’s Hummingbird processor under the hood, clocked not at 1GHz as in the Galaxy S but to an even faster 1.2GHz. A front-facing camera for chat, of course, is included as well.
Interestingly, the Infuse will run Android 2.2 rather than Android 2.3 as we’ve seen on most CES arrivals this year, but we doubt an older OS will hold the hardware back.
Samsung hasn’t talked about pricing or release dates just yet, but AT&T claims is LTE network will be operational by mid-2011, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see the Infuse on it at launch.
