Sprint announced today major network enhancements in Seattle, Las Vegas and Milwaukee markets. Upgrades to the Sprint Power Vision Network to the new EV-DO Revision A technology will allow consumers to take advantage of higher data transfer rates for enhanced data communications.

Sprint Power Vision users in these markets should experience significantly faster average upload speeds of 300-400 kbps (compared with 50-70 kbps of current EV-DO networks). Average download speeds should also increase to 450–800 kbps from 400-700 kbps.

Overall, Sprint plans to reach more than 200 million people in the U.S. with mobile broadband data services (including both EV-DO Revisions 0 and A) in 220 major metropolitan areas across the country with its Power Vision network by the end of 2006. By 3Q 2007, Sprint’s Power Vision network is expected to be completely upgraded to the faster EV-DO Revision A.

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In response to the latest lawsuit set by NTP against the SmartPhone manufacture, Palm had issued the following statement.

The NTP lawsuit claims that certain Palm products infringe seven NTP patents. All seven of the patents asserted are being re-examined by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and have been rejected by the re-examiners as invalid. Palm also noted that the NTP patents disclose a pager-based email service that has nothing in common with the mobile-computing devices invented by Palm.

Palm has been in occasional contact with NTP concerning a license to these patents. When Palm last communicated with NTP many months ago, however, each of the patents already was the subject of re-examination proceedings by the PTO. Palm is disappointed that, after many months of silence and repeated rejections of NTP’s claims by the PTO, NTP has chosen to sue on patents of doubtful validity.

Palm respects legitimate intellectual property rights, but will defend itself vigorously against the attempted misuse of the patent and judicial systems to extract monetary value for rights to patents that may ultimately have no value at all.

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Just when we thought NTP was out of the spotlight with all the lawsuit activity, they are back. NTP said on Monday it files a patent infringement lawsuit against Palm. NTP states that the Palm handheld products and service infringe NTP’s patents and seeks recovery of monetary damages.

NTP, a patent holding firm, said in the lawsuit that it first contacted 3Com, once Palm’s parent company, in January 2000. It says it followed up with Palm in July 2004 and April 2006. In the meantime, NTP had kept busy with litigation against RIM.

Palm stock was down more than 7 percent after the lawsuit was announced.

Sprint announced today plans to release the first CDMA version of the SLVR from Motorola. The updated SLVR L7c is Sprint’s first candy bar style phone to offer EVDO high-speed technology. Like other handsets offered by Sprint, the L7c offers access to Sprint’s Power Vision Network, the Sprint Music Store, Sprint TV, On Demand services and more.

SLVR L7c features include:

• 1.9″ 65K-color TFT (176 x 220 pixels) display
• Bluetooth
• Speakerphone
• Media player with MicroSD card slot
• VGA camera (still and video)
• Tethering capabilities

Sprint had not announced pricing and exact release dates, but it is expected well before the holidays and competitively priced.

Its no surprise that Cingular is set to release the 8525 (a.k.a. HTC Hermes), but it is good to hear that it will be before the holiday season. Cingular Wireless announced today details of the upcoming release of the updated Windows Mobile 5.0 handheld. Replacing the current 8125, the 8525 offers the addition of high-speed HSDPA technology. HSPDA offers data transfer rates of up to 700Kbps in Cingular’s continuously growing BroabandConnect coverage area.

The Cingular 8525 is set to release November 16th and be offered for $399.99.

Cingular Newsroom

With the announcement of Cingular’s advancements with mobile music, came the subtle announcement of the Samsung SGH-a707 a.k.a. the “SYNC”. The SYNC will come pre-loaded with Cingular’s mobile music application which will allow users to easily ‘sync’ music files from their desktop computer and mobile phone.

SYNC features include:

• 2 megapixel camera
• Bluetooth
• 2.2″, 320 X 240 QVGA display
• Speakerphone
• Quad band 850/900/1800/1900MHz GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 1900 UMTS
• MicroSD memory card support

The Cingular SYNC is expected to release November 6th, for $49.99 after rebates and a new two-year service agreement.