Verison Wireless will shortly introduce CDMA 1xEV-DO for the Washington, DC and San Diego, CA markets. For those who are unfamiliar, CDMA 1xEV-DO promises sustained data rates of 300-600 kps, with burst rates of up to 2.4 Mbits.second. See http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=29754

My question is, does anyone know if the Kyocera 7135 (or any Express Network-compatible phone) will support it?

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No it won't. 7135 supports 1xRTT not 1xEV-DO.

Maybe just a firmware upgrade? Probably not. Sound very hardware-ish.

Very hardwareish..........

Well, hopefully Kyocera can do the hardware upgrade w/free upgrade or very very very discounted upgrade.

Not possible. The very guts of the phone, the baseband processor and it's associated chips are different.

Even though I am in the DC area and would love to play with this kind of speed, I travel too much to give up on my 7135 with 1x speed yet. By the time VZW has this rolled out nationwide, there will be newer and better smartphones available and it will be time to upgrade....

Alan

You will not see EV in any of the handsets currently offered by Kyocera. That would be totaly differnet handsets. Perhaps the next smartphone....

From what I've read, my guess is that if you get a EV phone and go to a 1xrtt or regular cdma area it will work, without the fancy additions, but the 7135 will not do anything new, but it should work on the new network, again with no new bells or whistles

Jorge

yeah, these systems will be backwards compatible, but the legacy handsets wont be able to take advantage of the new features of the network.

Wat??? There's no way I can afford another phone after how much I paid for this one. This phone is like a computer for sakes...

Maybe if kyocera is thinking of a new phone, try to make it future upgradable like today's pc by just swaping hardware. Think about the possibility. Users that can't afford all the bells and whistle of the most advance phone can customize it to their budget.

Like OSes
CPU
Memory
Modem

What do you guys and girls think?

I think the FCC would not allow it. They test and award certification based on a fixed configuration. You swap out the radio part and you have a new phone. And it would not be as easy as testing the module and OK'ing that - putting it into a different case and having different components near it could totally changed the RF characteristics.

I think you need to accept the fact that nobody is going to make a field-upgradable (hardware-wise) phone.