Ting promises LTE smartphones from LG, HTC 'sooner than later'

Sprint Nextel (NYSE:S) MVNO Ting said it plans to release a number of LTE devices "sooner than later," including the LG Viper 4G LTE, the LG Optimus Elite and HTC Evo 4G LTE. Later on, the company said it expects to sell the Samsung Galaxy S III, and possibly the Samsung Galaxy Nexus as well.

LG Viper LTE Ting

LG viper

"As a Sprint MVNO, we have some restrictions on which devices we can make available to our customers as they must be approved for use on the Sprint network. As a general rule, the device lineup available through Sprint Retail is a good indicator of the devices we can or will get," Ting's Scott Allan wrote on the company's blog. "We want to bring you the best devices as soon as possible, and we are working closely with Sprint to continually improve our ability to do so. We are pretty happy with what we have been able to offer to date, and are quite optimistic things are only going to get better."

Sprint is gearing to launch LTE service sometime this summer.

Ting noted that all its forthcoming smartphones will run Google's Android operating system.

"We have no plan to offer RIM devices at this time," Allan wrote. "We are open to the Windows Phone, but do not have anything firm to tell you at the moment."

And what of the iPhone, which landed at Sprint last year? "We're big fans of Apple and all that they've accomplished with the iPhone," Ting wrote on its website. "Perhaps one day we'll be in a position to offer it to our customers but currently we have no plans to offer the iPhone."

Ting also said it will expand its feature phone lineup.

Ting today offers a number of EV-DO Android smartphones from Kyocera, LG and Samsung, including the LG Optimus S and the WiMAX-capable Samsung Galaxy S II 4G.

Ting, an MVNO run by Internet domain company Tucows, launched service in February with Sprint's CDMA network and Clearwire's (NASDAQ:CLWR) mobile WiMAX network. The MVNO offers minutes, text messages and data in different buckets. If customers use more than they have paid for in a certain month, they are not charged an overage fee, but instead get bumped up to the next usage tier for that month. Likewise, if customers use less than they had thought they would need, they are bumped down to the next lowest usage tier and will receive a credit on their bill for the difference. Users can continuously monitor their usage via an online dashboard.

Importantly, Ting also lets customers have multiple phones under one account and share pools of minutes, text messages and data. Verizon Wireless (NYSE:VZ) recently reformatted its pricing plans around shared data, and AT&T Mobility (NYSE:T) has promised to offer shared data plans as well.

For more:
- see this Ting blog post

Special Report: Will today's next-generation MVNOs shake up the U.S. market?

Related Articles:
Ting offers daily $300 prize to customers who ditch contracts
MVNO Ting to offer LTE service via Sprint's network
Ting MVNO will vary bills based on month-to-month usage