Frozen yogurt coming to Sprint EVO 4G, Possibly tomorrow

Breaking news from the good guys over at Engadget: Froyo (aka Android 2.2) might, just might, be releasing to the world of the Sprint EVO 4g's as soon as tomorrow.  Now granted, I won't believe the yogurt is actually in the freezer until I see the update notification on my phone, but this is truly good news if it does happen.  For those of you that would like a cherry on top of your frozen dessert, this isn't just Froyo with the Sense UI slathered on.  They're being nice enough to include a number of enhancements as well.

This news comes to us via an internal Sprint memo that Engadget was able to get their hands on.  According to the memo, there's going to be some nice enhancements, including:

• New preloaded widgets, such as:
  • Calculator widget
  • FM radio widget
  • Message list view widget
  • Profile settings widget
  • Rington settings widget
• LED Flash-enabling of the camcorder at 24fps (frames per second) for shooting in low-light situations
• The search widget will be able to switch on-the-fly between searching the web, a specific application, or everything (i.e. All, Web, Apps, Calendar, Footprints, Mail, Messages, Music, People, Settings, etc)
• Plus much, much more

There is a statement in the memo regarding preventing 4G Hotspot usage without essentially paying for that option from Sprint.  This is definitely not a shocker.  We're not sure if this will also affect 3G usage as well, though likely it will.

The memo goes on to say that the release for tomorrow will be a client-initiated test bed.  It's not clear if that actually means a limited number of users selected by Sprint or not.  One could read the statement to mean that it will be available if you manually request an update tomorrow, as the note goes on to say that they will not start actively pushing the update until Tuesday, 8/2, "assuming everything goes well".

Clearly, Sprint is under pressure to value-add the EVO 4G as much as possible right now, even with the phone shortage.  They desperately need to get the strong foothold in the 4G market space as quickly as possible to establish a dominant position as the industry leader in the new technology.  This would obviously go a long way as marketing collateral.

I am as anxious as anyone to see this pushed out.  One thing that does scare me though: let's hope they didn't rush this update through their software QA department and it results in a disaster.  We will definitely need to keep our collective fingers crossed on that front.

Click here to read Engadget's write up.

Click here to see the Sprint memo.