Sprint Direct 2 You sends company representatives to you to help setup new smartphones

While Sprint is busy putting up new towers to help improve their network and trying to match T-Mobile in the value game, they’ve come up with another unique strategy to help retain your business: personal visits to help you set your new smartphones up.

It’s called Direct 2 You, and a fleet of more than 5,000 vehicles driven by Sprint representatives will be on-hand to meet up with you at your home, office or any other location you desire — at whichever time you desire (within reason, we imagine) — to help you get going on your phone. This includes transferring content and contacts from one phone to another, with great emphasis placed on the Android to iPhone conversion or vice versa.

This is a process typically done in-store, but Sprint feels time is too precious to have you waiting in long lines at the point of sale. The best part? It’s all absolutely free. Take it from someone whose most recent upgrade took more than 3 hours of waiting inside the stuffy corners of a Verizon store — this is awesome.

The service will begin in major areas of Miami and Chicago starting April 20th (testing has already started in Sprint’s backyard of Kansas City), and will spread to more major cities as 2015 rolls on.

[via Sprint]

Sharp reveals a ridiculous 5.5-inch 4K display, but will smartphones ever need that much?

The display arms race has been underway since companies decided Quad HD was the new high-end standard last year, but Sharp says that isn’t enough — displays need to be even more rich and dense than they currently are. The company today announced the development of a 5.5-inch display at a whopping 4K resolution. That’s 3,860 x 2,160 pixels if you aren’t aware, and stuffing all of that into a 5.5-inch form factor stands to bring you a pixel density of 806ppi.

That’s far higher than what the human eye is said to be able to notice, and it should make for a display quality that’s absolutely out of this world. Sharp touted the use of “IGZO” technology that is able to produce a richer picture while using significantly less power, something we imagine was important considering the batteries for the types of devices that these displays will be used for aren’t quite fit to handle such a thing.

A 4K display at this size is seen to be quite useless, though there are many benefits to be had for technologies such as virtual reality where a rich pixel density helps immerse you into whichever virtual world you’re whisked to. We imagine VR will be the initial and primary market for this sort of display, though we wouldn’t be surprised to see smartphone manufacturers wanting to use it just for the sake of saying no other smartphone’s resolution can beat theirs.

We’ll have to wait for its arrival in an actual device to see if there are any significant drawbacks to using the display (such as being more taxing on a mobile processor or sucking a battery dry before the sun sets), but it’ll have to wait as Sharp doesn’t expect to ship these displays until sometime next year.

[via Techblog.gr]

LG sold a respectable 15.4 million smartphones in Q1 2015

LG is really hitting their stride when it comes to knowing how to deliver desirable smartphones, and their latest quarterly results prove it. The company reported revenue and profit of .72 billion and .91 million, respectively. The profit is up “significantly” compared to the last quarter, all the while revenue was virtually the same as it was in the same period a year ago.

LG has many businesses that contributed to the result, though they noted their smartphone business has been doing quite well. The company shipped a total of 15.4 million smartphones last quarter, a 26% increase from the same period a year ago. It also accounted for .27 billion of the overall revenue, which is a 5% year-on-year increase.

The result was helped by particularly strong performances in North America and their hometown of South Korea. The former region’s smartphone sales jumped a whopping 66% year-on-year, while quarter-over-quarter performance in South Korea jumped 57%.

Much of the company’s success in the mobile sector last quarter can be credited to the launch of the intriguing LG G Flex 2, our review of which you can find right here. Expect the forthcoming LG G4 (see our hands-on) to take the baton and do even more. It might not be enough to topple the current smartphone king known as Samsung, after a string of bad years earler in the decade we can’t imagine LG is disappointed about recent results.

Official: OnePlus 2 will be one of the first smartphones to feature a USB Type-C port

OnePlus is officially getting the hype train rolling for their upcoming OnePlus 2, the followup to last year’s (frustrating) OnePlus One flagship. Today they announced on social media that the phone will be the first Android flagship to feature USB Type C, a reversible port that doesn’t care which way you insert the cable in (similar to Apple’s Lightning port on the iPhone).

The connection does more than just charge devices (which tops out at 5A/20V/100W vs USB 2.0’s 2.5V), allowing video output as well thanks to higher 10Gbps speeds. Google committed to the new connector back when they unveiled the Chromebook Pixel 2 in March, so we expect it will also arrive in this year’s Nexus launching at the end of this year. OnePlus seems confident their flagship will be the first to use the new spec, so we expect a OnePlus 2 launch is right around the corner.

[Twitter]