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Echoing sentiments of Sprint’s senior VP of networks from last month, CEO Dan Hesse has said that the company will be saying goodnight to its aging push-to-talk network — iDEN — that it inherited from its Nextel acquisition several years ago, “just like 1G was shut down.” Of course, the difference between 1G cellular and iDEN is that iDEN still holds a very unique position in the wireless marketplace: even though it sucks for data, it’s really the only popular, successful way to route push-to-talk over a cell network of any kind. To that end, the company is actively soliciting bids to build out CDMA 1X Advanced right now, which may allow the company to have another go at moving its PTT services over to a CDMA-based technology (the first attempt, QChat, already failed). In the meantime, Hesse says that the company is putting most of its marketing efforts into attracting customers to its CDMA airwaves, not its iDEN ones, in the hopes that they’ll be able to smooth out the transition and free up iDEN spectrum for other services. It’s had a good run, hasn’t it? Read more at www.engadget.com

There aren’t many CDMA Windows Phone 7 phones hanging around the WP7 launch event, but Sprint’s 3.6-inch HTC 7 Pro ended up in our warm hands just moments ago. Sadly, HTC didn’t have a working unit (no, IMDb demos for you!), but we did get to check out the hardware and its extremely comfortable five-row QWERTY keyboard — with clicky keys, a dedicated number row, and a properly staggered layout for once. As for the slider mechanism, it’s quite sturdy, and we’re definitely digging HTC’s good old tilt capability, here in its finest iteration yet — whereas previous devices typically floated the screen somewhere above the keyboard, here the front lip actually sinks into the phone’s frame for extra stability and class. That’s all we really got for now as this bad boy won’t be hitting Sprint until the first half of 2011, but in the meantime you can check out a quick video of it below.Read more at www.engadget.com

According to an administrator on Sprint’s official forums, the company will be releasing a software update for the Epic 4G to address issues with data speeds being capped. The thread, titled “3G Upload Capped,”  has well over 500 replies. The administrator’s response is as follows: Good news – an update will be released tomorrow 9/30.  It will be rolled out over a 4 day period so not everyone will get it on day 1. I will have the standard MR information (fixes included, rollout schedule, etc) available tomorrow morning and will post it in a new featured thread. Hopefully this will squash he data speed issue that Epic 4G users have been reporting. Read more at www.boygeniusreport.com