Viva Las Vegas! T-Mobile rolls out 3G in Sin City

No Elvis, EDGE hasn’t left the building, but it has been augmented by much faster HSDPA service in Las Vegas. T-Mobile appears to be doing a very staged 3G rollout in service areas; for example, New York, New York (the city, not the casino) saw service a few months back. Good timing too since CES is right around the corner and we need to see some customer offloading from Verizon’s EV-DO. It seems to get more clogged in January than McCarran Airport does the day after a convention.

T-Mobile says they’re on track for a 3G rollout in 20 markets by the end of 2008, but they haven’t introduced any heavy-duty hardware that can take serious advantage of the faster up- and down-link. That should be changing in the near future based on this quote from the PR: "T-Mobileplans to soon offer its first HSDPA device, along with new andcompelling data-centric, all-in-one devices that help make the most ofT-Mobile’s high-speed data network. " Read into that what you will, but I suspect we’ll see an HTC device or two with 1700 MHz support in the very near future. Any guesses on what they might be? A handheld built upon the Android platform should be in the cards, no?