Sprint announces the Eco-friendly LG Viper 4G LTE for preorder on April 12

[Brendan Hugo]

We still don’t know when Sprint is going to fully take the wraps off of its 4G LTE network, but theoretically it will soon. Sprint has just announced that it will be offering the LG Viper 4G LTE on pre-order on April 12 and it will be available before the month is out from all of Sprint’s sales channels. I could be remiss, but I can’t help but hope this means we’ll see Sprint’s LTE turn on before May. Better yet, any lingering fears of 4G LTE unlimited plans being done away with by Sprint can be put to rest.

"LG Viper pairs perfectly with our unlimited data plans to bring customers the benefit of new technology, including our upcoming 4G LTE capabilities at a great price,” said David Owens, vice president-Product Development, Sprint.

The Viper 4G LTE is certainly worthy of its spot as one of Sprint’s two first 4G LTE phones—the other being the Galaxy Nexus—with its 1.2GHz processor and 1GB of RAM, LTE and a price tag of only $99.99 on-contract. This is where the high end specifications stop, but the rest of the phone’s features aren’t too shabby.

Internal ROM is set at only 4GB, with a 4GB microSD card, so you will want to heavily consider a better SD card. A front and a rear camera are also provided, VGA and 5MP respectively. The Viper 4G LTE will provide NFC in its arsenal of wireless technologies, and will support Google Wallet—no hacking required! LG is also providing a sweet deal with Box to provide the Viper 4G LTE’s users with 50GB of free cloud storage, something that otherwise could have cost you as much as $240 a year.

Sprint is touting a long list of eco-friendly attributes on this one, such as ULE Platinum certification—the highest available level of environmental performance. The phone’s casing is made from 50% recycled plastics, and the phone is CarbonFree certified, so the phone’s lifetime carbon footprint has been offset. The eco-friendly feature I care about the most is the phone’s charger, which has a no-load consumption rating of .03W—so you can leave it plugged in all the time without worrying about the ozone layer, or your utilities bill.

In closing my question is thus. Is an eco-friendly phone really a concern for anybody out there? Obviously an eco-friendly car can make a difference, or clean energy, or using less harsh cleaning chemicals. But until our manufacturing and engineering of microchips and batteries drastically changes, electronics will be mostly eco-evil. So does “CarbonFree” or “ULE Platinum” make a difference for you in your buying decision, or are you more concerned with a better price and more features, like free cloud storage and NFC?

[Sprint | 2]