A Little Walkie Talkie Love Between CDMA and iDEN

In an effort to further merge their services, Sprint has successfully completed a walkie talkie call between an iDEN and a CDMA phone. What this means is that when fully implemented, you’ll be able to “chirp” one another, regardless of whether you’re using a Sprint CDMA phone or a Nextel iDEN handset.

The spokeswoman from Sprint “confirmed that test was an important advancement in Sprint’s efforts to launch walkie talkie service using its Revision A CDMA network.” As they push the 3G envelope further, they’d like to be able to use the EVDO Rev.A network for a walkie talkie service, as well as the usual onslaught of data-heavy services.

The plan is to have the walkie-talkie service function similarly to the existing iDEN system, providing interoperability between the two.