You may have purchased your first cell phone for its elemental function of being able to take phone calls, but is that the main reason you own one now? With text messaging, food delivery apps, and social networking right in the palm of your hand, today's technology has made it wonderfully possible (debatable) to avoid talking to another person on your phone in real time. Now, Sprint has made it even easier to evade direct and lengthy communication with the revival of an old service, Direct Connect Now, in the form of a new push-to-talk app -- in other words, they're bringing back walkie-talkie chatting.
Sprint Direct Connect Now is slated to debut first on the Samsung Transform Ultra, and will be downloadable as an Android app. It will give users access to Sprint's CDMA-based Direct Connect network to let them chirp at their family and friends -- holding up to 20 conversations at once -- even minus the all-but-defunct iDEN-compatible hardware of yore. (The iDEN network Sprint scooped up when it acquired Nextel is actually 2G technology, which means voice and data can't be operated on it simultaneously.)
While the Samsung Transform Ultra is set to get push-to-talk first, Sprint may offer the feature on their higher-end Android phones soon afterward, since it's entirely software-based. Who knows? The glory days of walkie talkies might just be making a comeback.
via The Verge
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