Yesterday Sprint launched the Kyocera Echo, the first smartphone device in the market to come pre-installed with the Location Labs Sparkle technology. This is a proud moment for us as it is a culmination of a year of hard work and collaboration with Sprint and their OEM partners.

Enter the No Download Zone!

A pre-install means that users don’t have to download anything to their phone – effectively solving one of the toughest problems faced by smart phone developers: ubiquity in service availability without worrying about users deleting their app. Sparkle exposes device access and control capabilities to the network via a REST-based API. In this initial release, we focus on location, exposed both as a real-time location API (initiated via MT-SMS or IP-based push) and a location streaming (or push) API, updating the network application if and when the user's location changes. We have also addressed the two typical concerns of location access – privacy and battery life. Our patent-pending technology minimizes battery impact while providing a high quality of service location data stream suitable for a wide variety of applications and services.

More Devices Coming …

The Echo is an Android 2.2 device, and through the rest of the year we will continue to be pre-installed on all Sprint smartphones across multiple platforms. So, look out for more announcements from us in upcoming days and months.

For more information about the Kyocera Echo launch, click here.

@sahotes