Watch out, Sprint and T-Mobile. Cricket's joining the big guys.

Executives from the nation's number-seven wireless carrier outlined an ambitious plan for growth at their annual analysts' day today, including smartphones, tablet computers, a music service, national phone sales in big-box retail stores and an eventual 4G LTE network.

"Our goal is to become the leading prepaid, value provider of consumer wireless voice and data services nationally," Cricket's chief executive Doug Hutcheson said.

Cricket has about 5.3 million customers right now, and the company's network covers about 94 million people in the U.S. Cricket phones work nationwide thanks to various roaming agreements, but you can only sign up for new Cricket service in a Cricket city.

Androids and Tablets and Music, Oh My!

Cricket is shaking up both their product lineup and their service plans, Hutcheson said.

The company is moving away from voice-and-text phones and towards QWERTY, touchscreen and smart phones. Carrier execs showed off three new smartphones: the BlackBerry 8530, the Kyocera Zio Android phone, and the Huawei M860 Android phone. (For more on Cricket's new phone lineup, see our hands-on with the new Cricket phones.) More smartphones will follow by the end of the year, Hutcheson said.

Those phones come with a new set of plans: $35 and $45 for feature phones, $55 for Android phones and $60 for BlackBerrys. All of those plans come with unlimited voice and text, and "unlimited" data that dramatically slows down after you use more than 1 Gbyte/month.

"We believe that $35 is a winning price point," said Jeff Toig, Cricket's vice president and general manager for products.

While these plans are much cheaper than the four major carriers, Cricket eliminated the least expensive plan in its previous lineup, a $30 talk-only plan.

"In postpaid ... you've got to sign up to a $100 to $150 rate plan to get an Android device," Toig said. "If we come into the market with these services and these devices at these prices, we've got an opportunity to be very disruptive," he said.

Cricket will also change the plans for its 3G Internet service for PCs, in an attempt to drive more costs onto the heaviest users. The current $40, 5-GB/mo plan and $60, 10 Gb/mo plan will become a $40, 2.5-GB/mo plan, a $50, 5-GB/mo plan and a $60, 7.5-GB/mo plan. Existing subscribers will be able to keep their old plans.

"Three percent of users account for 20 percent of usage. Those are the users we'd prefer to have fewer of," said Colin Holland, Cricket's senior vice president of engineering and technical operations.

Smartphones will be followed by tablets, Hutcheson said. He cited "under $200 tablets" that could be coming to Cricket next year.

Along with the smartphone and tablet moves, Cricket plans to introduce a new downloadable music service called MusiK sometime next year, Hutcheson said. The new service, which will be unveiled in October, has been designed from the ground up for mobile devices and has the participation of Warner and Universal Music.

"It's a collaboration amongst the music industry, ourselves and the device manufacturers, and it's designed specifically for the prepaid customer," Hutcheson said.

Verizon Wireless, Sprint and AT&T all have mobile music stores, but Hutcheson said that the new service would have specific features tailored to prepaid and urban customers. More details will come out this fall, he said.

Cricket Goes National

Cricket's next step will be to go national and even compete in 4G.

The company can currently only sell phones in about a third of the country, where they have licenses and spectrum. That will change in the second half of next year, thanks to a new agreement with Sprint, Hutcheson said.

Next year, Cricket will start selling phones nationwide in retailers such as Target, Best Buy and Wal-Mart. If a subscriber isn't in a Cricket city, the carrier will use Sprint's physical network with Cricket's phones and services.

Known as an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator), that's similar to the arrangement Virgin and Boost have with their parent company Sprint.

Hutcheson didn't give any details of how the service plans or product mix would work in the Sprint-originating markets. Currently, Cricket sells different service plans at big-box retail than they do at its own stores, so the plans and phones might be different, but several Cricket execs said to me that they wanted the difference between Sprint-Cricket and Cricket-Cricket to be invisible to the consumer.

As for 4G, Cricket has 10-MHz of dedicated spectrum reserved for 4G use in many of their markets, Holland said. By using LTE as their 4G technology, they can use many of the same components as Verizon Wireless and MetroPCS will be using, he said.

But Cricket is going to wait. They're a value provider, and LTE equipment just won't be priced right for them until the second half of 2012, Holland said. They'll start with trials in the second half of 2011, then build out a "hotspot" network in early 2012 and follow with full market launches in the second half of 2012. By the second half of 2012, they could have a sub-$150, 3G/4G smartphone, he said.

"As a value player you don't want to be on the bleeding edge, you want to let the eocnomics build that are in your favor. We don't want to just launch technology for the sake of launching technology," Holland said.

In the mean time, the company will shore up its 3G network. While Cricket doesn't intend to speed up data with Qualcomm's EVDO Rev B system, the company is seriously looking at improving voice capacity with Qualcomm's 1x Advanced technology, Holland said.