The $299 Samsung Craft, the world's first LTE phone, takes a quiet approach to introducing a 4G network technology that will soon sweep the globe. It's a well-built, solid feature phone that's very similar to Verizon's Samsung Rogue, just with a frisson of 4G.

So first, that 4G. That's what you want to know about, right? Most of the wireless carriers in the world, including Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Cricket, will be using 4G LTE in the next few years in a quest for more speed, more capacity, and more flexibility. MetroPCS beat them to the punch by launching its 4G LTE network today — at $55 and $60 per month, no less. For more on Metro's 4G plans, see our related story.

The key to understanding the Craft is that MetroPCS has 4G, but most MetroPCS cities don't have 3G. So in this case, 4G takes the place of 3G, enabling decently brisk Web browsing, streaming NBC TV shows, full-track DRM-free music downloads — the sort of stuff that we've seen from Verizon and its ilk for ages, but that MetroPCS has never been able to pull off because of its lack of Gs. Even the speed I saw on the Craft's browser was 3G-esque, at around 1 megabit per second.

4G or no 4G, though, this looks to be MetroPCS's best feature phone - and in some ways, MetroPCS's best phone, period. The Samsung Craft is a sliding phone with both a comfortable, four-row QWERTY keyboard and a 3.3-inch, 800-by-480 AMOLED capacitive touch screen. Its build is very solid, and it has a noticeable but not unpleasant heft at 5.29 oz. The phone runs Samsung's proprietary OS with the TouchWiz widgets, so you can stick shortcuts to your favorite photos or apps onto three sliding home screens.

There's a full complement of Internet technologies here: 2G, 3G, 4G LTE, and Wi-Fi. Sadly, though, although the Craft supports 3G, MetroPCS doesn't have any 3G roaming agreements, so if you aren't in Metro's two 3G cities (Dallas and Detroit) you'll have to rely on Wi-Fi if you can't find 4G and want speed.

The Craft's Polaris browser is better than most feature-phone browsers. It does a good job of displaying desktop HTML pages, and it supports very limited Flash content through Flash Lite 3. Pages viewed on 4G loaded at what felt like 3G speeds, which was expected given that I was on a very limited network. While you can't pinch to zoom, you can tap, hold, and drag to zoom, which is almost as good.

There's a ton of custom MetroPCS software on here. If this were a smartphone, I'd call it bloatware, but on a BREW-powered feature phone, it's all useful. The flagship 4G app is MetroStudio, the carrier's new music and video store. Initially, it's going to show some TV episodes and promos from NBC properties, BET, and Univision, and sell non-DRMed M4a-format music from all the major labels. It's powered by RealNetworks. I took a look at "The Office" on 4G, and it played back sharp and clear.

Other Metro apps include a new social-networking app that combines instant messaging, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, Metro411-enhanced directory assistance, and a new version of Metro Navigator GPS with better points-of-interest support. The social-networking app, which will initially appear only on the Craft but will spread to other phones, is quite cool — it leaves you logged into all of your networks and alerts you if you get direct messages.

So far it's all impressive, but incremental. A lot of the features here are new to MetroPCS but they're stuff Verizon and AT&T have had for a while. But that's OK with MetroPCS: this is the start of a decade-long road into 4G for the company, into a world that it has said continues on to Android smartphones in 2011, to ubiquitous voice-over-IP and to whatever data services its prepaid customers' hearts desire. For now, that journey begins with a step.

We'll have a full review of the Samsung Craft soon.