NEW ORLEANS—Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich is finally coming to Cricket Wireless in the form of the ZTE Nova 4.0 V8000, according to ZTE representatives at the CTIA Wireless trade show.
Cricket has several Android phones, including the highly rated Huawei Mercury, but hasn't announced ICS upgrades for any of them. Over at ZTE's booth, on the other hand, the V8000 is running ICS out of the box.
The V8000 is a clear competitor to the Huawei Mercury, with a 4-inch, 800-by-480 screen, 8-megapixel camera, 1900mAh battery, and 1.4-GHz single-core Qualcomm S2 processor. Internal storage is slim at 1.1GB, but there's also a memory card slot.
This phone is definitely going for the "nondescript black slab" look, although in this case it's a slab with a bit of a chin thanks to a large bottom bezel. It's not quite as premium a feel as the Mercury, but it might be cheaper. The back is matte plastic, with a glossy plastic edge and a glass screen. I have no complaints about its performance; it flipped through menus just fine, although ZTE's demo unit couldn't connect to the Internet and didn't have any interesting apps on it.
It looks like the V8000 may not have been initially designed for ICS, because it has four rather than three virtual keys below the screen, including the now-deprecated menu button. That's actually a plus, in my view; I like always knowing where the menu button is.
Interestingly, ZTE's spec list for this phone showed "HD Voice" as one of its features. So far, Sprint is the only U.S. carrier to announce HD Voice, but it's a potential feature of Qualcomm's 1X-Advanced network system, which Cricket is switching over to.
Cricket reps would not confirm that the V8000 was headed to its carrier.
For more from CTIA, check out the photoblog below.