14 DAY TRIAL // It appears that Sprint is likely to rebrand the rumored HTC Kingdom smartphone and release it under a different name, HTC Hero 4G.
According to the guys over at Pocketnow, the news was confirmed by multiple sources, one of which being a DLNA certificate for a device that goes by the HTC Hero 4G name.
Furthermore, the HTC Hero 4G has already started to show on different picture sharing websites, which suggests that the phone's launch is imminent.
The HTC Kingdom appeared for the first time about two months ago, when a leaked ROM of the smartphone was spotted in the wild, which suggested that this is indeed a different device and not the HTC EVO 3D.
In addition to the leaked ROM, the HTC Kingdom appeared along with the HTC Shooter, known as HTC EVO 3D, in a GLBenchmark comparison.
Unlike the HTC EVO 3D that is powered by a dual core CPU, HTC Kingdom is presumably equipped with a single core Qualcomm MSM7630 processor, clocked at 1.2GHz.
Furthermore, the HTC Kingdom packs 768 MB of RAM and comes with a 4-inch qHD touchscreen display with 960 x 540 pixels resolution.
The phone's 5-megapixel camera with autofocus features HD video recording capabilities (720p), while the secondary front facing camera allows users to make video calls.
Sprint's HTC Kingdom / HTC Hero 4G will be delivered with Google's Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread) operating system on board.
The launch of the highly-anticipated HTC Hero 4G seems to be imminent, especially that the phone already received FCC's (Federal Communications Commission) approval and Amazon received a stock of the phone's cases.
If nothing goes wrong, the HTC Hero 4G might hit shelves before the end of August or early September.
On related news, it is worth mentioning that Sprint was the sole U.S.-based major carrier that picked the original HTC Hero smartphone.