Sprint confirms new Motorola Photon Q

Sprint revealed it will carry Motorola's new Photon Q Android smartphone later this year.

Carrier CEO Dan Hesse first confirmed the smartphone during Sprint's quarterly earnings call earlier today.

He specifically highlighted the business smartphone is also environmentally friendly, with ULE Platinum certification.

Hesse also had kind words to say about the success of other high end smartphones with Sprint, including the Samsung Galaxy S3 and HTC Evo 4G LTE.

No numbers were given, but he said Sprint is seeing strong early sales for both devices.

Under the hood

After the CEO leaked word of the Motorola Photon Q, Sprint followed up with a fact sheet of the smartphone's upgraded specs.

The successor to last year's Photon 4G, the Photon Q makes use of its new name by offering a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

Along with the addition of physical keys, the Photon Q features a 4.3-inch ColorBoost display and 1.5GHz dual-core processor. Motorola is quite proud of the smartphone, claiming that the 4.3-inch screen is the largest found on a QWERTY keyboard-equipped 4G device.

The Photon Q also includes Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, an 8-megapixel rear camera, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of system memory, SD card slot, and NFC support.

No launch date was announced, with both that and the Photon Q's price said to be revealed in the coming weeks.