Motorola announces powerhouse Photon 4G on Sprint (Photos)

Motorola is off to a bit of a slow start with its 4G smartphones. It delayed the release of the Droid Bionic on Verizon months ago, and today the company finally announced its first WiMax smartphone for Sprint, the Photon 4G, at a New York press event. The company also announced the Triumph, its first Virgin Mobile smartphone.

While it stands to be one of the most powerful phone on Sprint when it arrives this summer, the Photon 4G comes more than a year after HTC released its super popular Evo 4G in fact, HTC is gearing up to launch that phone successor, the Evo 3D, later this month. Samsung also beat out Motorola with the launch of its Epic 4G on Sprint last August.

But perhaps Motorola’s 4G phones will be worth the wait. The Photon shares most of the Droid Bionic specifications– including a 4.3-inch screen, dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 camera, and 8 megapixel rear camera. Motorola also saw fit to include 1 gigabyte of RAM in the Photon, twice as much as what the Bionic holds. It will come with Android 2.3 installed, and as with most 4.3-inch monster phones, the Photon will be equipped with a kickstand.

Motorola is touting increased enterprise security with the Photon, thanks to its purchase of the mobile security startup 3LM earlier this year, as well as business-focused tools in its Blur software. The phone is also capable of working on GSM networks internationally, which coupled with the above enterprise features makes it a good Android phone for road warriors.

As for the Triumph on Virgin Mobile, its certainly less sexy than the Photon or Motorola other flagship smartphones, but it seems to be a solid phone for a prepaid carrier. The Triumph sports a 4.1-inch screen 2 gigabytes of storage and will be powered by Android 2.2 "Froyo" when it lands this summer.