In an interview with UBS yesterday, Sprint CFO Joe Euteneuer revealed that his company plans to introduce its first LTE-capable handsets in the latter half of 2012. More specifically, he identifies the third quarter as the likeliest time for launch, while also pointing out that Sprint will have "a number of different models" that will offer mobile broadband speeds that "will be very competitive to what's already out on the marketplace." Joe also announced that Sprint's first multimodal base station — supporting both CDMA and LTE — is now being deployed. The plan, he says, is for Sprint to light up its LTE service in a number of locations across the US first, and then introduce handsets that can exploit the new technology after that.

Joe also reiterated Sprint's commitment to using WiMAX until 2015, but was clear in saying that the company expects LTE to be the future. You can listen to the full interview at the link below, which includes some bonus discussion of Sprint's relationship with Clearwire and how the two will work together in transitioning to LTE.