It looks like Sprint has been champing at the bit for quite a while now to tout how badly it wants to jump into the 4G scene with their slowly blooming LTE networks. Among the scattering of announcements we’ve seen an HTC smartphone.

All Things D has a short article on the details of Sprint’s HTC Evo Shift. “Just ahead of the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sprint revealed the details on the HTC Evo Shift 4G and the Novatel MiFi 3G/4G portable hot spot. The announcement bulks up Sprint’s 4G lineup ahead of what is expected to be the announcement of several phones for Verizon’s new LTE-based 4G network.” It looks like the Evo Shift is coming soon, Jan 7, possibly being sold for $149 but the MiFi won’t be with us until Feb 27.

Walmart prematurely listed the HTC Evo Shift, and so we’ve managed to get images and specs. The device is a sleek little smartphone with a slide-out keyboard, 5-megapixel camera, and runs Android 2.2. It is an obvious evolution of the HTC Evo—another smartphone released last year with a touch screen, but no keyboard.

The Novatel MiFi hotspot is a sleek little thing that will be able to use the current 3G EVDO or 4G WiMax networks. It uses the MiFi OS, sports GPS, an SD card, and at least 60 hours of standby. It is currently boasting a peak down bitrate of over 10 Mbps for 4G networks and 3.1 Mbps for 3G networks. We’ll have to wait to see this device in the wild to see if it can live up to these expectations; but at these rates it could certainly handle most single-user applications with these bitrates.

Insofar, Sprint’s 4G LTE networks and phones have been plagued with glitches, with the EVO 4G facing firmware problems and an inability to connect to their networks, high latency, and spotty coverage. As the result of a firmare upgrade to Sprint TV, HTC phones rang in the New Year with a terrible performance downgrade. This follows an investigation in June by HTC as to why their Sprint devices also had trouble six months ago.