Multiple news sources are now reporting the debut of Sprint’s (and the industry’s) first 4G phone, the HTC Evo 4G. From Yahoo:

On sale now, the HTC Evo 4G ($199 with a new, two-year Sprint contract and after a mail-in $100 rebate) has been hotly anticipated for months now — and indeed, along with the recently released HTC Incredible on Verizon Wireless, it’s one of the two hottest Android phones on the market. Another cool feature on the Evo 4G: the phone’s ability to act as a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot, good for sharing the handset’s data connection with up to eight other Wi-Fi-enabled devices (laptops, MP3 players, etc.). Very cool, but keep in mind that you’ll have to pay an additional $30 a month for mobile hotspot functionality, in addition to your standard voice and data charges. (Bundled voice and 3G data plans for the Evo 4G start at $69, plus a mandatory $10-a-month charge for 4G service even if you don’t live in a WiMax coverage area.)

The real interesting thing here is that this is the demarkation point for the possible decline of the smartphone, and the advent of the the personal cloud. The smartphone is more and more being used as a data router with a nice interface (that’s sometimes used to make actual phonecalls). Meanwhile, you have operators like Sprint who are ever so slowly starting to morph their data plans to look more like the flat fee WiMax plans Clear provides.