Sprint Nextel Corp. wants to regain the 3 million customers it has lost this year (probably due to the iPhone) with the help of a new Android phone. It is ready to release a phone based on Google’s operating system within a year, and is hoping that a high-profile handset might help get back those lost customers. It might be too little, too late, but we’ll soon find out.

Sprint is the largest service provider supporting Android, and a release on their network will make it a larger player in the smartphone market, which is projected to double to almost 340 million units by 2012.