It’s official: Sprint’s first WiMax/4G phone is everything we hoped it would be. The HTC Evo  combines the “perfect specimen” hardware of the Touch HD2, the Sense-on-Android smoothness of the Legend, and unprecedented download speeds. It’s a beast. UPDATED: Hands on!

The Evo (rumored as the Supersonic) has the much-loved 4.3-inch screen (480×800 TFT LCD), and 1GHz Snapdragon processor of the of the HTC Touch HD2. But while not even HTC’s Sense UI skin could save that phone from its WinMo 6.5 underpinnings, Evo will run on the much sleeker Android 2.1. It’ll be one of the first US phones to sport the latest and greatest Android OS, although Kat’s already fully endorsed the 2.1 and Sense combo that runs HTC Legend in Europe. It also steps up the camera from 5MP to 8MP. Also: a front-facing camera 1.3MP camera capable of HD video recording.

The emphasis on video is clear: the Evo’s got HDMI out and a kickstand for full enjoyment of the HD video it’s capable of streaming and recording. The phone’s also got 1GB of built-in storage, along with 512MB of RAM.

The demos Sprint is showing us—of video playback and Google Goggles, do show very impressive download speeds. It also runs Flash seamlessly, a mandatory point these days to differentiate from the Apple mobile products that don’t.

Even better? The HTC Evo will work as a hotspot for up to eight devices. No word on pricing on that yet, but it’s pretty remarkable that you can run 4G speed internet from one phone that broadly. It’s not kidding around, either; in a demo, it enabled the streaming of a scene from Transformers 2 through a Roku. It’ll also, Sprint was happy to point out, work on an iPhone or Droid. It’ll be available this summer, presumably for a truckload of cash.

It’s a historic moment for Sprint, in a couple of ways. First and foremost, the Evo is the first 4G phone in the US (while still capable of a 3G signal). While WiMax currently only reaches 34 million people—and isn’t yet it New York, San Francisco, or Washington, DC—Sprint partner Clearwire hopes to expand coverage to up to 120 million people by the end of the year (they added seven new cities to the roster today.) And those that are covered can expect download speeds far beyond what we’ve become accustomed to on 3G.

The announcement of the Evo, in combination with the recent addition of the Nexus One to their network, also puts Sprint in an unusual position of hardware leadership. In just a few weeks they’ve gone from a middling smartphone line-up to having arguably the two best Android phones on the market.