Cingular today publicly took the veil off its first high-speed downlink packet access phone, the LG Electronics CU500, which the carrier has been selling silently in select markets this spring but is now commercially marketing throughout its UMTS footprint.

The first HSDPA phone to be released in the Americas, the device is based on the first iteration of the multi-stage HSDPA standard, delivering a maximum theoretical throughput of 1.8 Mb/s. LG and Cingular said the phone will deliver real-world speeds of 400 kb/s to 700 kb/s to users, doubling the downlink speeds over its current UMTS-only devices, and exceeding the 300 kb/s to 500 kb/s capacity available to a handset using current EV-DO revision 0 technologies.

Cingular's UMTS-HSDPA networks are now launched in 18 markets, but the company said it plans to have the 3G network up and running in most major U.S. markets by the end of the year.