HTC goes WVGA with Touch HD

HTC, the hardest-working smartphone maker in the business, has announced another Windows Mobile handset in the Touch family. The headline feature on the Touch HD, which joins an increasingly long list of WinMob iPhone-wannabes, is a high-resolution 3.8in. screen offering 480 by 800 pixels (WVGA).



At the back there's a 5-megapixel camera (a step up from the Touch Pro's 3.2-megapixel unit), plus a forward-facing VGA camera for video calling. Music-lovers will appreciate the device's standard 3.5mm audio jack, and of course there's HTC's pretty TouchFLO 3D interface to put a bit of gloss on the underlying Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional.

The 3.8in. screen makes the Touch HD a bit bigger than the Pro (62.8mm by 115mm compared to 51mm by 102mm), although it lacks a slide-out keyboard and so is thinner (12mm versus 18mm); it's lighter too (146.4g versus 165g). The battery in the Touch HD is a 1,350MAh unit that HTC rates for 310 minutes of GSM talk time.

A quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE phone with HSDPA support, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 (+EDR) and integrated GPS, the Touch HD ticks all the specification boxes. Like the Touch Pro, it's powered by a 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7201a processor with 288MB of RAM and 512MB of flash. Storage can be augmented via an SDHC-compatible microSD card slot, and the Touch HD will ship with an 8GB card.

There's no word on pricing yet. HTC says that the Touch HD will be available across major European carriers in Q4 2008. We'll follow up with a full review just as soon as we can prise one out of HTC.