Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Locked in a footrace with AT&T’s Fuze to become the first US national carrier to launch a variant of the HTC Touch Pro, Sprint has announced that folks can start ordering the QWERTY smartphone this week from “select national retailers,” making good on a promise made at CTIA last month. That’s not quite as cool as a full-scale launch, but at least we’ll start to get ‘em in the wild in the next few days — meanwhile, a more full-scale, fanfare-filled launch is planned for November 2 when the Touch Pro is made available online, via phone, and in all Sprint stores. Any Touch Diamond buyers feeling lingering regrets right about now?

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Filed under: Cellphones

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

We’d been encouraged in previous spy shots that AT&T was intending to keep a clean, brand-free look on the front of the Fuze, but what were we thinking? That’d never sit well with the suits up on the 49th floor of AT&T’s headquarters (we just made that up, by the way — we have no idea how many floors AT&T’s headquarters has), and sure enough, the latest batch of shots is showing a big ol’ logo slapped on the upper right of the face. The poster says release is currently planned for early November, but we’d say that target is about as solid as one of those Jello rings you make in a bundt mold. We’ll believe it when it’s on the shelf, as they say.

[Via wmpoweruser]

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You’ve seen HTC’s Touch Diamond, Touch Pro and Touch HD handled in separate instances, but CNET Asia took the opportunity to get all three of the handsets together for a little get-together. Atypical for most sibling relationships, these three seemed to get along fairly well, though we did overhear the Touch Diamond calling the Touch Pro “a fatso.” Hit the read link for a few more looks.

[Via SlashPhone]

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Oh, come on, you know there’s a part of you that wants it. A big part, even. The Touch Diamond is the first new HTC piece to get teed up for Sprint, but the Touch Pro is hot on its heels a few weeks later — and with a QWERTY keyboard, it’s hard to ignore. Question is, is it worth the extra wait? Well, ease your troubled mind for just a second and take a gander at our gallery on Engadget Mobile — we’re not saying it’s going to make your decision any easier, we’re just saying everyone likes pretty pictures.

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Filed under: Cellphones

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

It’s always good news when some sort of Touch Pro garners approval from that lovable bureaucracy we call the FCC, but this one has an extra-special place in our hearts: we’re pretty sure it’s the Fuze. Digging a little deeper into the documentation for the HTC model with code “NM8RPLT” reveals that it’s a Raphael, and it sports HSUPA 850 / 1900 — and if that doesn’t dovetail nicely with what we’re expecting out of AT&T any day, week, month, or year now, we don’t know what does. So tell us, FCC, how are AT&T’s customizations to TouchFLO 3D? Tasteful? Annoying?

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Before a single AT&T-subscribing soul dreams of jumping ship for Sprint just to pick up the Touch Pro in a few weeks, hold up: we can pretty much confirm that it’s coming to your neck of the woods, too. We’ve already seen some totally legit-looking shots of HTC’s hottest QWERTY WinMo piece in AT&T trim, but now we have some more damning evidence in the form of a Google cached page detailing the so-called Fuze on the carrier’s own site. As expected, we’ve got tri-band HSDPA, GPS, WiFi, and BlackBerry Connect waiting for us when AT&T finally decides to pull the plug on the Tilt and make this thing happen. Follow the break for AT&T’s poetic Fuze verbiage — and take your time, since there’s no indication that we’ll have this in stores in the next few days.

[Thanks, Fred]

Continue reading AT&T page confirms HTC Touch Pro as “Fuze”

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Filed under: Cellphones

From the looks of it, Sprint has gone and gotten a decent chunk of its playbook leaked all over the interblogs, and it’s chock-full of titillating information. Thanks to slippery fingers and loose lips, we already knew that the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro were headed to the carrier, but now we have some solid dates (mid-September for the Diamond, October 19th for the Pro), and pricing ($549.99 and $579.99, respectively). Of course, this is all according to the above document, which admittedly could be the work of an extremely bored Photoshopper — but this jibes pretty tightly with a lot of other chatter we’ve been hearing.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Now that the cat’s out of the bag it was no trouble tracking down HTC’s S740 this morning, and just for kicks we rammed the phone up against the Touch Pro, which we subsequently rammed against the Touch Diamond and an iPhone for a generally violent display of smartphone force. It is worth noting that while the S740’s keys are similar to the Touch Pro’s, they’re not quite as deep or clicky, which leads to a rather sub-par typing experience by HTC’s standards. That glossy mirror finish on the phone screens isn’t doing them any favors either — even when wiped smudge free it seems to impede viewing — and we must say the Touch Pro’s matte finish makes the Diamond and iPhone 3G look cheap in comparison. Oh, and when asked about the Dream, the HTC rep quickly replied “we don’t know anything.” It was worth a shot, right?

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Here’s how the smartphones compare:

• HTC Dream: 115 x 55-mm
• iPhone 3G: 115.2-mm x 62.1-mm
• Xperia X1: 110.5 x 52.6-mm
• HTC Touch Pro: 102 x 51-mm

Image of HTC’s label exchange request after the break.

[Thanks, OC]

Continue reading FCC outs HTC Dream’s dimensions: it’s smaller than the iPhone 3G

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While multi-touch input might be all the rage in handhelds and laptop trackpads at the moment, alas, it’s not on the feature list for HTC’s latest Touch Diamond and Touch Pro. However, the capability is indeed present and exploited on video by HTC’s own debug application. Even more interesting is the way that the handsets’ entire front, capacitive surface (not just the 2.8-inch, 640 x 480 pixel display) can be used for multi-finger input. So like Dell’s Latitude XT Tablet which launched multi-touch ready, expect to see future, multi-touch capabilities come to HTC’s latest… someday. Click through for the vid.

[Thanks, Marios S.]

Continue reading Video: HTC’s Touch Diamond / Pro are multi-touch gods, just not how you’d think

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Vodafone expected the Touch Pro to touch down in the UK this month, and sure enough, said expectation has become a reality. HTC’s mighty WinMo-powered smartphone is now available from official UK distributor devicewire, and if you just so happen to use pounds as your primary currency, you can claim one of your own for the eye-popping price of £514.99 (including VAT). We won’t bother converting that into dollars — trust us, you’re better off pretending you don’t know.

[Via coolsmartphone]

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After spending a few minutes with it, there’s no question to us that the Touch Pro is HTC’s most impressive handset to date (even if you count the Xperia X1). Okay, the phone is still a bit thick (roughly the same as a Tilt), and there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack, but it’s got a very small footprint and a very comfortably proportioned keyboard. We can also really definitely appreciate the lengths HTC is going to trying to make Windows Mobile a bit less doggish these days — but were they to spice up the Touch Pro with a capacitive touchscreen and Android, HTC might just have a game-changer on their hands.

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With all the Touch Diamond / Touch Pro news surfacing for these US CDMA carriers, quite a few AT&T subscribers are beginning to get restless. Calm down, folks — it seems the AT&T Touch Pro is a reality waiting to happen after all. Based on some admittedly dodgy claims and even dodgier photographs, one particular soul has apparently paid $900 for a pre-release Touch Pro with North American 3G. Only time will tell if he got duped, but we’re going to believe that AT&T wouldn’t let this gem pass it by for too much longer until proven wrong.

[Via wmpoweruser]

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There’s no doubt that both of HTC’s forthcoming handsets (yeah, the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro) are coming to Sprint and Verizon. What we’re still curious about, however, are the respective launch dates and the eventual names. phoneArena has it that the Touch Diamond will go by HTC Victor on Sprint and HTC Diamond on Verizon, with the former packing a slightly speedier CPU, an aluminum frame, accelerometer, 4GB of internal memory and EV-DO Rev. A support. As for Verizon’s, expect it to boast half the RAM (128MB), a wimpier CPU, microSD expansion slot and a stainless steel frame. Moving on, we’re told that the Touch Pro will be rechristined HTC Herman for Sprint and HTC Raphael (nice to re-meet you!) for The Network. Finally, we’re clued in on a September 2nd release date for Sprint’s Victor, while the Herman is expected a month later. As for Verizon? It’ll probably be 30 or so days behind in both instances thanks to a presumed exclusivity agreement with its nemesis. Get all that?

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The question on quite literally every WinMo fanatic’s mind as we go into the second half of the year here is, “Touch Pro or X1?” It’s not an easy question to answer, and anyone hoping to sink some cash on either one of these models in a few months is going to want to do so with a crap-ton of research and anecdotal information under their belts lest the buyer’s remorse set in particularly quickly. MobileBurn scored an early look at the Touch Pro — which won’t be available at retail for a month or three yet — and came away impressed with the all-important keyboard, saying that it was “much more” usable than the QWERTY found on Sony Ericsson’s rival superphone. Closed, it’s said to be virtually indistingushable from the Touch Diamond (which we’d say is a good thing) other than being a bit thicker to accomodate they keyboard and picking up a matte-finish rear cover. Unfortunately, HTC refused to show off the Touch Pro’s interface — apparently on account of some new tricks up TouchFLO 3D’s sleeve that haven’t already made their way into the Touch Diamond — but they did share that the new model will handle landscape mode with particular aplomb. So this one might have the X1 beat in the keyboard department, but the X1’s WVGA display takes the crown for sheer pixel count. Decisions!

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Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

var digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/gadgets/The_HTC_Touch_Pro_a_QWERTY_Diamond’; Call it Raphael no longer! HTC has officially thrown the cover off its Touch Pro today — the QWERTY slider sibling of the recently-unveiled Touch Diamond — which should cover the bases for those who loved the Diamond’s keen looks but decided they’d go our of their gourds without a full set of physical keys at their disposal. Under that glossy black shell lies WiFi, HSPA with a solid 7.2Mbps on the downstream, Bluetooth, 2.8-inch VGA display, Windows Mobile 6.1 featuring HTC’s TouchFLO 3D interface, a 3.2 megapixel camera, a half gig of ROM, and 288MB of RAM. It’s not going to win any “world’s thinnest” records with an 18.05mm waistline, but those five rows of textual healing don’t come without a price. The first batch of devices will be Europe-bound in “late summer” with 900 / 2100MHz 3G alongside the quadband GSM and EDGE; North and Latin American versions are promised for later in the year.

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