HTC launches new Windows smartphones

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 30 June 2009 12:47

Business IT - Technology

HTC has launched three new Windows Mobile based smartphones in Australia, all with features aimed at enhancing ease of use, particularly in typical business usage scenarios.

They are the HTC Snap, similar in layout to the standard Blackberry with full qwerty keyboard and trackball, and two touch-screen devices: the touch-only Diamond2 and the Touch Pro2 with both touch screen and full qwerty keyboard.

The Snap and Touch pro2 will be offered first by Telstra and the Diamond2 by Optus. Pricing and availability are yet to be announced.

All three devices presently run Windows Mobile 6.1 but will be upgradeable to 6.5, scheduled for release sometime before the end of 2009. All three products include 7.2Mbps HSPA modems and support Internet tethering, a feature that HTC says has been supported by its products "for several years."

The Snap is billed as "an affordable straightforward choice for remotely synchronising email, calendar and contacts with Microsoft Exchange server, yet simple and flexible enough for first time smartphone users wanting to keep their family life organised."

Its key user-interface innovation is a feature known as "Inner Circle". This enable users to nominate selected contacts as members of their "inner circle" then, when faced with a deluge of unread email messages, they can simply select "inner circle" to have messages from those people move to the top of the list.

The Diamond2 and Touch Pro2 both include another HTC innovation known as "People Centric Communication." This enables users to gather together all contact details and history for a contact on the one screen: email addresses and phone numbers, emails sent and received, call history etc and for information such as previous emails to be easily accessed during a call.

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