Click to View

Sprint will become the first carrier to offer High Tech Computer's (HTC) Touch smartphone in the U.S. on November 4th, America’s third largest mobile operator announced this week. The Touch has proven to be a very popular addition to HTC’s extensive lineup of smartphones. It has moved 800,000 units since releasing the Touch in Europe and Asia almost three months ago.

Sprint will sell the Touch for $250 with a two-year contract and after a $100 mail-in rebate.

As with the iPhone, the main means of interaction between the user and the Touch is through its display, which measures 2.8 inches diagonally, sports a 240 x 320 pixel (QVGA) resolution and supports 65,536 colors.

Unlike the iPhone, the Touch is built on Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6 Professional operating system, currently a far more open mobile platform for which thousands of applications are available.

The Touch features HTC's TouchFLO technology, which essentially grafts an advanced touch interface onto Windows Mobile. As a result, it is supposed to be capable of recognizing and responding to the sweep of a finger across the screen. It is even supposed to be intelligent enough to distinguish between finger and stylus input.

Sweep your fingers across the display to launch an animated, three-dimensional interface comprising three screens: Contacts, Media and Applications. The interface can be spun by swiping a finger right or left across the display, providing what appears to be easier access to these features for consumers than a normal Windows Mobile interface for most.

TouchFLO also delivers finger touch scrolling and browsing of Web pages, documents, messages and contact lists.

As a Windows Mobile Professional device, the HTC Touch offers Outlook Mobile, Office Mobile for editing and reading native Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, Pocket Internet Explorer and Windows Live. With it, you can view HTML-formatted e-mail and push e-mail in an Exchange environment.

The Touch measures only 4 x 2.4 x 0.6 inches and weighs 4 ounces. It offers both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and supports Sprint's high-speed EV-DO 3G data network.

There's a 2 megapixel with 5x zoom for picture and video, 64MB of RAM, 128MB of ROM and a microSD slot for extra storage. Sprint is bundling a 512MB microSD card, a format that currently tops out at 4GB.

Its Li-Ion battery specs out to last 200 hours standby and up to 5 hours of talk time.

The Touch supports the Sprint Music Store, TV, Radio and other exclusive content from the carrier.

We'll be posting our review of the Touch soon.