The Cream of the New Cell Phone Crop

HTC's major handset announcement at CTIA was the HTC Touch Dual, basically an HTC Touch enhanced by addition of a slide-out 20-key keypad. The Touch Dual uses predictive text entry similar to the scheme that powers text entry on RIM's BlackBerry Pearl. Due to appear by summer, the Touch Dual is a quad-band HSDPA phone; it will likely be one of the first to support Windows Mobile 6.1, the point update to Microsoft's mobile operating system that was announced at CTIA.

HTC, by the way, also announced a Verizon Wireless counterpart to the original HTC Touch (an EVDO handset with HTC's proprietary TouchFlo technology), which up to now has only been available on Sprint. On Verizon Wireless, it will be called the Verizon XV6900.