HTC Intros Touch Pro, a Business-Centric Version of Touch Diamond

High Tech Computer on Wednesday announced the Touch Pro, a business handset a similar design to the iPhone rival, HTC Touch Diamond revealed last month to great fanfare.

Touch Pro shares the curved diamond backside of its sister handset, but it’s thicker due to the Qwerty-keypad that slides out for easy thumb typing. The keypad also includes a fifth row, a top line with numbers, which HTC handset keypads have not had in the past.

Also like the Touch Diamond, the Touch Pro is a 3G (third generation mobile telecommunications) smartphone running Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional OS. The 2.8-inch screen on front is made for easy touch navigation using HTC’s TouchFlo touchscreen software.

Touch Pro marks the second 3G touchscreen handset HTC has announced head of the 3G iPhone. Last year, the company launched its popular Touch smartphone a few weeks ahead of the iPhone and has sold 3 million since then.

Apple has not formally announced a launch date for its 3G iPhone, but some speculate it may be out this month.

Touch Pro is aimed at business users who need the keypad and message/e-mail functions. An HTC representative said the device will be out globally around August.

The smartphone works on WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) networks. For mobile Internet access, it offers data rates up to 7.2M bits per second using HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) on cellular networks, or via Wi-Fi 802.11b/g.

HTC Touch Pro also includes a video-out port so people hook the device up to a larger screen or television and project a bigger image, a boon for activities such as giving presentations.

Price information was not immediately available for the device. As a reference, Touch Diamond will cost around NT$26,000 ($857) when it launches in Taiwan next month. An EDGE-based (Enhanced Data Rates for GSM Evolution) version of the Touch Diamond launched in India last month at a price of Rs. 27,500 ($646).

The price reflects some of the expensive features on board the device, which are similar to the Touch Pro; including GPS (Global Positioning System) and a 3.2-megapixel camera.

Nokia, RIM Lead in Phone Innovation: Study

Nokia is the mobile device maker with the best innovation and implementation strategies, followed by Research In Motion (RIM), which produces the popular BlackBerry smartphone, and Samsung, according to a recent analyst report.

The ranking was issued by technology market research firm ABI Research, whose innovation scores for the 10 companies included were based on a handful of factors, including choice of partnerships with cellular carriers, distribution channels, relative cost, hardware scalability, interface customization, handset differentiation, patent portfolio, battery life, handset size, support for third party application developers and operating system source code licenses, among others. ABI’s implementation rankings were based on factors like smartphone shipments, brand equity, the number of handset models available, choice of OS, smartphone market share, smartphone average selling prices, distribution networks, operator relationships, and manufacturing facilities.

Nokia scored the highest in both innovation and implementation.

“Nokia’s commitment to driving smart OS into a wider range of devices, and the success of its N series devices, especially the N95, gives it a huge market presence,” said Stuart Carlaw, ABI research director, in a statement.

Espoo, Finland-based Nokia is also the world’s leading producer of smartphones, and the Symbian operating system (OS) found within the vast majority of Nokia handsets is the most widely used mobile OS, followed by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and RIM’s BlackBerry OS, respectively, according to Canalys, another technology market research firm.

Nokia may be the global smartphone leader, but in the enterprise space RIM is king with nearly three-quarters of business users, a ChangeWave survey recently found. Palm is RIM’s closest competitor for enterprise smartphone users with 18 percent of the market, followed by Motorola’s nine percent share and Nokia’s seven percent of users, according to the ChangeWave survey.

ABI also predicts that the worldwide market for smartphones will triple over the coming five years from 10 percent of the total handset market in 2007 to 31 percent by 2013.

ABI’s full ranking of the top 10 smartphone vendors is as follows:

1. Nokia
2. RIM
3. Samsung
4. Motorola
5. Sony Ericsson
6. High Tech Corp (HTC)
7. Palm
8. LG
9. Sharp
10. Hewlett-Packard (HP)

HTC, Reliance to Sell CDMA Smartphones in India

High Tech Computer (HTC) has teamed up with Reliance Communications to tackle the market for high-end CDMA (code division multiple access) mobile phones in India, the companies said Thursday.

Reliance, one of India’s largest mobile telecommunications service providers, will market the handsets.

The companies will launch two smartphones that run Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, the HTC P3000 and the HTC S720 across India by the end of March. The handsets will cost Rs. 16,500 and 19,500, respectively.

The devices are both aimed at users requiring data downloading and high speed mobile Internet access via Reliance’s wireless network.

The number of mobile phone subscribers in India stood at 242.4 million as of the end of January, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. The nation added 8.77 million new subscribers in January.

HTC is the world’s largest maker of handsets for the Windows Mobile OS