HTC P3470 Combines Touch Screen, GPS

Unable to decide whether to launch a touch-screen smart phone or GPS-enabled navigation phone at this year’s World Mobile Congress, HTC took the safe middle route by introducing a phone that does both: the HTC P3470. With a 2.8-inch touch screen and built-in GPS, the P3470 will take the helm as HTC’s new well-rounded smart phone.

Besides a 240 x 320 pixel touch screen for navigation, the phone also includes dedicated call and end buttons, soft select buttons, and what HTC calls a “smart navigation wheel” for zooming, scrolling, and flipping through applications. The back sports a 2.0-megapixel camera with mechanical macro functionality, and a GPS antenna connector allows the P3470 to be hooked up to an external antenna for better satellite reception.

Like HTC’s other smart phones, such as the Touch, the P3470 will run Windows Mobile 6. Bluetooth 2.0 is standard, along with EDGE 2G wireless Internet access, but Wi-Fi connectivity is strangely absent. Despite a meager 128MB of internal memory, a microSD card slot with support for SD 2.0, which allows theoretical capacities of up to 32GB, although nothing larger than 8GB is yet commercially available. A 1GB card will come included with the phone.

The HTC P3470 will go on sale later in February across Europe for 449 Euros ($651 USD).  The European carrier Orange will launch the phone in the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands.