It traditionally was more popular in the USA than it was in Europe. However, the French carrier SFR now takes a final stab by releasing an “MSN Messenger phone” with an unknown version of Windows Mobile:

Further information can be had via the French web site below:
http://messengersurvotremobile.com/messengeredition251bysfr/

In a move which should not surprise true Hutchison experts, the carrier has just announced its version of the HD2.

Berthold Thoma, CEO and enfant terrible of the Austrian mobile landscape, describes the box as follows:

HTC has created a hardware giant and the best WM phone. And its just 11mm thin – both business and multimedia heads will love the critter!

As usual, prices start at just 3 Euros – more can be found out at your Hutchison dealership…

The image below has been circulating for some time:

An xda-developer user has now stated the following:

Just had a dinner with a friend of mine who is the main distributor for HTC in Europe, and he informed that they will receive the first shipment of Touch Pro3’s this summer and they will be on sale in Europe third quarter of this year. This is my main contact for HTC devices and he arranges a Touch Pro2 for me 4 months before it was officially released…He told me that the device will be much smaller and thinner, and soon he will provide me with the evidence including the full specifications Do you guys think this would be something you would purchase or would you rather wait for the Windows Phone 7?

Given the current rumors (400×240 screen), I am not too sure what to make of it – stay tuned for further info as we get it…

Shawn Hargreaves now disclosed further information which should be interesting to both users and developers:

The phone features an image scaler which allows games to render to any size backbuffer they like, and have it automatically stretched to fill the display, with black bars along the edges if the backbuffer and display have different aspect ratios (an idea that will be familiar to Xbox developers). This scaling is handled by dedicated hardware, so does not consume any GPU resources, and it uses a high quality image filter that gives much better results than bilinear filtering like you would get if you did this yourself on the GPU. The scaler is important for two reasons:

* At launch, all phones will have a 480×800 (WVGA) display resolution, but we will add 320×480 (HVGA) in a future update. Of course you can detect the native resolution and program your game to adapt to this if you want, but the scaler allows games to pick just one resolution, always render at that fixed size, and still run correctly on phones with different native screen sizes. For bonus points, we automatically scale touch input to match your chosen resolution.

* 480×800 is a lot of pixels! This is a great resolution for displaying text, browsing the web, etc, but it can be a challenge for intensive 3D games to render so much data at a good framerate. To boost performance, some games may prefer to render at a lower resolution, then scale up to fill the display.

Not much to add here…

Don’t ask me where erikaustria1974 got the tone-less video below – it seems to be a Samsung-internal video showing the benefits of Super AMOLED:

Not much to add here…

Press intro event: 16th of March
Public release: 23rd of March

Topic closed – for me, that is…

Forbes.com now took up the issue. Their Elizabeth Wayke claims the following:

… Insiders say production hurdles are keeping the phone from consumers. Art Stewart, vice president of wireless products at sensor maker AuthenTec, which provided fingerprint sensors for the phone, says LG had “antenna issues” with the device. “We shipped thousands of [sensors] to LG…but there has been a delay,” says Stewart.

LG and AT&T say the eXpo is out of stock due to “strong demand”. …

So far, not much more is known – but it sounds sensible to me…

Dell apparently sees value in styli, too – SlashGear reports the following:

…

As for stylus input – something we puzzled over earlier – Choubey seems to hint that Dell might use new transparent conductor resistive panels over capacitive technology in future tablet models, which support multitouch finger-input and stylus control with high-resolution accuracy.

…

This makes their Mini5 tablet interesting all over again…

In related news, TMoNews were provided with the image below showing the final device:

Not much to add here…

PCWorld states the following about the new standard:

…Previous versions of Bluetooth could only go into devices with triple-A or larger-capacity batteries.

Bluetooth 4.0 includes a low-energy specification for transmitting small bursts of data over short ranges, in addition to the high-speed data transfer capabilities introduced with Bluetooth 3.0 last April.

…

So much, so good…