The already much-fabled date of 24 June, when HTC will be announcing 'something', is looking even more fabled as rumours leak that we'll be seeing both QWERTY-enabled and touchscreen-only Android phones.
Much of the talk has been around the appearance of the HTC Hero, which seems nailed on, but now the Economic Daily News in China is reporting the afore-mentioned 'Lancaster', which looks a lot like a Magic with a keyboard, is coming too.
However, it predicts that the new phone will basically be the Hero, with both keyboard and touchscreen options to choose from. It would be the first time a phone has been released in both flavours at the same time, although a lot of phones in the HTC stable, especially from the Touch family, share a lot of traits and have both keyboard and touch only options.
Q3 launch
The paper also states that the new handsets will be available in the third quarter (to be fair, hitting the second quarter might be difficult from 24 June).
Another interesting snippet of information from the paper is the Hero will be running HTC's TouchFLO 3D interface, previously used to hide the horror of Windows Mobile 6.1, on the Android handset, which would certainly be a differentiator from the G1 and Magic phones before it.
Anyway, TechRadar will be there at the gala London event on 24 June, and as usual when we know, we're coming to tell you first.
Via Digitimes
