Jul 29, 2011 12:58 GMT  ·  By

Unveiled back in February, HP Pre 3 is slowly making its way into the European smartphone market. It appears that the device will be soon available for purchase in the UK, with more countries to follow immediately.

It appears that online retailer Mobiles.co.uk, a subsidiary of the Carphone Warehouse, has just announced that is taking pre-orders for the HP Pre 3 starting this week.

However, there is still no information about the phone's exact release date, though UK retailer Play.com states on its storefront that the HP Pre 3 is shipping on August 31.

Mobiles.co.uk offers the HP Pre 3 for free with select Orange or T-Mobile plans starting at £20.42, which will bag customers a reasonable 300 minutes, 300 SMS and 500 MB of data.

The Pre 3 features a thin exterior and touchscreen, which are concealing an email engine, slide-out keyboard, as well as a robust 1230 mAh Li-Ion battery.

The smartphone comes with a 3.58-inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen with 16 million colors and 480 x 800 pixels resolution, as well as accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate and proximity sensor for auto turn-off.

Users will be able to get fast downloads of their personal email and manage inboxes separately or all together, plus it keeps business and personal contacts automatically up to date.

Although the phone is said to be equipped with a single core Qualcomm MSM8655 processor clocked at speeds of up to 1.4GHz, rumors say that HP decided to replace it with a more powerful dual-core CPU clocked at 1.2GHz.

Furthermore, the phone comes with a 5-megapixel camera on the back, which features autofocus and LED flash, as well as a secondary VGA front-facing camera for video calls.

The HP Pre 3 lacks a microSD card slot for memory expansion, instead it embeds 16 GB of internal memory and 512 MB of RAM.