HTC Corporation announced at the CTIA Wireless 2009 trade show in Las Vegas a new QWERTY smartphone, dubbed HTC Snap. The new mobile phone has been packed with features that are meant to offer users all the functionality they need, allowing them to easily stay connected to their friends. The new Inner Circle feature present with the device enables users to bring emails from a selected group of people to the top of the inbox, so that they can be read instantly.

“Recognizing that people are being overwhelmed by an avalanche of email, the HTC Snap introduces Inner Circle, an HTC innovation that makes it easy for people to prioritize messages from the most important people in their lives at the press of a button,” said John Wang, chief marketing officer, HTC Corporation. “The HTC Snap represents the latest step in HTC’s mission to create a range of innovative smartphones, each with specific benefits designed to both surprise and delight our customers.”

The new HTC Snap measures 12 millimeters, includes a full-QWERTY keyboard, HSDPA connectivity, a QVGA display, GPS capabilities, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, a 2-megapixel photo snapper, as well as a 528MHz Qualcomm CPU, coupled with 256MB of ROM and 128MB of RAM. The device also includes a 1500mAh battery that is able to offer up to eight and a half hours of talk time.

The Taiwanese mobile phone maker will bring the HTC Snap to the market as a rather affordable handset targeted mainly at experienced business users. It will be able to provide them with the Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard operating system, as well as with options such as remotely synchronizing email, calendar and contacts with the Microsoft Exchange server.

The new HTC Snap is expected to become available on the market starting with the second quarter of the ongoing year on selected channels, and to more markets around the world in the second half of 2009. In the summer, HTC also intends to release to the US market an unlocked version of the device, which will be dubbed HTC S522 and will come with support for HSDPA 850/1900MHz bands.