14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like HTC's legal team has filed for a new trademark possibly tied to a new device called “HTC EVO Shift 4G”. The application has been filed on October 11th and is yet to receive an examining attorney that would approve it.
Apparently, the Taiwanese company has previously filed for an almost similar name, “HTC EVO 4G Shift”, but decided to change it due to unknown reasons to “HTC EVO Shift 4G”.
There's no information regarding the speculated device's technical specifications, nor what it could have in common with Sprint's HTC EVO 4G smartphone that is already on sale.
Speculation about an HTC tablet release has been circulating in the past, but according to an analyst from JPMorgan, the company delayed its Android tablet because “current Android versions are not tablet friendly.”
It is possible that HTC will release its tablet right after Android 3.0 Honeycomb is launched in Q1 2011. The Android 3.0 platform is especially designed to run on tablets and manufacturers like Samsung will probably issue upgrades for their own tablet products.
Rumors are also pointing out that there may be a relation between the trademark's filed name, HTC Shift's old MID (mobile Internet device), which is running Windows Vista Business, and Sprint's HTC EVO 4G smartphone.
The result may be a full QWERTY keyboard super-smartphone with a 4.3-inch display and 4G compatibility.
In case this is just an upgraded HTC EVO 4G with an added QWERTY keyboard, it's possible that it will be available through Sprint as well.
For those out of the loop, HTC EVO 4G is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8650 1 GHz processor and runs on the Android 2.1 (Eclair) platform.
The device comes with a 4.3-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen with 65K colors and 480 x 800 pixels resolution, as well as HTC Sense UI.
Other key features of the EVO 4G include: 512MB RAM, 1GB ROM, microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB, 8GB card included), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, WiMAX 802.16 e (Wi-Fi router), 8-megpapixel camera with autofocus and dual-LED flash, secondary 1.3-megapixel camera, GPS with A-GPS support and HDMI port.
