HTC announced the release of HTC P3470, also known as HTC Pharos, for the Hong Kong market. Officially announced In February, during MWC 2008, the device comes as a rather affordable smartphone with GPS.

Weighing 122 grams and measuring 108 x 58.3 x 15.7 millimeters, HTC P347 runs on Windows Mobile 6 Professional, hence it brings many useful business-orientated features, including: Microsoft Office Mobile (Word, Excel, Outlook and PDF viewer), Push mail, voice dialing, calendar and so on.

The new smartphone comes with the unique HTC Home homescreen, allowing users to easily access emails, text messages, contacts and calendar entries. Moreover, the device provides one-touch access to important information and features (like weather forecasts), supports both stylus and finger input, and lets users customize up to 9 of its most commonly used applications.

Aside from the built-in GPS already mentioned above, HTC P347 also packs a 2.8 inch touchscreen (240 x 320 pixel resolution, 65k colors support and handwriting recognition), a TI OMAP 850 processor at 200 Mhz, 256MB of ROM, 128MB DDR of RAM and a 2 Megapixel camera with macro-mode and video recording. Furthermore, we have quad-band GSM connectivity, GPRS, EDGE, WAP 2.0/xHTML and PocketIE browser, Instant Messaging, Java MIDP 2.0, Music player, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, USB, Video and Audio album. The smartphone's battery is a Li-Ion 1100 mAh one that should provide up to 5 hours and 50 minutes of talk-time and about 240 hours of stand-by time.

HTC P347 will be available in Hong Kong starting April (hence next week) for a retail price of 3,680 Hong Kong dollars ($470 or 300 Euro).

With a total population of about 7 million and a mobile penetration rate of over 150%, Hong Kong is obviously an important market for HTC, as well as for all the other major handset manufacturers.