14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian carrier Mobilicity is about to release another Android-powered smartphone, the HTC Panache
According to the guys over at MobileSyrup, the carrier held an internal brainstorming session for its employees to rename the HTC Emerald.
Several weeks have passed and Mobilicity comes with a new French name for the HTC Emerald, the Panache, which means “a bunch of feathers or a plume, especially on a helmet.”
Although Mobilicity has yet to disclose the smartphone's release date, it seems that the first dummy units have started to arrive along with the phone's price tag, which is set to $499.99 off-contract.
For those who are not aware, the HTC Emerald / HTC Panache is also known as myTouch 4G and was initially launched on the North American market via T-Mobile.
The smartphone is equipped with a single core Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8255 1 GHz processor and runs Android 2.2 platform out-of-the-box.
Unlike the myTouch 4G, the HTC Panache comes with Android 2.3 Gingerbread at launch, which means that the Taiwanese manufacturer will be upgrading the other variants of the device soon.
In this regard, an official Gingerbread ROM has leaked earlier this month, which brings several important improvements and new features.
Obviously, the HTC Panache runs the manufacturer's proprietary HTC Sense user-friendly interface, though there's no mention of the version.
It comes with a generous 3.8-inch TFT capacitive touchscreen with 16 million colors support, 480 x 800 pixels resolution, accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate and Swype input method.
HTC Panache sports a 5-megapixel photo snapper with autofocus and LED flash, as well as secondary VGA front facing camera for video calling.
The handset is fully packed with connectivity features such as Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n DLNA, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP support, GPS with HTC location experience including turn-by-turn directions, as well as Wi-Fi spot capabilities.
