HTC Touch Diamond, one of the hottest full-touchscreen handsets to be launched this year, will soon be released in India, via Airtel, the largest mobile operator in the country.

Officially presented to the world on the 6th of May, in London, HTC Touch Diamond is a stylish smartphone that combines an exclusive design and advanced features with the latest 3D full-touch user interface. Called TouchFlo 3D, Diamond's unique finger-touch interface together with the 2.8 inch VGA display (640 x 480 pixels) will offer users a "mobile adventure" never experienced before.

HTC Touch Diamond comes with both GSM and 3G connectivity, but in India it will have to work only on the GSM frequencies, since neither Airtel nor any other carrier have deployed 3G networks yet. Anyway, Airtel's GSM / EDGE services should still provide decent data transfer speeds to the future owners of the Diamond.

Besides the features already mentioned, HTC's new flagship device also comes with Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, GPS and A-GPS navigation, Google Maps, a 3.2 Megapixel camera with auto-focus and video recording, 4GB of internal memory, Media player, easy YouTube access, FM radio with RDS, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR, Opera browser, email, Office Mobile and so on - all in a slim case that measures only 102 x 51 x 11,5 millimeters and weighs 110 grams.

Peter Chou, President and CEO of HTC Corp., said about the upcoming Indian release of the high-end device: "The Touch Diamond is a breakthrough in innovation that packs the functionalities of a complete phone and offers an entirely new Touchscreen and mobile Internet and browsing experience for consumers. The launch of the Touch Diamond in India marks a new era in mobile phone evolution which will further catalyze the growth of Internet on mobile in the fastest growing Telecom market in the world."

The Diamond will be commercially available starting June, in 25 of India's most important cities, exclusively via Airtel and HTC's authorized distributors, for a retail price of 27,500 INR (about $645 or 410 Euros). Although this is far from being an affordable price, it's lower than the one HTC Diamond will have on other markets (Europe, for example), where the device should sell for about $800.