HTC Velocity 4G Coming to Germany on March 1, Europe’s First LTE Smartphone

We already reported last week that HTC and Vodafone plan to launch Europe’s first LTE smartphone, HTC Velocity 4G. Today, both companies officially announced that the superphone would be exclusively available from Vodafone Germany on March 1.

According to Vodafone, HTC Velocity 4G will be priced for under 200 EUR (265 USD) with a new two-year agreement.

The guys over at AndroidPit report that the LTE-enabled smartphone is set to reach about 16 million households. LTE network coverage in Germany is about 90%, which is pretty amazing for a European country.

HTC Velocity 4G supports LTE download speeds up to 100 Mbps, as well as upload speeds up to 50 Mbps. Although the smartphone is powered by Google’s Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, HTC already confirmed it would upgrade the phone to Ice Cream Sandwich in early Q2 2012.

Aside from LTE support, HTC Velocity 4G is equipped with one of the most powerful processors embedded onto a smartphone, a dual core Qualcomm MSM8260 Snapdragon CPU clocked at 1.5 GHz.

On the inside, the phone packs 16GB of internal memory, 1GB of RAM and microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB). There’s also an 8-megapixel rear camera with autofocus, dual-LED flash and full HD (1080p) video recording, as well as a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video calls.

The phone runs HTC Sense 3.5 UI on top of Gingerbread, but it’s likely to be replaced with HTC’s latest Sense 4.0 user interface, which comes along with Ice Cream Sandwich.

HTC Velocity 4G is a big device. The phone sports a large 4.5-inch Super LCD capacitive touchscreen with support for 540 x 960 pixels resolution and 16 million colors. It also comes with a 1620 mAh Li-Ion battery, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support, TV-out via MHL A/V link, as well as DLNA capability.