Vodafone, the second largest mobile operator in the world, will soon offer HTC's Touch Diamond Pocket PC to its subscribers. Not in all the countries where the giant operator activates though (not for now at least), but only in the UK, its home country.

Although the Touch Diamond is already available from several other European and Asian carriers, Vodafone will not be offering the handset starting this month, but starting July. On the carrier's official website, HTC's new touchscreen device is featured in the "coming soon" category, hence its price (with or without a contract agreement) is not known yet.

What is known, though, is that Vodafone presents the Touch Diamond as being better than Apple's iPhone "in all aspects". But that might be mainly because, in the UK the V carrier is not the one to bring Apple's new iPhone 3G, as only O2 will have the honor to do so. Thus, if they can't have the new iPhone, they can surely fight against it, and HTC Touch Diamond is definitely a handset that can easily compete with Apple's smartphone. I'm not saying it's better or worse than the iPhone, it's just that the features of the two devices are quite similar up to a point.

Measuring only 102 x 51 x 11.5 millimeters, the Touch Diamond runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 and comes packed with lots of nice things like: a 2.8 inch TFT touchscreen display with a VGA resolution (480 x 640 pixels) and handwriting recognition, a TouchFlo 3D user interface, accelerometer, tri-band GSM and dual-band HSDPA connectivity, 4GB of internal memory, Wi-Fi, GPS and A-GPS, Pocket Office, email, HTML browser, Music player, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP, FM radio with RDS, miniUSB, a 528 Mhz processor, a 3.15 Megapixel camera and a secondary video-call camera.

Now, all the British users who want to own an HTC Touch Diamond must wait about one month before they can get their hands on it.