14 DAY TRIAL // HTC Merge, the long-rumored Android-based slider set to land at Verizon Wireless in the near future, has just made an appearance into the wild, and a hands-on walkthrough was published online, along with some benchmarking results for the upcoming device.
Of course, nothing is yet official on when the smartphone would make an appearance at Verizon Wireless, but chances are that this would happen in the near future.
In case you missed previous reports on this device, we should note that it is expected to land as a dual-mode CDMA / GSM worldphone, and that previous rumors suggested it would be called either Merge, or Lexikon.
Until specific info on this will make it on the Internet, we should have a look at what the guys over at Android Central, who scored one Merge unit and played around with it, have to say on the phone's performance and internals.
It seems that the mobile phone was able to score a whooping 1,500 in Quadrant benchmarking, which is more than what many other devices can offer.
Interestingly enough, the HTC Merge showed this impressive performance levels even if it packs only an ARM7 processor clocked in at 800MHz.
As for what it packs inside, we can count a slide-out QWERTY keyboard to complement its touchscreen display, as well as a 5-megapixel photo snapper on the back, which includes 720p video recording capabilities.
Moreover, the HTC Merge should arrive with 512MB of RAM and 2GB of on-board memory, complemented by a microSD memory card slot for additional storage space.
The smartphone runs under Google's Android 2.2 Froyo operating system, on top of which HTC pre-loaded its own user interface, the popular HTC Sense.
Microsoft's Bing is also on board of this device, but this is not a deal breaker in the end, as one would certainly be able to easily set Google as the default search engine, that's for sure.
In the end, all that remains to be seen is when would this handset arrive at Verizon Wireless, and what price tag it would sport when made available.
