14 DAY TRIAL // Officially announced on January 6th, HTC Thunderbolt's release date and price have been a mystery until recent information revealed that the device might be landing at Best Buy on Valentine's Day.
Apparently, the rumor of the upcoming HTC Thunderbolt release at Best Buy has been verified by the guys over at AndroidCentral and proves to be correct for the moment.
According to a screenshot taken from an official Best Buy internal document, the online retailer is expected to release a certain Verizon device listed as model BBY60LD, on February 14th.
The same document mentions another bar code number (044476816574), which was spotted in a video hands-on of the Thunderbolt appeared on YouTube and made by someone at HTC.
Even though the video has been removed in the meantime, it seems that one of the Android Central Forums members (paulmike3) noticed the number on the proof of purchase attached to the box and made the connection with the Best Buy internal document, which lists the same number.
Furthermore, HTC Thunderbolt has been rumored to be available at Verizon sometime around February 11th, but no evidence pointing to this date has been found yet.
Those waiting to purchase the upcoming LTE Android smartphone on Verizon should also know that the Thunderbolt lacks features such as Mobile Hotspot and Skype.
Even though the device has been advertised as the first Verizon 4G LTE network compatible device to use Skype’s new video chatting feature and also act as a mobile hotspot for up to 8-devices, it looks like these features will not be available initially, but will be added afterwards instead.
According to Verizon, when HTC Thunderbolt launches, Skype mobile with video will not be available. Even though a Skype mobile icon will be preloaded on Thunderbolt's second home screen, this will display a “Coming Soon” message if launched.
It seems that when the new feature is available, an Android Market notification will appear in the notification bar to alert users that they can update and use Skype mobile with video.
Unfortunately, there's no additional information regarding the availability of the Mobile Hotspot support, but Verizon said that HTC Thunderbolt would not support this feature at launch.
