Those looking for a nice alternative to the iPhone may have found Apple’s biggest competitor in the smartphone market with HTC’s recent launch of the Touch Diamond. The Diamond is the latest in High Tech Computer’s line of Touch smartphones, and looks to be the best one yet.

The Touch Diamond runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional and in addition to the many common features of popular smartphones it has some custom applications built in for watching YouTube video and taking advantage of Google’s mapping service. To top it off, HTC has included a 2.8-inch VGA touchscreen which they claim brings near print quality viewing.

The first “official” photos and specs for the HTC Diamond have now been leaked and it looks pretty sexy. It sports a 2.8-inch 640 x 480 pixel screen (that’s twice the lines of the iPhone in a smaller surface,) Windows Mobile 6.1 and 3G connectivity. Could this be the most important product of the year for HTC? Maybe so.

It seems like a pretty sweet cellphone, judging from the specs: Large 2.8 inch VGA display (640×480 pixel resolution), Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, Quadband GSM/GPRS/Edge and UMTS/HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0, 3.2megapixel camera with autofocus, Extra VGA camera in the front for video telephony, QWERTY keyboard, Qualcomm 528 Mhz CPU, 4 GB of internal memory plus a MicroSD slot, FM Radio, An accelerometer sensor like the iPhone has.

The sweet Apple iPhone spawned a whole host of me too devices that looked to cash in on the ground breaking touch screen navigation Apple introduced. HTC was one of the players that jumped into touch in a big way.

HTC announced that its HTC Touch Dual handset would be coming to the U.S. this quarter and would be powered by the new Windows Mobile 6.1 OS. HTC says that Best Buy will be the first retailer to offer the HTC Touch Dual device.

Today T-Mobile has announced the launch of the new Shadow mobile phone from HTC. This is the first of a number of Shadow-branded phones that T-Mobile has planned for the future as devices that are “designed for people who have lives beyond work.”, according to Robert Dotson, president and CEO of T-Mobile USA. The device runs on an enhanced version of Windows Mobile 6 which hides a lot of the usually interface from Windows Mobile and replaces it with custom menus and navigation. According to T-Mobile the enhanced interface makes the Shadow more intuitive and easier to use.

Aside from this slider looking just plain good, it also features a spin navigation wheel, 2.6″ display (not a touchscreen), microSD memory expansion slot, a full QWERTY keyboard, Bluetooth, 2.0 megapixel camera with video capture, media player for music and video, Wi-Fi and EDGE high speed data. The Shadow also has an enhanced version of T-Mobiles myFaves where users can call, email, text, send a picture, send a video or send a voice note easily from the myFaves screen. It even has some instant messaging clients built in, including Windows Live Messenger, AOL IM, Yahoo Messenger and ICQ.

Sprint today rolled out across its cellular network the HTC Mogul. This new handset marks the first CDMA device in the U.S. with Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition and will also be the Sprint mobile that will support EV-DO Rev. A via an upcoming software update.

The HTC Mogul, with its slide-out keyboard design, sports a large touch screen with a five-way navigation button. Sprint says this handset gets 20 percent more battery life than its predecessor the PPC-6700. It has 256MB of internal memory, expandable via a microSD memory card. …