So the good news here is that Best Buy's getting ready to open its arms to yet another HTC product that's impossible to find by wandering into the brick-and-mortar store of the US wireless carrier of your choice; the bad news, though, is that it doesn't seem to be the version we wanted. The Touch Diamond now has a Coming Soon page all its own on Best Buy's site, which is just fantastic considering that neither AT&T nor T-Mobile have yet bothered to pick it up -- but the problem is that the specifications make no mention of US 3G despite the fact that we know there's just such a version floating around. Our hope is that we've just caught the big box with its pants down (wouldn't be the first time) and they'll look into carrying the real deal by the time "coming soon" switches to "in stock," especially since they've given the Touch Dual the same courtesy.

[Thanks, Mark]

Before a single AT&T-subscribing soul dreams of jumping ship for Sprint just to pick up the Touch Pro in a few weeks, hold up: we can pretty much confirm that it's coming to your neck of the woods, too. We've already seen some totally legit-looking shots of HTC's hottest QWERTY WinMo piece in AT&T trim, but now we have some more damning evidence in the form of a Google cached page detailing the so-called Fuze on the carrier's own site. As expected, we've got tri-band HSDPA, GPS, WiFi, and BlackBerry Connect waiting for us when AT&T finally decides to pull the plug on the Tilt and make this thing happen. Follow the break for AT&T's poetic Fuze verbiage -- and take your time, since there's no indication that we'll have this in stores in the next few days.

[Thanks, Fred]

Now that Uncle Walt has gone and opened the floodgates, details are starting to pour in on Sprint's imminent release of the Touch Diamond, a device that should actually manage to get the carrier damn close to the top of the Windows Mobile pile (for a short while, anyway). PC Magazine is now reporting that it'll be available on September 14 for $249.99 on a two-year contract after $100 rebate, a sum that would put it squarely in the "average" category for on-contract smartphone pricing in these parts. Of course, with the Touch Pro allegedly just around the corner, it remains to be seen just how much love this thing is going to get; nothing like a good, old-fashioned QWERTY-versus-touchscreen fight, is there?

It was only a matter of time before the WSJ (Katherine Boehret, in this case) got their hands around Sprint's still-not-official Touch Diamond, and we can't say that the conclusion she drew is at all shocking. As Mossberg and his partners so often do, Katherine mentions Apple's darling just as much as the topic of the review itself, and while she seemed impressed with the hardware, it was the software that suffered the brunt of her attacks. She proclaimed that "despite its handsome TouchFLO 3D software and animated icons, the device failed to disguise the frustrating interface of Windows Mobile often enough for [her] taste." Beyond that, she also found room to gripe about the "cramped" keyboard, which she felt was "next to impossible" to use with just her fingertips. On the plus side, she did give the browser a decent amount of praise, but if you were looking for support from this critic before picking up the forthcoming handset, you'll be sorely disappointed.

[Via phonescoop]

From the looks of it, Sprint has gone and gotten a decent chunk of its playbook leaked all over the interblogs, and it's chock-full of titillating information. Thanks to slippery fingers and loose lips, we already knew that the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro were headed to the carrier, but now we have some solid dates (mid-September for the Diamond, October 19th for the Pro), and pricing ($549.99 and $579.99 unsubsidized, $249.99 and $320 with contract). Of course, this is all according to the above document, which admittedly could be the work of an extremely bored Photoshopper -- but this jibes pretty tightly with a lot of other chatter we've been hearing.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Everything prior had been rumors, hearsay, speculation, and leaked documents -- but now that Sprint has something out in the open, it's going to be a whole hell of a lot more difficult to renege on that September time frame we'd all been pulling for. The carrier and partner Bluefish have thrown up a site taking names and email addresses to be notified when the Touch Diamond is available for purchase; no exact date is given (we wouldn't be surprised if Sprint still hadn't decided on that), but they do mention that it's "coming in September." That gives 'em a full 30 days to make good -- but if it just happened to roll out on September 2 like we'd originally heard, we don't think we'll be seeing too many complaints around here.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Sure, we've seen some blurry videos and a few stolen glimpses when Andy Rubin demonstrated this beast, but now we've gotten our hands on a slew of pictures showing off a very real T-Mobile-branded Dream in all its Android-running glory. Not only does this confirm the design spied in those FCC docs as well as show off that nearly-done version of Android, but it seems to confirm the fact that this will be headed to T-Mobile, and sooner rather than later judging from the looks of the above device. Needless to say, our inner-geeks are completely geeking out right now. Hit the gallery below for a handful of other views of the phone. [Warning: read link is a forum, requires registration, and is in Chinese]

[Thanks, Michael]

HTC is keeping the S740 under wraps at IFA, but the crafty folks at newmobile managed to score some time with the new QWERTY slider, and it looks pretty decent. Thinner than the Touch Pro, the keyboard is basically the same, with the same sort of stealth-look backplate as the Diamond. No motion sensor, so the display only rotates when the slide is open, but that's really all we know -- the unit wasn't running a production-ready version of Windows Mobile, so impressions are a little up in the air. Hit the read link for more shots.

[Via Coolsmartphone]

With the dull roar of frenzied anticipation (okay, that might be over the top, but you know what we mean) surrounding the launch of the Touch Diamond in all its variants around the globe, why would HTC take a step back in time to get one of its older models approved in a new flavor? Don't get us wrong -- for its day, the Touch Cruise was one of the hottest Windows Mobile devices going -- but the Touch Diamond has seriously muted an overwhelming majority of the WinMo kit out there, including much of HTC's older lineup. Put head to head, the VGA display and TouchFLO 3D alone are enough to make sure the newer handset spanks the Polaris, but for whatever reason, Mr. Chou and his gang saw fit to repurpose it with HSDPA 850 / 1900 and send it through an FCC lab. We're not sure whether this will end up on a carrier anywhere, but with the front-facing cam, we'd probably rule out AT&T off the bat.

Update: Touche, there's a Touch Cruise already in circulation with 850 / 1900 3G -- but the question remains, why was this just approved? Thanks, everybody!

It's still anybody's guess when the Touch Diamond will actually launch on Sprint, though the latest rumors suggest that it has once again been moved up to September 2 after initially being pushed back to October. The fact that promo materials are starting to show up would certainly support that theory, too, now wouldn't it?

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

We're not sure if it's coincidence or if there's some concerted effort to push out overdue Windows Mobile 6.1 updates all of a sudden, but for whatever reason, Verizon's XV6800 is joining the AT&T Tilt this week in offering an official upgrade package for the first time. Could've come a little quicker, honestly -- Sprint beat 'em out the door by a country mile -- but let's just thank our lucky stars that it finally happened, shall we?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

It leaked ages ago, but the Windows Mobile 6.1 upgrade for your beloved Tilt is now ever so slightly more legit now that it's made an official appearance on HTC's support site. The big draws here are Video Share support, reconfigurability for the push-to-talk button, and all the other spoils that come with the WinMo 6.1 we know and love, tolerate, or hate, depending on your disposition.

[Via MobileBurn and WMExperts, thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Looking for the Touch Pro in a slightly less conspicuous package? HTC (who else?) thinks it has the answer in the S740, the first thorough revamp of the S710 of old. The basic concept is the same -- wrap Windows Mobile Standard into a candybar package with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard -- but the S740 takes design cues from the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro for a thoroughly 2008-ish look. The feature list has naturally been refreshed, too, with 7.2Mbps HSDPA on the 900 and 2100MHz bands (read: screw you, North Americans), quadband EDGE, a 3.2-megapixel fixed focus cam, WiFi, GPS, and a 2.4-inch QVGA display. And, you know, if all that isn't enough to impress your snobby friends, just slide open that keyboard, say "boom," and watch the jaws drop. Look for it to filter across Europe starting next month.

Yesterday we got the height and width, today it's the full wireframe model with scale measurements. While we can't confirm the authenticity, several details including that arcing base certainly dovetail nicely with the images found in the original FCC filing. It's also a near-perfect match to that early reference design seen kicking around the Googleplex courtesy of Andy Rubin. While not obvious before, we can clearly see that the arc belongs to the handset's rigid, non-sliding "chin" with lots of logos from HTC, T-Mobile, and Google fighting for visibility.

Notably, the right-most image contains measurements which can be applied to the rest of scale model as well. This confirms the 115 x 55-mm height and width shown by the FCC yesterday as well as a new, approximate, 16.35-mm depth after applying the calipers. That would make it fatter (as expected) than the 12.3-mm iPhone but skinnier (and a hair wider) than the 18.1-mm HTC Touch Pro and 17-mm Xperia X1. Not bad. Now let's get to it boys, else there won't be much left to announce in September.

[Via Android Community]

We've been slipped a handy little document that indicates the dates that Sprint is currently targeting for the release of a few of its fall hotties, and although we already knew some of this stuff, it's always good to have some corroborating evidence in these situations. First up, the Motorola Renegade V950, i365, and Samsung M220 and M320 are all still apparently locked for September 2, as is the Touch Diamond. We've heard a groundswell of concern from tipsters that the Touch Diamond may have been bumped out to October -- it certainly wouldn't surprise us, given our jaded, overwhelmingly pessimistic personalities -- but here's hoping, anyway. It also looks like the just-released Katana Eclipse in silver will be getting pink and black siblings come October 16, along with an "LG LX600 Messaging Handset." We're not sure what the LX600 might be beyond what a confidentiality-bound FCC filing tells us, but the Rumor is getting a little long in the tooth, so it could conceivably be replacement device or a slightly higher-end QWERTY set that would sit somewhere above the Rumor in the lineup.