The existence of a slide-out keyboard version of the MyTouch 3G has been widely accepted as truth for the past few months, and today"s press release confirms what we already assumed. The MyTouch 3G Slide will be available for purchase on the T-mobile network sometime in June 2010. It will ship with Android 2.1. It sports a 3.4" touch-screen WVGA screen, a virtual keyboard as well as the eponymous slide-out QWERTY pad, and 8GB of pre-installed MicroSD memory. It will be available in black, white or red.
New Features on this incarnation of the MyTouch 3G include:
- Faves Gallery - A dedicated app to manage 20 of your most common contacts. It is a robust social communication tool that facilitates instant communication and updates throughout your Faves contact list, sending you notifications when any of your Faves posts social network activity or communicates with you.
- myModes: Change your theme using time-based cues. Have a clean, professional, and efficient theme and app set for the weekday, and automatically switch to a colorful, wild, and email free party theme for the weekends.
- Genius Button: An enhanced voice command tool that can read back text messages, take dictation, search the web, and make calls, and powered by Dragon Dictation from Nuance Communication.
Engadget got some hands-on time with the phone, and were generally impressed with the functionality. They praised the voice-recognition by Dragon Dictation as "some of the best we"ve played with, nailing complex text message dictation (including the word Engadget) on the first try. Honestly, it put Google"s stock voice recognition to shame." They weren"t as impressed with the aesthetics of the phone, citing a plasticky shell, and over-styling. The older-generation Quallcomm CPU managed fine on the phone, but they would rather have had the newer Snapdragon chip.
Image courtesy of Engadget