T-Mobile's German wing today launched the latest in the company's own-brand MDA handset family, the 3G-enabled MDA IV "mini laptop".

With a design that clearly owes much to Motorola's MPx smart phone and Danger's Hiptop communicator - which T-Mobile offers in the US as the Sidekick - the MDA IV sports a QWERTY keyboard located below a 640 x 480 display that not only folds up and away from the keyboard clamshell-style, but also rotates to allow the unit to be used tablet-fashion like a PDA.

Inside the unit is a 520MHz Intel XScale PXA270 processor, we understand, running Windows Mobile software, though at this stage the version remains unclear. It may be Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition, or possibly its successor, T-Mobile said. Nor is it certain who's building the MDA IV for T-Mobile, but Taiwan's HTC remains the most likely candidate. It has designed and produced all of T-Mobile's MDA line-up to date. The design certainly has an HTC feel about it.

If it is HTC, then the MDA IV is likely to appear on other networks, too, such as O2, Vodafone and Orange, all of which have taken a number of HTC's earlier Windows Mobile devices and applied their own branding.

The unit sports two cameras, and come equipped with a tri-band GSM/GPRS radio. Like the MDA III, the new model features Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. There's USB for wired connections to a PC. T-Mobile also said it would offer a push email service with the unit.

The MDA IV is set to ship this coming summer. ®

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