George walks along a beach one day and comes across a dirty old lamp. He picks it up and gave it a rub, and behold, a genie appears. The genie grants the man one wish for freeing him. Being a dork his whole life, George has never quite hit if off with the ladies, so he says: "I want to be irresistible to women!" The genie waves his hands and poof! George turns into a shopping discount voucher.

We've all heard jokes like that, where a supposedly lucky person gets one thing he wants--but not in the way he expected it. In a way, that's what HTC has done with the Touch Dual as compared with the original Touch.

We lamented the lack of 3G and processing power with the Touch, and these are things that have been addressed in the Touch Dual. This new version comes with not just 3G, but also supports HSDPA for data download speeds of up to 3.6Mbps.

Like the HTC TyTN II, the Touch Dual uses the new 400MHz Qualcomm MSM 7200 processor. Another feature it shares with the TyTN II is the 128MB RAM and 256MB ROM. On paper, this will put both devices on par when it comes to raw performance.

Closed, the Touch Dual has dimensions of 107 x 55 x 15.8mm. Compared with the Touch's 99.9 x 58 x 13.9mm, it is longer and not quite as slim. This can be quickly forgiven because the screen slides up to reveal a keypad. In the specifications sheet found on the HTC Web site, this is listed to be a QWERTY keypad. It is laid out like the one found in the BlackBerry Pearl SureType keyboard which fits two letters onto one key and uses software to assist typing by auto-completing words. In another HTC photo found on the specifications flyer, the Touch Dual has a numeric keypad that looks just like those you see on regular mobile phones. So there will be two keypad versions apparently, but at this point, HTC has not responded to our query on which version will be the one available in Asia Pacific.

Everything seems rosy so far, but here's the kicker--there's no Wi-Fi. We knew that Wi-Fi was absent in the Japanese version of the Touch Dual, the NTT DoCoMo FOMA HT1100, when it was launched a while back. Since then, we've held onto the hope that it would make its way into the version for the rest of the world--but it was not to be.

Bottomline

The HTC Touch Dual will be available in Asia Pacific in the second half of Q4 2007. Pricing information is still unavailable. We welcome all the additional features on it compared to the original Touch, but the lack of Wi-Fi on the Touch Dual will potentially be a deal-breaker for a good number of users. This is especially so for current users of the Touch who love the form factor and have been looking forward to an update. Anyway, the genie has spoken, and we'll have to wait for a new lamp to appear for another wish.