Velocity Mobile ships first smartphone

Five months ago at the main CTIA show in Las Vegas, Velocity Mobile made its debut. The new company, which brought together a firm called Inventec plus a host of wireless industry veterans, promised to jump headfirst into the competitive smartphone market with a host of original models. At the time, we were quite excited by not only the promise of a new player in cell phone land, but also by its innovative recasting of Windows Mobile.

Now as CTIA Fall 2008 begins on Wednesday, the company announced that it would start shipping its first smartphone, the Velocity 103. Sporting a thin eye-catching design in basic black, the Velocity 103 lacks a QWERTY keyboard, but it offers a full touch screen. We got to examine a Velocity 103 prototype at the time of its initial announcement back in April, so we're now excited to see the real thing. Bonnie Cha will be meeting with Velocity Mobile on Thursday, so we hope she'll get the chance then.

Features include quad-band GSM support, tri-band 3G (UMTS and HSDPA) support, 256MB of internal memory, 128MB of RAM, Bluetooth 2.0, a 2.0-megapixel camera, Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, Wi-Fi, TV out, and a microSD card slot.