We've seen it in Japan, we've been hearing rumors of its overseas release and now it's official: HTC's Touch Dual is landing in Europe. Essentially a thinner version of the Touch [1] that features a slide-out T9 keypad in addition to the Touch's touchscreen, this little guy should be available now in select European markets on the Orange network. Here's what's inside: support for WCDMA/HSDPA, GSM and EDGE (sorry, no WiFi like its Japanese counterpart), Windows Mobile 6 Professional, a 2.6 inch QVGA touch-screen, 400Mhz CPU, 128MB of RAM and 256MB of flash and support for Bluetooth 2.0+EDR. On the battery life tip, this device supposedly boasts 4 hours of WCDMA talk time and 6 hours on GSM. And while that T9 pad isn't quite QWERTY, this should hopefully be enough to silence those touchscreen critics who have been clamoring for some true touch-typing on the Touch.

For more on the new Touch:
- see this Gizmodo article [2]