Sprint gets Palm Centro (a.k.a "Gandolf"), HTC Touch

It's not easy having to go up against the current crop of smartphone incumbents--namely the BlackBerry and the iPhone--but Sprint sure is giving it their best shot. At a press conference yesterday, the wireless carrier unveiled a new crop of handsets and at least two of the new phones look anything but dumb.

First off, the Palm Gandolf lives! The long-rumored mini Treo, which will be known henceforth as the "Centro," will run Windows Mobile 6 on Sprint's EV-DO network, sports a tiny QWERTY keypad and touchscreen and is allegedly the smallest Treo ever. Sprint is hoping to market this little guy to the teen crowd and to that end, they're slapping a suitably small price tag on it: $99. The catch? "The Centro has possibly the tiniest QWERTY keyboard I've ever seen," says Gearlog. "It's infinitesimal: it's actually impossible to type on this thing with two thumbs."

For the adults, they've got the long lusted-after Touch, HTC's Windows Mobile answer to the iPhone. While we've been hearing about the European version of the handset for a while now, the U.S. version will be seeing a few upgrades when it lands in November, most notably CDMA/EV-DO and a speed bump from 200Mhz to 400Mhz (for WM6, natch). Later on down the line, we'll see Rev. A and GPS, both of which might be woken up via a software update. We got a little hands-on time with a European version of the device yesterday and while it doesn't sport full iPhone-like Multitouch, the Touch's big, bright screen, snappy performance and GPS module didn't fail to impress.

For more on the new phones:
- see this Gizmodo article on the Palm Centro
- and this one on the Touch