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The Register is reporting that Orange is following T-Mobile's lead and will probably be offering the new 3G Universal from HTC sometime later this year.

CREDIT: The Register

The HTC "Universal", or MDA IV depending on branding
The 3G Universal handset is apparently PDA sized, with a proper 640 × 480 VGA display and QWERTY keyboard, stereo speakers and two cameras, one for photograhy and one for video calls. However, the killer feature of this handset is that in addition regular triband operation it also supports both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networking, which pretty much makes it the perfect mobile data platform.

I've been waiting for something like this for a long time, of course I'll probably be waiting for a while yet, as the ship date is simply "later this year" which with Orange could mean anything...

Update: I knew it was going to run Windows Mobile. However, I sort of saw that as a downside until I found out that it's supposed to have a VGA display out. Which means that you can easily do PowerPoint presentations directly from the palmtop. The pictures coming out of 3GSM World also seem to show it with a mini-USB connector, which is more than nice.

So, it's got a "proper" VGA screen, VGA out, a decent keyboard, 3G, triband, WiFi, Bluetooth and USB and it's about the size of a PDA? Got to get one...

Update: More details about the release of this palmtop onto both Orange and Vodaphone have been confirmed by the networks.

Update: I've just bought one...

Update: My first impressions...