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The great marketing maxim that you shouldn’t be tinkering with a successful product goes out the window with the HTC Desire Z. The Taiwan-based leader in smartphones HTC did just that. It took its highly successfully HTC Desire released this March and decided it can reach more markets by adding a full QWERTY keyboard in a slider form factor.

HTC didn’t sacrifice much of the slim profile of the Desire as its QWERTY version has a 14.2mm profile making it one of the slimmest QWERTY sliders on the market.

Feature Desirability

Apart from that, HTC traded the beefy muscles of the older Desire’s 1GHz Snapdragon for a less endowed by just as capable 800 MHz Qualcomm MSM7230 under the hood. At least you now get the latest Android v2.2 to run the HTC Desire Z. You give some, you lose some, right?

But for all intents and purposes, the two are almost identical, with the same 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen display all the bells like proximity and accelerometer sensors, Swipe and multitouch input technologies, 480 x 800 resolution and 16 million colors. The display is S-LCD which is no less as good as the AMOLED in the first early batches of the Desire which now uses the same screens, thanks to Samsung’s inability to meet the HTC needs.

The new Desires features quad band GSM on 2G with class 32 GPRS/EDGE connectivity speeds and a dual band UMTS on 3G with HSDPA at 14.14 Mbps and HSUPA at 5.7 Mbps data speeds. Local data transfers get WiFi 802.11 b/g/n for hotspot surfing, Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP, microUSB v2.0 and an in-built GPS receiver with A-GPS.

Imaging gets a 5-megapixel shooter with autofocus, LED flash, face detection, geo tagging and video recording at 720p high definition. Mobile entertainment starts with its Stereo FM receiver with RDS, a 3.5mm audio jack and wireless A2DP stereo listening option.

HTC puts in a generous 1.5 GB of user memory coupled with a 512 MB RAM for its OS files. You also get a 32GB microSD support. A 1300 mAh Li-ion battery delivers up to 9.8 hours of call time on 2G, 6.6 hours on 3G with a standby time of 430 hours.

Ever since the next little green robot was given a name (Gingerbread), rumor mongers have been quite active in spreading “news” about it. The Google Android 3.0 operating system was said to have been developed for next generation smart phones and, as such, will not be compatible with any of the ‘Droid devices available at present.

The rumors circulating stated that the Gingerbread had a screen resolution requirement (1280 x 760 to be exact) and will not be compatible with some screen sizes. It also entailed a mobile phone to have a next gen processor, which is at least 1 GHz, in order to run the resource heavy platform.

Due to the steep minimum specs rumored to be needed by the device, the 3.0 version would split the Google Android family of devices in half. Those who would run the 3.0 would be the high end devices while those that would be upgradeable to a 2.2 would be in the cheap or mass market mobile phone category. And from the rumors being circulated, it appeared that the HTC Desire and Google’s own Nexus One would fall into the latter category. Lastly, Gingerbread is due to be released mid-October this year.

As to why these were given to the public as news, nobody knows. Perhaps this was just a trend prediction gone awry, or maybe it is just an innocent comment that happened to reach the ears of Google execs. At any rate, Google lead for Android Open Source and Compatibility Technology, Dan Morrillhas, had to dispel the rumors through his Tweet:

“I love it when people just make stuff up and report it as news. In summary, please remember that rumors are not official announcements. .”

So if you currently own a Nexus One, you will probably be able to update your ‘Droid to version 3.0 without problems in the future. If you want to know what makes Gingerbread worth all the fuss, just feast your eyes on version 2.2.