Motorola's first US touchphone announced

Motorola hasn't exactly had the strongest presence in mobile phone hardware lately, and was slow to officially hop on the 3G touchphone bandwagon, but now it has debuted its second device in the familiar form factor.

Today, just two days ahead of the CTIA Wireless convention, Motorola announced the Evoke QA4, an CDMA/EV-DO (Rev. A) device with a 2.8" touchscreen. The Evoke is equipped with 256MB of on-board memory and is expandable up to 8 GB via MicroSD, a 2 megapixel 5x digital zoom camera, stereo Bluetooth and full HTML browsing.

Motorola expects the device to be available in the second quarter of 2009, with no word on price or carrier affiliation.

At CES 2009, Motorola prominently featured its first genuine touchphone, the MotoSURF A3100, a Windows Mobile 6.1 device with GSM/EDGE/HSDPA connectivity. Though it showed promisingly fast browsing with its native Opera 9.5 browser in demonstrations, the company made no mention of a US launch.