The price of HTC's recently launched S740 Smartphone has been revealed by Expansys. as they have the handset up for pre-order and it's not cheap at £359.99 (€448/$633) without a contract. This puts it at £30 (€37/$53) more than the Nokia E71, which has received rave reviews and we think it'll have a tough time competing at this price point.
When you then have to take into consideration that it's taller, a fair bit chubbier, although not quite as wide and heavier, then it seems like this Windows Mobile 6.1 standard device is going to have a tough time convincing business users that are looking for an email device that isn't a Blackberry to go for it.
The S740 does have a pretty solid feature set with a slide out QWERTY keyboard, a 528MHz Qualcomm processor, 256MB of RAM and ROM, support for up to 7.2Mbit HSDPA, WiFi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS and a 3.2 megapixel camera.
Although, once the network providers starts subsiding this handset it might become popular, as we'd expect it to go for less than the Nokia E71, as high-end Nokia handsets doesn't tend to get as much of a discount as HTC devices due to their popularity.
You can place your pre-order
here if you're interested.