[hecatae]

the HTC 7 Pro is £220 from Expansys and £229 from Play.com

this is the qwerty slider:

Windows Phone OS 7
1 GHz processor
117.5 x 59 x 15.5mm
185 grams (6.53 ounces) with battery
Touch screen with pinch-to-zoom capability
3.6 inches
480 x 800 WVGA
Slideout keyboard
ROM:512 MB/RAM:576 MB
5 megapixel color camera with auto focus and flash
720p HD video recording
Built-in scenes include candlelight, landscape, and portrait match the environment of your subject
3.5 mm stereo audio jack
Standard micro-USB (5-pin micro-USB 2.0)
G-Sensor
Digital compass
Proximity sensor
Ambient light sensor
Wi-Fi: IEEE 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 2.1 with Enhanced Data Rate
HTC Hub - Weather, Stocks, Converter, Photo Enhancer, Sound Enhancer, and more
Facebook and Windows Live
Share photos on Facebook or Windows Live SkyDrive
Internal GPS antenna
Bing Maps

nothing seems wrong with those hardware specifications

The LG E900 on the other hand has been available as low as 148 Euros from amazon.de

3.8" 16M-color capacitive TFT touchscreen of WVGA resolution (480 x 800 pixels)
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
3G with HSDPA (7.2 Mbps) and HSUPA (5.76Mbps)
Windows Phone 7 operating system
1GHz Snapdragon CPU, 512MB RAM
5 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash and geo-tagging; Panorama photos with the Panorama shot app
720p video recording @ 24fps
16GB of built-in storage
Standard 3.5mm audio jack
Standard microUSB port (charging)
Wi-Fi b/g/n; DLNA support via PlayTo
Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP
Accelerometer for screen auto rotation
Landscape on-screen QWERTY keyboard
FM radio with RDS
Office document editor
Social networking integration
Built-in A-GPS receiver
Comes with a choice of free apps via LG AppStore
Voice-to-text functionality
ScanSearch augmented reality app

yet again, nothing wrong with the specification

Would be quite decent with Android on them

[Ben]

I suppose they may be, ahead of Mango or whatever it's called?

Perhaps they're also conscious of the impending Nokia that will arrive with it, and the damage that it may do to sales of existing handsets.

[Hands0n]

I think the chances are that they're making way for the likes of the new Samsung Galaxy S2 (http://tinyurl.com/62fme8e) that Microsoft was showing off the other day.

The HTC 7 Pro is a nice bit of hardware, and it would be a shame if Mango update does not appear on it. There is no assurance that it will. I would be very wary of buying one of these just yet.

[miffed]

Well , I just ordered one on impulse (7 PRO)
- TBH I was a little sad about jumping ship with the HD7 & felt I should have stuck around a little longer , and I would like to have a go on a more modern QWERTY device , I did quite like WP7 , it was a just all moving a bit too slow , maybe things have picked up now ? AFAIK a mango update should be available (no reason why not ? ) ...even if it has to come from the dev communty .

Bargain for £229 IMO