Taiwan’s HTC has taken the wraps off a thinner, faster version of its Touch smartphone. “This is the much anticipated 3G version of Touch,” Peter Chou, CEO of HTC, said at a news conference in Tokyo.

From the outside the HTC-1100 looks much like the existing Touch handset, which was launched in June this year and is based on the same Windows Mobile 6 operating system. But there are some changes inside.

While the original Touch works only on second-generation GSM networks, the HTC-1100 works on both GSM and 3G (third-generation) WCDMA (wideband code division multiple access) networks. The data transfer capabilities include support for 3.6M bps (bit per second) HSDPA (high speed downlink packet access) networks.