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High Tech Computer (HTC) has sold more than 800,000 Touch smartphones since its release in Europe and Asia on July 22nd. That's a pretty impressive number for a company that has little brand recognition among the general public.

It achieved this milestone in about the same amount of time, 2.3 months, that it took Apple, a company with a huge amount of brand recognition, to ship its first million iPhones, which has been available only in the U.S. since its launch on June 29th. The iPhone is supposed to start shipping in Europe next month.

Even HTC Chief Executive Peter Chou was surprised by the number of Touches sold so far. Chou said to Reuters in an interview, "This is better than I expected ... We feel very good about our success."

HTC is expected to make the Touch, a Windows Mobile smartphone, available in the U.S. later this year. It is reportedly developing models for both GSM (i.e. AT&T and T-Mobile) and CDMA (i.e. Verizon Wireless and Sprint) carriers. This will give the Touch, or whatever it will be called by the time it ships here, the best chance to succeed in the U.S. market.

The iPhone, by contrast, is officially only limited to one mobile operator; AT&T. Folks have been able to unlock their Apple smartphones to work with other carriers however. That is until Apple released firmware version 1.1.1, which re-locked and disabled many of these iPhones.

HTC already has a follow up to the Touch, the Touch Dual phone, in the works. This model, which may become available in Europe later this month, is supposed to sport both touch screen and keyboard interfaces.

France Telecom's Orange will be the first carrier to offer this smartphone; across Europe, in the UK, France, Romania and Poland. The Touch Dual should be capable of using Orange's 3.5G HSDPA network.

HTC has integrated what it calls TouchFLO technology into the Touch. This means it essentially grafted an advanced Touch interface onto Windows Mobile.

As a result, the Windows Mobile 6 Professional (formally known as Pocket PC Phone) smartphone is capable of recognizing and responding to the sweep of a finger across the screen. It is even supposed to be intelligent enough to distinguish between finger and stylus input and then respond accordingly.

Sweep your fingers across the display to launch an animated, three-dimensional interface comprising three screens: Contacts, Media and Applications. The interface can be spun by swiping a finger right or left across the display, providing what appears to be easier access to these features for consumers than a normal Windows Mobile interface for most.

TouchFLO also delivers finger touch scrolling and browsing of Web pages, documents, messages and contact lists.

As a Windows Mobile Professional device, the HTC Touch offers Outlook Mobile, Office Mobile for editing and reading native Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, Pocket Internet Explorer and Windows Live. With it, you can view HTML-formatted e-mail and push e-mail in an Exchange environment.

The GSM/GPRS/EDGE Tri-band HTC Touch measures only 3.9 x 2.3 x 0.5 inches (99.9 x 58 x 13.9 millimeters) and weighs 3.9 ounces (112 grams). It offers both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

There's a 2 megapixel camera, 64MB of RAM, 128MB of ROM and a microSD slot for extra storage. It comes with a 1GB expansion card.

The Touch's 2.8-inch display sports a 240 x 320 pixel (QVGA) resolution and supports 65,536 colors. Its Li-Ion battery specs out to last 200 hours standby and up to 5 hours of talk time.

We've got a review of the Touch in the works and will post our thoughts on the smartphone soon.