HTC Advantage coming to US... under the HTC brand

Another from HTC we saw coming, but that's still a pleasant surprise: HTC's Advantage (codename Athena) will in fact be making it Stateside! Noice, but even better, HTC will be releasing the Advantage (now camera-free) under its own brand. In other words, the little ODM we all watched grow up in the last couple of years has finally broken free of designing handsets for others and the perpetual carrier rebadges, and is officially launching devices under its own brand in the US. Perhaps they finally have the cachet to play the game outside of the normal carrier / device ecosystem (or, equally likely, no US carrier was brave enough to sell the Advantage), but either way users can look forward to:

• 5-inch VGA touch display

• Tri-band UMTS / HSDPA, quad-band GSM / GPRS / EDGE

• WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0

• GPS navigation

• 8GB drive, 256MB flash memory, 128MB RAM

• miniSD card slot, HTC VueFLO nav

• 3.5mm audio jack

Coming this summer -- hard price and date not yet established.