HTC Lancaster: Will AT&T Murder Android With Carrier Customization?

When the G1 was released on T-Mobile, many were disappointed in the keyboard, pointing to the Touch Pro design and keyboard layout as what the first Android handset should have been coming from HTC. In the meantime, since the release of the T-Mobile G1, carriers and manufacturing partners have taken a close watch at what the platform will do without fully committing to the OS. Now, AT&T will be the second American carrier to bless Google with the Android in the form of the HTC Lancaster, a device that bears a resemblance to the carrier's Touch Pro2 offering, but with more rounded corners and either a large trackball or directional pad on the front.

At this time, it's unclear whether the tilt feature will be carried on the Lancaster, but the device will be able to slide to reveal a capacious keyboard in landscape orientation. Unlike the leaked screenshots of AT&T's Touch Pro2, the Lancaster does not appear to carry its own number pad, instead the device will have a number configuration built into the keyboard which can be access via a function or secondary key.

This Android model seems to be mostly limited to North America, with dual-band 3G and only tri-band GSM/EDGE radios.

What sets the Lancaster apart from the G1 is AT&T's insistence on branding the device with its own user interface, rather than sticking with the vanilla Google build. According to Engadget Mobile, the carrier is requesting its own AT&T Standard UI, which will come with a software called HTC Social Messaging, which presumably will connect you to social networks to retrieve information in the same way that the cloud-based Palm Pre would.