While Apple chose London to inform the world of the iPhone's international agenda, HTC is reportedly looking to make a few announcements of its own on that side of the pond. According to TheUnwired, HTC will hold two press events on the first two days in October, the first of which will be in the UK and the second in Germany. Best guesses suggest that we'll be learning a bit more about the firm's forthcoming Windows Mobile-based lineup, and we can only hope that the Kii, Omni and / or Polaris are part of the show -- but considering the location and all, we wouldn't bet the farm on hearing too much about the likely US-bound Juno. Hold tight kids, the events get going in under a week.

With interest in the Shift -- HTC's foray into the wacky UMPC market -- coming to a rolling boil, we're glad to hear the company has finally shored up firm plans to get the sucker released. Vishnu Vardhan, HTC's exec for the Middle East and North Africa, says that the Shift will see an official release at Dubai's GITEX Technology Week starting September 8. That's not all, though; Vardhan says that four "brand new products" will see the light of day for the first time at GITEX, too, and if we had to lay money on it, we'd guess they're all Windows Mobile handsets. We'd previously heard that the Touch-like Nike might get called out in September, but the other three are anyone's guess.

[Via the::unwired]

HTC's model naming convention has always been just a little tricky to commit to memory, and with this latest batch, it certainly ain't getting any easier. A couple of these we've heard about before -- namely the Nike, Kaiser, and Shangri-La -- but the rest are brand new to us and very exciting. First up, the S640 "Iris" is a CDMA rendition of the Excalibur and Cavalier, tossing in EV-DO rev. A and WiFi atop Windows Mobile 6 Standard. The "Vogue" is essentially a Touch (TouchFLO UI and all) with the same EV-DO rev. A guts as the Iris -- good news for Verizon and Sprint customers, we'd imagine. GSM users have reason to celebrate here too, though, in the form of the "Volans" and "Polaris." These two are upgrades to the Vox and Artemis, respectively, adding in much-needed 3G radios and faster processors. Finally, the P6550 "Sedna" appears to be some sort of industrial device with support for a credit card reader -- though with a 3 megapixel cam and 3G data, we wouldn't mind having one ourselves. Release dates are up in the air on most of these, but our money is on late '07.

[Via The Boy Genius Report]

Update: Crikey, the Shangri-La's slide reveals that the device -- HTC's entry into the UMPC fray -- runs both Vista and Windows Mobile 6. Sound vaguely familiar? [Thanks, Kevin]