T-Mobile USA will begin selling its new smartphone which uses Google Inc’s open-source Android Operating System (OS) by this August-end. Its features include a touch-screen display, 3.2-megapixel camera, GPS, Wi-Fi, 3G support, music-player and also video-capabilities to ease sharing of pictures and videos on sites like YouTube and Picasa.

The idea for the phone stems from the lack of personalizable smartphones in the market. It follows that the phone’s advantage lies in the fact that it can be highly personalized with custom home screens and widgets. Being a smartphone, the myTouch will also learn user preferences and make suggestions that are tailored to the user’s tastes.

The phone is lighter than its predecessor, G1, and has longer battery life. Unlike the G1, it will not feature the sliding QWERTY keypad which is instead replaced by a touch-screen keyboard. It is much slimmer and curvier than the earlier model. The myTouch will be available in three colours: white, black and wine red.

As regards storage capacity, the phone has 512MB of internal memory and comes with expandable-memory capability. T-Mobile plans to give away a free 4GB microSD card with every set sold.

It will cost $199, which is in line with the current market-prices of smartphones. Existing customers of T-Mobile can pre-order myTouch from July 8 onwards and can expect to receive the same from July 29 onwards. The company has forecasted that more than half of the new myTouch G3’s users will be existing customers looking to upgrade their old T-Mobiles.