In case you missed it, here is a drill down of what you can expect:

• Built in GPS with digital compass
• Exchange Active sync support
• 3.2″ 320 x 480 capacitive touchscreen
• Android
• ROM: 512 MB
• RAM: 288 MB
• Qualcomm MSM7200A, 528 MHz CPU

Just also keep in mind, since HTC heavily modified this device, this won’t come stock with any of those Google Apps you’ll see in full Google Experience phones, such as the G1 (HTC Dream) or the myTouch (HTC Magic), but be sure that someone like Cyanogen or someone from XDA will be able to hack it in there somehow.

Although, I’ve never experienced the true Internet until my freshman year of college (I lived in the excruciating land of dial up, barely hacking away at those 100,000 free hours on AOL), I’ve seen the progression of what the infinitely expanding Internet has become. The fight for the world that is the Internet has reached the point of where platforms are becoming key to the success of products and companies. Gone are the days of using one shot devices designed for a single purpose and never extendable. It’s all about the APIs and platforms that drive easy content pushing to potential consumers. Think of how explosion of a trend Apple’s App Store or the plethora of twitter clients out there for almost every single connected device. It all likens to the trends where platforms are key to successes of businesses.

So how does this apply to traditional media and how would they benefit from platforms? To understand it, you’ll have to understand how difficult it was to delivery content to a mass of people before the platform craze. Picture this scenario: you’re a software developer who’s worked long and hard on a J2ME application to push weather updates to mobile phones. After months of hard work you finally finish it, but how would you deliver it to your mass potential users? You could put it online and then tell people about it? You could try to propose this application to those big-wigs at those cell carriers? Or you could try to deliver and push the application yourself? There are a number of ways, but to be honest, none of them have ever been very easy. Now picture this, filling out a simple form, uploading your application and just waiting for approval, then just sitting back and just watching all those people get some use out of your application.

Now picture how the traditional media outlets have operated. Articles are written, submitted to editors, cut up to fit a certain word count because it may not fit on a single column, it is fit into a layout and put together with other articles, cut together, sent for printing, stacks are delivered to distributors or newspaper boys/girls, those limited amounts that were printed are sold, the ones that aren’t are either thrown away or recycled. All this while wasting time, money, fuel and more people than you should to delivery a most likely already outdated piece of physical paper to people that may or may not read it. So how’s this different today? Well… nothing at all. Articles are still written based on a certain width or word count to fit an arbitrary piece of paper; papers are still printed in a set quantity to be delivered to a set number of people and they all get trashed by the end of the day. So how can this all change? With ebook readers coupled with a platform for easy content distribution that is. With Amazon and it’s Kindle (with rumors of a large version coming this week) and the rumors of the publishing giant that is Hearst creating a cheap ebook reader I think this would solve a multitude of the problems that are plaguing traditional publishers and bring an end to a majority of these layoffs. Think of just picking up a slim device, with a nice readable screen and reading the New York Times on it, then flipping through to see what’s are the latest in gadget news from Engadget, all in one seamless hassle-free experience. That, in essence, is what the Kindle is becoming. A singular easy device that allows people to read what they want, where they want and taking up the smallest space possible. The one thing that’s missing is an easy way for content publishers to dictate pricing of their content and large point of entry that is such a device, afterall the Kindle is a $360 piece of equipment. I’m hoping what will save these companies is what Hearst is planning on doing, partnering up with a conglomerate of publishers, creating a very cheap device (under $200), making it like the Kindle, and having it subscription based and allowing consumers to pay for what they want to read. When that happens, we’ll see less tweets from themediaisdying and more from themediaishiring.