Today HTC USA announced the HTC Touch Dual, a device that adds a keypad to the popular HTC Touch design. Like the Touch before it, the HTC Touch Dual makes use of HTC’s TouchFLO finger based user interface extensions to allow users to navigate through the phone quickly and accurately with only a fingertip. Thanks to the addition of a slide-out keypad, the Touch Dual has a non-touchscreen based input method for entering text, which addresses one of the major complaints with the original Touch. The Touch Dual will ship with one of two different keypad designs. The 20 key keypad is laid out in a QWERTY fashion that looks very much like the SureType keypad used on RIM’s BlackBerry Pearl devices, with 5 columns of keys and each key representing two letters of the alphabet.

In addition to the keypad, the Touch Dual also gains 850MHz/1900MHz UMTS/HSDPA connectivity, double the RAM and built-in storage, and improved GSM battery talk times. The price for these advances is pretty minimal: the Touch Dual is 7mm longer, 2mm thicker, and only 8g heavier than the original. That’s pretty impressive. There is a downside, however: the Touch Dual appears to have lost the WiFi support that the original had.

Lastly, HTC also announced that the original Touch will now be available in a silver color scheme, and that Touch users will be able to download and install a free version of HTC’s PhonePad virtual keypad application

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