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Bell Canada may not be the first carrier to deliver the HTC Touch in North American—fellow Canadian operator Telus took that honor in October, followed by Sprint in the U.S. earlier this month—but it sure is offering the best deal on High Tech Computer's first smartphone with an advanced touch screen interface.

You can pick up the Touch in Canada for $150 with a three year deal, $200 on two years, $350 on one year and $400 with no contract at all.

More impressively, because Bell is classifying the Touch as a mobile phone and not a PDA, it is offering an unlimited Internet plan (i.e. Web access, e-mail) for the Touch at an outrageously low $7 CAD (about $7.11 U.S. as of November 26th) per month. You'd be hard pressed to find another smartphone data plan for less on either side of the U.S./Canadian border.

More on HTC Touch
As with the iPhone, the main means of interaction between the user and the Touch is through its display, which measures 2.8 inches diagonally, sports a 240 x 320 pixel (QVGA) resolution and supports 65,536 colors.

Unlike the iPhone, the Touch is built on Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6 Professional operating system, currently a far more open mobile platform for which thousands of applications are available.

The Touch features HTC's TouchFLO technology, which essentially grafts an advanced touch interface onto Windows Mobile. As a result, it is supposed to be capable of recognizing and responding to the sweep of a finger across the screen. It is even supposed to be intelligent enough to distinguish between finger and stylus input.

Sweep your fingers across the display to launch an animated, three-dimensional interface comprising three screens: Contacts, Media and Applications. The interface can be spun by swiping a finger right or left across the display, providing what appears to be easier access to these features for consumers than a normal Windows Mobile interface for most.

TouchFLO also delivers finger touch scrolling and browsing of Web pages, documents, messages and contact lists.

As a Windows Mobile Professional device, the HTC Touch offers Outlook Mobile, Office Mobile for editing and reading native Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, Pocket Internet Explorer and Windows Live. With it, you can view HTML-formatted e-mail and push e-mail in an Exchange environment.

The Touch measures only 4 x 2.4 x 0.6 inches and weighs 4 ounces. The CDMA version offered by Telus and Bell includes Bluetooth and support Bell's high-speed EV-DO 3G data network, but doesn't feature Wi-Fi like its GSM cousin.

There's a 2 megapixel with 5x zoom for picture and video, 64MB of RAM, 128MB of ROM and a microSD slot for extra storage. Today's micro SD cards top out at 4GB.

Its Li-Ion battery specs out to last 200 hours standby and up to 5 hours of talk time.