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HTC's answer to the Motorola Q, RIM BlackBerry and Samsung BlackJack, code-named Excalibur, may soon find its way to Canada through Rogers Wireless. Although the device hasn't been officially introduced yet, an Excalibur product manual has been posted to Rogers' Web site.

Rogers will apparently offer Excalibur as the S621. Many of you may be familiar with this model under its U.S. name, Dash; T-Mobile has been shipping the Windows Mobile smartphone since last October. While the Dash ships with Windows Mobile 5.0, it is likely the S621 will run on the recently introduced version 6.0 of Microsoft's mobile platform.

(In fact, at the time of Windows Mobile 6's announcement, it was revealed Dash would be one of the first smartphones running the earlier version of the operating system to receive an upgrade to the new edition.)

The S621 PDF file does not indicate when the smartphone will become available or how much it will cost.

As with the Q and BlackJack, the S621/Excalibur runs on the Smartphone (and not the Pocket PC Phone) edition of Windows Mobile. This means, among other things, users can natively view but not edit Microsoft Office files, and the QVGA (320 x240 pixel) resolution screen is not touch.

The smartphone falls into what is called the communicator category of advanced handsets. That means S621/Excalibur is a thin and compact PDA/phone hybrid with the type of QWERTY thumb-keyboard.

The quad-band GSM/GPRS S621/Excalibur is a world phone capable of being used outside of North America. It also sports Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and 2.5 G EDGE data cellular-networking for accessing content services like e-mail, the Web, streaming multimedia, and so on. There's no 3G.

It runs on a 200 MHz TI OMAP P850 processor, 64 MB of RAM, and 128 MB of ROM.

An innovative jog strip replaces the typical thumbwheel found on many communicators.. Located on the side of the device near the display, users slide their fingers up and down the strip (like you would with a touchpad on a laptop). At the top and bottom of the strip are places that lead to the Start Menu and go back.

For more on Excalibur/Dash/S621, see our review.