After its first review of the 3G-enabled Dash smartphone more than two years back, T-Mobile finally launched the much-awaited Dash 3G on Wednesday. T-Mobile's refreshed smartphone, coming at a time when the mobile phone market is becoming a fiercely-contested one, will hit the stores in July.

Though T-Mobile has not yet officially disclosed the pricing of its Dash 3G, the HTC-designed new smartphone features a full QWERTY keyboard, is Wi-Fi-enabled, and runs on Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard Edition operating system.

T-Mobile's Dash 3G has quite a few similarities with the HTC Snap, which is available on Sprint and Verizon. The handset of the new smartphone marks a definite evolution from its predecessor, with a trackball and well-defined, round nav buttons of the new model substituting the earlier model's five-way nav button and bunch of small nav keys underneath the display. 

In addition, some other specs of T-Mobile's Dash 3G include a QVGA display with 320 by 240 pixel resolution; integrated GPS; a 2-megapixel camera; exchange server support; Bluetooth 2.0; and microSDHC card slot.

Though the features of the new smartphone are a marked improvement over T-Mobile's earlier Dash version, they still leave a lot to be desired when compared to the specs of some of the other new entrants in the smartphone market - including the Palm Pre or the iPhone 3G.