HTC’s MyTouch 4G Slide Has Serious Camera Chops

The iPhone 4 takes fantastic pictures, for a phone. But over on T-Mobile in the U.S., HTC’s upcoming myTouch 4G Slide promises to be the first phone since that takes better pictures and doesn’t suck at, well, everything else.

The Slide’s got an 8-megapixel shooter with back-illuminated sensor (also found in the iPhone 4, and a ton of higher end point-and-shoots, like from Sony) and a superfast lens (f/2.2 versus the iPhone 4′s f/2.4). That means un-sucky photos even in low-light conditions, in theory. Plus, modes like Panorama shot, HDR and a rapid-fire burst shooting let you flex your camera phone photography muscle.

It also has “zero shutter lag.” The camera automatically starts buffering as soon as the photo app launches, continuing to cache in the background until you push the camera button. The camera software then records the timestamp of your press and matches it to the photo in the buffer.

Besides the camera, the 4G Slide is your standard Android smartphone with a 3.7-inch WVGA display, 1.2 GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor and Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS. Sense 3.0 is there to make your life easier with its carousel homescreen and new lock screen. Swype also makes an appearance, but the phone is a slider so you always have the physical QWERTY keyboard if you need it. (And it’s surprisingly thin for a slider.)

And it’s one of the few Android handsets to natively support Netflix.

There’s no hard launch date or pricing available yet—July is as specific as T-mobile’s getting. [T-Mobile]