Toshiba shocked the gadget world today with the surprise announcement of a stunning 4.1-inch touchscreen smartphone, called the TG01. The handset looks to go head-to-head with Apple’s iPhone and HTC’s Touch HD and is the first gadget to incorporate Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon QSD2850 processor.

The TG01 is slimmer than its rivals at a mere 10mm thin, yet features a larger 4.1-inch 800 x 480 WVGA touchscreen, HSDPA, HSUPA, WiFi as well as built-in A-GPS navigation. The handset will also come equipped with a MicroSD card slot which is good for up to 32GB of storage, plus Flash and DIVX are supported.

The stripy GUI is Toshiba’s doing – a custom interface hiding Windows Mobile 6.1 running in the background. It features three vertical panels that can apparently be scrolled through with a swipe of a finger, which is a neat touch. I don’t know how people will react to the color scheme of this interface, but there may yet be some modifications before launch.

The TG01 responds to shaking and gestures and includes an accelerometer to rotate the display. Sound familiar? You can shake the smartphone to either end or answer calls, or to simply return to the homescreen.

The European launch date is apparently set at sometime in Summer 2009, but no pricing info has been made available as yet. We will find out more when Mobile World Congress hits Spain on February 16th, however. For hands-on pics and reviews, be sure to head on over to SlashGear and ElectricPig, who were lucky enough to attend the London launch today.

Sources:
Register Hardware and SlashGear.com