AT&T will introduce more Android phones with touch screens and keyboards this year, starting with a slider from Pantech in early June, AT&T senior vice president of mobile devices, Jeff Bradley, said today.
The Pantech slider phone will be followed by a "nice, large-screen side-sliding Android device; it's an area we need to address," Bradley said.

Pantech's phone is a "cool little device; it looks a little like a [Casio] G-Shock ... a little bit more outdoors, and it's more durable than a classic side-slider," he said.
Windows Phone, meanwhile, is "doing fine" on AT&T, with the new HTC HD7S

coming soon, Bradley said. The next round of Windows Phones, based on more advanced hardware than the current set, will come with the "Mango" software update later this year.

"Mango will be the next event. With the timing of when [Windows Phone] came out and the timing of Mango, it didn't leave a natural period in between when we could introduce an interim round of devices," Bradley said. "We're working very, very actively with the ecosystem and Microsoft."

AT&T also plans to lift its block on downloading apps from locations other than the Android Market, Bradley said. The first step will be to enable Amazon's Appstore, after which AT&T phones may finally be able to install apps downloaded from other locations. AT&T took its original stance because it was afraid of "bad apps" harming phones and the network, Bradley said.

Bradley said. "First and foremost we were genuinely concerned from a network bandwidth standpoint and a customer experience standpoint for not having any mechanism to take down a bad app. And the only way we could do it at the time was relying on Google to leverage what [security] they had in [the] Android Marketplace. We took a lot of negative publicity.

Source: PCMag