Telstra announced today that the HTC HD7 is now available for sale at their stores.

Today we’re launching a new big-screen mobile that we think caters perfectly for this growing appetite for mobile gaming and video.

In the same announcement they also mentioned the state of the Windows Phone NoDo updates that will be released for their existing Windows Phones.

We know our Windows Phone 7 customers want the latest, best-performing software for their smartphones. We’re working with Microsoft and phone makers to deliver OS updates as quickly as possible. The Windows Phone 7 ‘pre-update’ has passed Telstra’s test program and we expect Microsoft to make it available to our 7 Mozart and LG Optimus 7Q customers late this week or early next week. Additional software updates for both devices will follow in April.

Source: http://exchange.telstra.com.au/2011/03/29/htc-hd7-the-ultimate-entertainment-phone/

Microsoft have just released an update schedule to list the fragmented update status of all the phones by carriers around the world. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/features/update-schedule-world.aspx

As you can see this schedule shows Telstra as still “Testing” the February and March updates which is behind many of the other carriers around the world.

However the official Telstra twitter account ( @telstra ) has confirmed that the HTC HD7 that is being released this Tuesday 29th March will definitely have the NoDo update pre-loaded.

the HD7 is releasing with NoDo

http://www.twitter.com/Telstra/status/50781737348890624

As you can see this does not confirm that other Telstra Windows Phones will be updated on or before this date. But it does mean that Australia users can officially have a Windows Phone with Copy & Paste support in only a few days…

Today Telstra announced that the HTC HD7 would be coming to Telstra as an exclusive handset in Australia. This is one of the flagship Windows Phone 7 devices that many people have been holding out to buy due to its large 4.3” screen and kick stand. This phone has been out since October in other countries such as Singapore and T-Mobile USA however they were not capable of the 850mhz NextG frequencies for the Telstra network.

What is not known yet is if this device will come with 8gb or 16gb storage. However the official Twitter accounts did speculate the device will come with 16gb as this is the normal capacity for the device when sold in the Asia region.

The phone will be released on Tuesday 29th March for $768 outright.

Source: http://www.telstra.com.au/abouttelstra/media-centre/announcements/telstra-joins-with-htc-and-microsoft-to-launch-the-htc-hd7-smartphone.xml 

Full Product Specs: http://www.htc.com/www/product/hd7/specification.html

Right now the official Windows Phone 7 page from Microsoft have listed the 5 launch handsets for all the networks in Australia. One of the phone that is most notably missing is the HTC HD7 which many people have been hoping would be one of the launch device in Australia.

Image source http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-au/buy/7/default.aspx

However i have just added the “New Phones” (see bottom left above) RSS feed to my Google Reader account and I was shocked to see that the two HTC HD7 entries were added just 4 days ago.

As you can see there are two entries in there that list the HTC HD7 as a Telstra phone.

Interesting to note is that the RSS feed right now does not have the HTC HD7 listed in the raw feed so I am assuming that Google have cached some information in the feed that was accidentally released early.

What I suspect that this means is that HTC HD7 will be shipping very shortly after the release but of course Microsoft and Telstra don’t want to take away from the launch event by they don’t want to

Source RSS http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/components/bbRssGenerator/DevicesRSS.aspx?locale=en-au (via Google Reader)