I want to love the Dell Venue Pro. This is the Windows Phone 7 with a keyboard that might actually work: a vertical slider, so it's usable one-handed and it gets around Windows Phone 7's problems with rotating screens. But it's from Dell, and even T-Mobile doesn't seem to have complete faith in the phone.

The Venue Pro is a long, narrow phone with metallic edges. It feels a little like a tube of something. Maybe it's a tube of Windows Phone 7. Slide the 4.1-inch, 800-by-480 screen up, and it becomes even longer, but there's a big payoff: a really nice little keyboard. The Venue Pro has a full four-row keyboard of domed keys, with a decently sized spacebar and the shift key in the right place. I could type on this. I could even type on this one-handed.

By being an entirely vertically oriented phone, the Venue Pro avoids some of the pitfalls the LG Quantum runs into. Many built-in Windows phone 7 apps only work in portrait mode, but that's OK; the Venue Pro is always in portrait mode.

Otherwise, all Windows Phones at the moment have similar hardware specs: a 1-GHz Qualcomm QSD8250 processor, a 5-megapixel camera, and 16GB of storage.

Dell's contribution to Windows Phone 7 software is a free year's subscription to Pageonce Personal Finance, a well-known and well-liked money management app. T-Mobile, meanwhile, has added streaming T-Mobile TV, Netflix, Slacker, Telenav navigation, and Family Room, a custom app to let ad-hoc family groups keep track of and send messages to each other.

I didn't have any problems with the Venue Pro's performance. Maps came up promptly, Web pages pinched to zoom, and T-Mobile TV looked pixelated, but it looked pixelated on the T-Mobile HD7 too.

Here's the thing, though. The Venue Pro will not be sold in T-Mobile stores. It will be sold directly on dell.com and through both Dell and T-Mobile enterprise sales. The Venue Pro didn't even get its own press release today - it was just a paragraph tacked at the end of T-Mobile's HTC HD7 release. That's really weird; it looks like T-Mobile doesn't have enough faith in the phone to stock it in stores and support it with its own front-line personnel.

T-Mobile's hesitation may come from the utter disaster of Dell's last two phones. The Dell Aero, an Android smartphone for AT&T, was so bad that the company wouldn't send me one. CNET's Bonnie Cha called it a "huge disappointment." Phone Scoop's Phil Berne called it a "total disappointment." The Aero followed the Dell Streak tablet for AT&T, about which I said, "its buggy, cobbled-together software begs for serious improvement."

So I suspect T-Mobile has the Dell Venue Pro on probation. Everybody loves a comeback story, and this could be Dell's - the keyboarded Windows Phone you actually want to use. We'll have to see when we get a review model in. Dell didn't announce a release date or price for the Venue Pro.