Taiwan's HTC, the world's No. 5 smartphone brand, expects to announce a Windows 7 phone by the end of this year, it said on Wednesday.

Earlier it said Q2 revenues would grow to T$50 billion (1 billion pounds) in the second quarter, helped by improving demand for the feature-jammed gadgets.

It also signed a licencing deal with Microsoft covering HTC phones running Google Inc's Android operating system.

(Reporting by Argin Chang, Editing by Jonathan Standing)