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September 5, 2007

HTC Touch smartphone

With the HTC Touch, HTC has done a great job of making a user-friendly touchscreen interface phone with the all-important matte black, rubber casing that's likely to appeal to Apple iPhone refuseniks.

To gauge just how deeply the Apple hype ran, we had the editor of our sister magazine, Macworld, test out the Touch initially. Despite being grudgingly impressed, as far as the Apple iPhone goes, he's a goner.

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Stiff competition

We expect much the same to happen to other fans of fashion phones who largely want a solid media-centric phone with the essential ‘designed by Apple' cachet and to be seen ‘pinching' and swooshing with aplomb. It's certainly a flash number, but for now it's lacking the solid communications we believe are critical in a smartphone. Sadly, the HTC Touch also lacks some of these features, most notably 3G/HSDPA.

The HTC Touch is a triband phone with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi as well as GPRS/Edge. As far as business smartphones go, it's a stylish cut above the pack.

However, it's not straightforward to make calls with the HTC Touch. You first have to add the number you want to dial. Not impressive: time-consuming and frustrating.

We had a few issues at first with the Touch being unable to find ActiveSync on our PC, but installing the Sprite Backup applet allows the Touch to restore any contacts or other content should it accidentally lose them.

Multimedia

Click on to the camera – or press the hardware button on the righthand side – and the HTC Touch's screen quality becomes apparent. It uses the whole of its depth to take landscape or portrait images with EV, white balance, a self-timer and access to stored photos all offered with no need to hunt them down. The top resolution is just 2Mp, which seems a shame for such well-thought-out cameraphone software.

Cameras from Canon and Sony, as well as the iPhone, recognise when you change the device orientation. The HTC Touch can't. It does have a software button onscreen which does the same thing – except when in camera mode.
Nor can you view anything in Windows Media Player other than in landscape view. In fact, the HTC Touch doesn't really advertise its media playback credentials at all.

While you can access many useful items from the HTC Touch's Launcher screen, you're stuck back with the fiddly WM6 (Windows Mobile 6.0) drop-down Start menu if you want to track down the Streaming Media function.

Media Player itself doesn't get a look in unless you go to the programs menu and scroll all the way down to find it, or slot in some video footage that then autoplays.

The microSD card slot is hidden beneath the metallic silver strip that runs around the HTC Touch's girth, which is also where the SIM resides. Getting to these cards is best done by removing the back cover first.

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Independent customer reviews from

HTC Touch scored:
7.6 out of 10 100% real reviews

The 2 most helpful reviews based on 3 reviews:

11 Oct 2007 Tathan, North Wales

9

Good Points

Decent WM6 device, doesn't have GPS sensor but otherwise good. Screen is a lot better than previous HTC (SPV M600) and despite looking similar in terms of size is a world slimmer. One of the best phones that is free on a sensible contract and certainly the best PDA. TYTN II if you've got the money, otherwise this.

Bad Points

The HTC TouchFLO software is fairly useless for me tbh - looks nice and works well sometimes but often dumps you into a situation where you have to get the stylus out anyway. Maybe I'm just not down with the kids man. Couple of bugs... transcriber module keeps disappearing and claims to not have enough memory to open camera when nothing else is running and nothing installed. Finally the big button dropped off after a couple of days, glue technology obviously not having reached the point in Taiwan where it can be successfully used to stick things together.

12 Dec 2007 Phil, Newbury

6

Good Points

The HTC Touch Flo interface is great and makes using Windows Mobile easy and fun. The slide down keyboard makes text entry a lot faster (if you're comfortable with T9 predictive text)

Bad Points

The poor device performance in terms of the graphics, HTC hasn't got the device drivers to make full use of the hardware and this really shows. Screen re-draws can be awfully slow. The device is fast, it's just the response of the display which makes it feel slow.

See more HTC Touch reviews on Reevoo.com

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