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	Htc Touch HD black (Orange) Carphone Warehouse £98.71
	Htc Touch HD black (Orange) Carphone Warehouse £206.36

RATING:

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SUMMARY:

Decent Windows Mobile 6 touchscreen phone. Pan across pages with TouchFlo. Looks good. Feels good. The HTC Touch has no 3G or HSDPA. If you want 3G, see the HTC Touch Dual or Touch Cruise.

HTC Touch Review

The HTC Touch is a Windows Mobile 6 Professional smartphone. It's thin (14 mm), has a big 2.8-inch touchscreen, and the casing has an "oo-er, that feels mighty fine" rubberised feel.

It's called 'Touch', because the HTC Touch is the first HTC phone to use the TouchFlo touchscreen technology - drag, flick and tap the screen. More on that in a mo.

Put simply, the HTC is a good-looking thin Windows 6 Mobile phone with a HTC home (a new Today screen plug-in), TouchFlo (flick through lists with your finger, pan around documents), and the Touch Cube interface - drag your finger across the screen to change menus.

The not-so-good: There's no 3G or HSDPA, but there is EDGE and Wi-Fi connectivity. And there's no 850 Mhz frequency (the HTC Touch is tri-band).

You can buy the HTC Touch on SIM-free, PAYG or get it for free on contract. The UK mobile networks offer their own branded versions of the HTC Touch. See links below for more on these.

Design

Most HTC mobile phones are chunky beasts. The HTC Touch however is good-looking - smooth rubber feel to the case, soft curves... woof.

The Touch is reasonably light for a smartphone too - just 114 g, and its dimensions are quite petite too - 100 mm x 58 mm x 14 mm. It's the best looking HTC phone to date - take the HTC Touch out for a kebab and Guinness. Satisfaction guaranteed.

This smooth handset fits snugly in the hand. You can operate much of the interface using one hand and your thumb. You'll need to use the stylus to operate much of the interface.

Screen: 2.8-inches, 240 x 320 pixels and 65k colours. It would have been better to have a 240 x 400 resolution - the LG Viewty manages it on a 3-inch screen.

Hardware controls: Minimal hardware keys. Beneath the screen are the talk and end keys, a tad small, but easy to press. Between these 2 keys lies the navigation key. The confirmation button is large - lovely jubbly.

There's a volume slider on the left (fine), microphone, USB port and soft reset on the bottom, power key on the top and the stylus and camera button on the right. The USB port is good - some/many people would like a 3.5 mm audio jack too - it ain't there.

The SIM card and memory card slots are a bit bizarre. You have to first remove the back cover (easily done, slide it up), then open the large flap on the right side of the phone. The manual recognizes it isn't easy to do - the manual says "pry it open... [to make it] easier, open both ends.

The upper slot is the storage card, the lower slot is the SIM card. This could have been better designed. A 1 GB microSD memory card is included in the package, along with an extra stylus, pouch, earphones, application CD, a 208-page colour user guide, charger, battery and USB cable.

Features

TouchFlo

The "revolutionary" feature - TouchFlo [TM]. Use your finger to scroll and pan the screen. Yes, it's like the Apple iPhone.

Finger scrolling and panning: When content can't fit on a screen, you'll see a scroll bar on the right side of the page. The scroll bar is a little thin - use your nails, a stylus, or simply drag your finger and up down to scroll or pan.

If you see a vertical scrollbar, you can scroll with your finger. Simply drag or flick up/down to scroll down/up or drag/flick right/left to pan left/right. There can be a few time delays when panning across documents, and sometimes the screen failed to respond to my touch.

Example uses: Web pages, documents and lists.

Touch Cube: Available in portrait mode only. The Touch Cube is a 3D cubic interface. To access the Touch Cube, slide your finger upwards, starting from the bottom of the screen where it shows the logo image.

Once in the Touch Cube interface, drag your finger across the screen - from left to right, or right to left. The Touch Cube has 3 menus:

1. Contacts: 9 quick access contacts with photos. Just tap the photo/contact to access their info. Useful and easy. 4 keys align the bottom of the interface - phone, call history, contacts and delete from favourites.

2. Quick shortcuts: Drag your finger across the screen again to access the shortcut menu - 2 x 3 grid of keys - Email, SMS/MMS, Internet Explorer, Tasks, Comm Manager and Calendar.

3. Media menu: 3 keys - music playback, photos and video.

A little gimmicky. A bit of a "look at what we can do with our interface" sort of feature. The Touch Cube is simply a cutesy "drag finger up the screen to access the cube" user interface offering quick-access to contacts, quick shortcuts and the media screen.

Drag up from the bottom logo image to access the 3 menus (sides) on the cube. Drag your finger down the screen to exit the cube. Select a menu item, and you'll access the Windows Mobile 6 application.

HTC Home

New for HTC, the HTC home plug-in for the Windows Mobile 'Today' screen. HTC home covers the top half of the 'Today' home screen. The HTC home plug-in features 3 keys - home, weather and application launcher.

Home: Current date and local time (in nice big numbers). There are also 3 keys - new email, SMS/MMS and missed call keys. Each key displays the number of missed emails, messages or calls. Useful.

Weather: Shows you the current weather for today and the next 4 days (select a city). The HTC Touch automatically connects to the Internet via GPRS, and downloads weather data from the Accuweather Web site. You get pretty weather icons - clouds, sun, rain etc.

Launcher: Add shortcuts to your favourite programs and settings for one-touch access. Add up to 9 applications.

On-screen QWERTY keyboard

The Windows Mobile QWERTY keyboard keys aren't very large. You can use your fingernails, but it's best to use a stylus. What, no big full-screen keyboard like the iPhone? That's an outrage, what were they thinking, some might shriek.

No problem Mr Bond. You can download a full-screen touchscreen keyboard from the Internet. You can then use your fingers/thumbs. Much better. Popular touchscreen keyboards include the Spb full screen keyboard and TouchPal (see useful links section at end of review).

Windows Mobile 6

The HTC Touch is a Windows Mobile 6 handset. Office applications, handwriting recognition, voice recorder, dialling, notes, Windows Media Player, calendar, contacts, file explorer, ActiveSync, games, Adobe Reader LE, comm manager and more.

Applications CD: Sprite backup and Spg GPRS monitor applications are included in the box.

Connectivity

There is EDGE and WLAN (Wi-Fi), but no 3G or HSDPA. EDGE isn't very widespread and GRPS is slowwwwwwwww. Insert the charger, earphones and other peripherals into the USB port at the bottom.

2 MP camera

Image quality is OK. You might think image quality is rubbish. Very subjective topic. There's a self-portrait mirror on the back. There's no auto-focus or macro mode. Take photos in landscape mode - press the camera button to activate.

There are various capture modes: photo, video, MMS video, contacts picture, picture theme, sports (3, 5, 7 or 10 consecutive shots) and burst (up to 30 shots).

Images are saves in .jpeg format, video in .mp4, .avi, or .3gp. You can tap the camera interface (stylus or fingers) to switch modes, zoom, open the album, access the settings menu. Easy-to-use.

2 megapixels is 1200 x 1600 pixels. Tap the screen to access the 'quick settings' panel - you get 5 large finger-friendly keys: resolution, white balance, brightness control, storage and self-timer. Tap the key multiple times to scroll through the option.

Other camera settings include metering mode, quality, size, time stamp, screen hue/saturation/brightness, shutter sound, grid, backlight, review duration and more. Video capture resolution is 176 x 144 pixels.

HTC Touch vs Touch Dual vs Touch Cruise

HTC's other TouchFlo-enabled phones - HTC Touch Dual and HTC Touch Cruise are perhaps better options.

HTC Touch Dual: Has a slide-out QWERTY (or 16-key) keyboard, 3G, HSDPA, secondary camera and a 2.6-inch screen. No Wi-Fi.

HTC Touch Cruise 2.8-inch screen, 2nd camera, quad-band, 3G, HSPDA, Wi-Fi, GPS.

Summary

The HTC Touch is a decent Windows Mobile 6 phone. TouchFlo lets you scroll and pan across pages, and the Touch Cube gives you quick access to commonly used applications (although its usefulness is questionable).

The HTC Touch has no 3G or HSDPA - both the HTC Touch Dual or Touch Cruise do have 3G and HSDPA. Being newer phones, they're more expensive than the HTC Touch.

TAGS: touchscreen, wi-fi, smartphone, big screen, bar phones

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