HTC Touch review

Bonnie Cha CNET

Published: 11 Jun 2007

HTC, the company behind many of today's most popular Windows Mobile smartphones, is known for offering a broad range of devices. It has done petite, thin and powerful, and it's even gone above and beyond traditional smartphones, as we saw with the HTC Advantage (a.k.a. the T-Mobile Ameo). And now, the company has once again pushed the limits of design with its latest project: the HTC Touch.

The HTC Touch makes its mark by offering TouchFLO, a brand-new user interface that allows you to operate the smartphone just by swiping your finger on the device's touch screen. It's innovative and cool, but it's also flawed. Our main concern is the lack of a keyboard, which is a huge drawback for messaging, and even slows down simple tasks such as entering new contacts.

HTC is hoping to capture a broader audience with the Touch — someone who is thinking of moving from a mobile phone to a smartphone — and it's certainly a step in the right direction. It's fun to use, so we didn't feel like we were using a buttoned-down corporate device, even though it comes with the Professional edition of Windows Mobile 6. We also absolutely welcome the innovation in technology and design, as it opens up the doors to smarter and cooler phones. That said, we're not sure the HTC Touch is quite ready for mass consumption yet. There are some niggling design quirks, and performance can sometimes be sluggish. But mostly, if the company can find a better solution for text input then the HTC Touch could certainly catch on. It's a good first effort, but we'd hold off for now.

Finally, we'd be remiss not to mention the Apple iPhone here. With its touch-screen capability, there's a natural inclination to compare the two. In fact, the Touch has already solicited a few, 'Oh, so it's like the iPhone?' responses from casual observers. Will it rival the iPhone? We'll know soon enough, when the iPhone ships (in the US). The HTC Touch is available now in the UK, and will ship in the rest of Europe and Asia later in June. US availability is expected during the second half of the year.

Design

The HTC Touch is unlike any other smartphone the company has produced in a number of ways. Obviously, the TouchFLO interface is the biggest story, but the Touch also is the smallest touch screen smartphone that we've seen in recent memory. The handset measures 58mm wide by 99.9mm deep by 13.9mm high and weighs just 112g, fitting nicely in the palm of your hand and easily slipping into a bag or trouser pocket. In addition, the device features a soft-touch finish, giving the device a nice, rubberlike texture that makes the phone easy to grip.

The screen itself measures 2.8in. diagonally and displays 65,536 colors with a native resolution of 240 by 320 pixels. That's all pretty standard, but what sets the screen apart from other smart phones is the TouchFLO technology behind it. Basically, it allows you to operate certain portions of the smartphone with a series of finger swipes or taps. To complement this functionality, HTC has also made some interface and menu changes so you can more easily access your messages, applications and other pertinent information.

Starting with the home screen, if you've used Windows Mobile devices before, you'll notice a new look and feel right away. On top of the shortcuts to your contacts and calendar, you now have convenient one-touch access to your messages, call list, frequently used applications and even weather. From there, you can dig deeper into the smartphone by dragging your thumb from the bottom of the screen (around the HTC logo) to the top. That will take you to a new screen where you can cycle through a 3D interface of three menu choices: Applications, Contacts and Media by swiping your finger left to right or vice versa. Launching a program only requires a tap on the appropriate icon. To get back to the home page, just sweep from the top to the bottom of the display.

The screen is also smart enough to know the difference between a tap and finger sweep, which comes in handy for scrolling through emails and Web pages. When checking out a Web site, a quick flick up or down will tell the Touch to automatically scroll through the page. You can then stop the action by tapping the screen. You can do this with your Office documents, emails, and more — all very cool.

Overall, it only took us a few minutes to get a good understanding of those commands, but we needed more time to learn how the touch screen works once you're in an application. For example, to exit out of a Word document, our natural inclination was to swipe the screen downward, similar to what's needed to get back to the home page. But that's not the case. Rather, you press the X or OK box at the top right of the screen, or you can drag your finger upward to get back to the 3D menu. Oh, another thing we noticed: the TouchFLO technology doesn't seem to work when you switch from portrait to landscape mode.

However, our biggest problem with the HTC Touch is that there's no easy way to enter text. Given the compact design, a full QWERTY keyboard is clearly out, but you're reduced to using a tiny virtual keyboard that absolutely requires the use of a stylus. I have pretty small hands and couldn't accurately type messages with my fingertips. Having nails may help, but the stylus is your best bet. It's true that the HTC Touch isn't meant to be a messaging machine for the power business user, but pecking out notes with the little stylus and on-screen keyboard just doesn't sound appealing or efficient. We hope this is something HTC will reconsider or tweak in the future. On the bright side, the virtual dialpad for making phone calls is spacious and usable.

You do get some tactile controls on the HTC Touch. Below the display, you get tiny Talk and End buttons and a five-way navigation toggle. Along the right side, you'll find a camera activation key and the SIM card and microSD slots, which are protected by an attached cover. At first, we were pretty excited that you could side- load your SIM card and the expandable media until we tried to access the slots. But the flap is extremely hard to open — we tried using our nail, the stylus and other sharp objects to crack it open, but ended up removing the back cover to get at it. But really, that rather defeats the purpose of having it on the side.

There's a volume rocker on the left side, a mini-USB port and a lanyard loop along the bottom edge, and a power button at the top. And finally, the phone's speaker and camera lens and self-portrait mirror are located on the back. The HTC Touch comes sleekly packaged with an AC adapter, a wired stereo headset, a 1GB microSD card, a USB cable, a protective pouch and reference material.

Features

Aside from the new interface, the HTC Touch doesn't offer anything revolutionary in the features department. At its core, the HTC Touch is still a Windows Mobile smartphone, running the latest Windows Mobile 6 Professional.

TheHTC Touch is a tri-band GSM handset and offers a speakerphone, smart dialing, voice commands and dialing, and text and multimedia messaging. The address book is only limited by the available memory, and as always, the SIM card holds an additional 250 contacts. You can store up to 12 numbers for a single entry, as well as home and work addresses, email, IM screen name, birthday, spouse's name and more. For caller ID purposes, you can pair a contact with a photo, a caller group, or one of 20 polyphonic ringtones.

Wireless options on the HTC Touch include Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) and Bluetooth (2.0). Unfortunately, there's no 3G or HSDPA support, so you're left to surf the Web at GPRS/EDGE speeds or via a Wi-Fi network or hot-spot. The Touch was able to find and connect to our test access point immediately, and we were surfing the Web in a matter of minutes. As for Bluetooth, the smartphone supports wireless headsets, hands-free kits, object exchange, file sharing and A2DP for stereo Bluetooth headsets.

Finally, the HTC Touch is equipped with a 2-megapixel camera with 8x zoom and video-recording capabilities. The options are pretty standard for a camera phone. You have a choice of five resolutions and four quality settings. There's no flash, but you do get white balance settings, including one for night shots, and various image effects. There's also a self timer, a time stamp option, a picture counter and a flicker adjustment, among other things. For video, the Touch can capture clips with or without sound in MPEG4, Motion JPEG or H.263 format. There are only two resolution choices, but you get the same white balance and colour effect settings from the still camera.

Picture quality is OK. Overall, objects have good definition, and colours are mostly bright. However, we noticed some blurring in the middle and a hint of a yellow overtone. You also have to hold the phone really still to get a decent shot. Video quality is subpar, as clips look particularly pixelated.

Performance

We tested the tri-band (GSM 900/1800/1900; GPRS/EDGE) HTC Touch in San Francisco using Cingular/AT&T service, and call quality was OK. We could hear a slight background hiss when we talked to friends — not enough to prevent us from having a conversation or interacting with our bank's voice response system, but enough to be annoying. On the other hand, our callers reported excellent sound with crisp audio and little to no interference. Unfortunately, we didn't get great results from the speakerphone; voices sounded far away and echoed on both ends of the conversations. We were able to pair the Touch with theLogitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset with no problems.

Armed with a 201MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 850 processor and 128MB ROM/64MB RAM, general operation was a little slow. With about 12MB of free program memory, there was often a few seconds of delay when opening applications. At first we thought our device just didn't register our touch commands, but it was really a performance issue. Launching any of the multimedia functions really stressed the Touch, as the screen sometimes froze midway between the music player and menu screen. This happened on a number of occasions, and became quite frustrating. Listening to music through the phone's speakers isn't bad. There's plenty of volume, but it's lacking in bass, and unfortunately, you don't get much of a boost with the included pair of earbuds. Video clips were watchable in short spurts.

The HTC Touch's battery is rated for 5 hours talk time and up to 200h of standby time. We are still conducting our battery tests, but we can tell you that the device has already surpassed the rated talk time. We will update this section as soon as we have the final results.

 

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