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Since we have extensive experience with all types of phones, we rarely see something that makes us gasp or eagerly wait for it to see the light of day. HTC’s Touch HD is one of those devices. When the world’s leading manufacturer announces its most feature-rich phone ever people stop and take note, and we were no different. The Touch HD has the potential to become the best ever device running WinMo, but can it live up to that potential? 
Design Let’s analyze its name – Touch HD. The first word shows that the device belongs to the Touch series, known for its optimized interface in order to be finger-friendly. But what does HD stand for? HTC doesn’t explain it but we know it very well - High-definition, i.e. high resolution images/videos. 
This is the key feature for the Taiwanese monster. The large 3.8” display has a WVGA resolution of 480x800 pixels. To give you a better idea we’ll tell you that this is 4 times larger than OMNIA’s (standard for widescreen) and 2.5 than iPhone’s resolution – impressive! This not only gives better DPI (dots per inch) ratio, but is handy for viewing text and Internet pages, visualizing more content. The color reproduction is at a good level when viewing pictures despite the OS limitation of 65,536 colors. We are impressed with its sensitivity;it’s resistive, meaning it reacts to pressure rather than touch like the iPhone. While it compares favorably in sensitivity, the iPhone is much better in direct sunlight. The Touch HD turns into a 3.8” mirror. 
The first thought that comes to mind after seeing the device is “It is huge!”, but we think it’s actually small for what it offers. It’s not easy having a very small phone with a large display. HTC has done a great job and HD’s face is slightly bigger than its display. Nevertheless, the quality build is visible and the device feels solid. It’s not metal, but the rubber-coated back is very nice to the touch. The same material has been used for the side buttons (volume rocker on the left and power on top), аnd in combination with their shape (narrow but long rectangles) and relief they are simply excellent. Even though we’re not completely sold onthe touch sentive buttons on the front, they still perform OK. 
The large display and the quality make definitely make a good impression but we are slightly disappointed from the package the phone comes in and its contents. It’s not that there’s something missing – we have a case, beautiful charger, cables, handsfree and even an 8GB card, but everything is jammed in the box, as if there was no attention to detail... 
Interface and Software HTC Touch HD’s hardware is really impressive, but its software is not revolutionary at all as opposed to the G1. The high-definition model runs on Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional with HTC’s TouchFLO 3D, we’ve seen in Touch Diamond and Touch Pro. We think that this is the best personalization of this OS, but we would’ve liked to see some substantial innovations here. 
For those of you who are not familiar with TF3D we’ll say couple of words; the standard home screen is replaced by an interface with about 10 tabs, which give you direct access to specific functions – favorite contacts, messages, music, weather forecast, etc. There is additional personalization like keyboards for example. Please read Touch Diamond’s review for more information. There are small differences introduced with the HD – we now have a new tab “Stocks”, to help business people stay updated with stock index changes. In case that you don’t care about such a function, you can deactivate it or rearrange the tabs as you like – an option that should’ve been available from the very beginning. Another new thing is the incoming call screen – it is very reminiscent of the iPhone, with a slider used to accept or reject a call. 
We were up for a surprise opening the phonebook. Starting from the CDMA variant of the first Touch, HTC has offered their Random Access bar with all the letters on the right, to assist you sort your contacts by name. In the HD, this option has disappeared, but thankfully there are no other negative changes. The type and number of the on-screen keyboards have remained the same but using them on a 3.8” screen is much easier, because they are bigger. We still think that the QWERTY found in the Pixon is much better. It visualizes when the phone is viewed in landscape mode, offers larger buttons and vibration upon pressing, which reduces the mistakes. HTC should take some notes. 
As we’ve said in the beginning of the review, the large screen can be helpful for reading. We opened the browser (based on Opera Mobile 9.5) and loaded phoneArenа. Thanks to the screen and the excellent software it was a very pleasurable experience. This version comes with the option to change the zoom level, via a scroll in the bottom of the screen. This way is easier ( though not as easy as Safari’s multi-touch gestures) to set it up so you can view more contents. 
While viewing pages is easy with other phones with Opera Mobile 9.5 as well, we can’t say that for the document viewing features (PDF or Microsoft Office). The resolution and the size of the display have a great influence; HD is simply a pocket book. Viewing a large file like the user manual in PDF is very convenient. We had no troubles with any Word documents either, but bear in mind that this is not a laptop and when we tried to open a 3.5 MB .DOC file of 550 pages, we waited a few minutes for the HD to load it. 
Image gallery The Touch HD offers a nice thumbnail browser straight from the Photos and Videos tab on the Home screen. There's another thumbnail browser in the Album app available from the context menu on the Home screen or the Programs menu. Once an image is opened, you can make use of auto screen rotation to view it in landscape mode or you can zoom in with a circular gesture over the part of the image you want to zoom in on (it just doesn't get any cooler than that). Once you zoom in on the image you can start panning by holding your thumb down for a second. The Albums application also offers a customizable slideshow. 
Scrolling to the next image is a matter of a single finger sweep and it's almost instantaneous. The image viewer actually has the same functionality as in the HTC Touch Cruise. 
It's got to be said that the Touch HD has a certain advantage over competing devices when it comes to image browsing since this is one of the applications where WVGA resolution does count big time. The images look great on the huge high-res screen. Music player Much like the HTC Touch Diamond, the Touch HD has a good music player, which makes heavy use of album art. The music player is accessible straight from the TouchFLO home screen with cool cover flow animation for you to pick an album. In case you want to filter tracks by other criteria beside album, the Library shortcut will take you to the player backend where you can sort music by artist, genre, composer, purchased tracks or simply create custom playlists. The visual interface of the library is fluid and gets as close to Apple's omnipresent iPhone as we have seen any gadget go. 
Equalizer presets are available only when you have the headset plugged in. They are not part of the music player itself but of a separate application called Audio Booster. That setup allows you to make use of the presets when you watch videos or even when you listen to music on an alternative player. Camera What now seems a small step for the mobile industry proved a giant leap for HTC. Anyway, they are finally hitting the 5 megapixel scene and by the looks of it the wait may have been well worth it. By the way, the 5MP breakthrough must have taken everyone at HTC by surprise. Or someone was so excited they forgot to fix the camera chapter of the standard Windows Mobile Help, which still claims the primary shooter is a 3.2 megapixel unit. 
Never mind the Help texts, HTC Touch HD has a 5 megapixel auto focus camera producing photos with a maximum resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. The camera shoots only in landscape mode. It lacks a dedicated camera key so focusing and actual shooting are entrusted to the touchscreen. 
Auto focus engages when you touch the shutter icon on the screen and then the handset proceeds to take the photo. It sounds quite inconvenient and in fact it is. This way you get little-to-no chance of deciding not to take a photo after focusing. A Shoot Option setting is there to give you somewhat better control of the situation. You can opt between Touch and Touch-and-Hold, the latter leaving you about a second or two to change your mind and not take the shot after focus is locked. 
The HD camera lacks a flash, which basically renders night photography impossible. Camera interface and features The Touch HD doesn't use its whole display as a viewfinder and has a reserved space for the shutter icon to the right. Since the display aspect ratio is different from the aspect ratio of the camera sensor this is understandable. And with a display of this size the frame still remains more than clearly visible. 
You will find though that the default setting for the viewfinder is a fullscreen view, which naturally leads to some sort of cropping - part of the image that's actually taken is not visible on the viewfinder when you shoot. In terms of camera features, the HTC Touch HD isn't the best equipped 5MP camera we have seen. It still offers a self-timer, white balance presets, as well as color effects, and a viewfinder gridline. You can shoot images with the front-facing video-call camera too and there's some nice custom resolution setting for contacts' images. 
The most interesting among its features is probably the touch focus which allows you to focus on any object in the frame by simply touching the display. While we aren't quite sure how useful it is in real life terms, the feature is quite well working, refocusing instantly and quite precisely. Probably the biggest letdown, when it comes to features, is that the camera lacks geotagging. The third party remedy for this is already found but we still can't figure out why HTC saved themselves the effort. With the Touch HD you can shoot macro images easily without changing modes or anything. Luckily the focusing is improved over what we saw in the Diamond and the Touch Pro. There are still a few shots where it failed to get proper focus but those were rare enough and not too badly missed either. 
There is also a panorama mode that offers on-screen framing guidance. After all the individual shots for the pano are taken, the HD stitches the images automatically. The downside here is that in Panorama mode each individual image is shot at about 480 x 480 pixels. Plus, images aren't seamlessly stitched. Obviously, the Panorama mode is only ok if you intend to show your images on the handset display exclusively (which is exactly 480 pixels wide) with no further zooming. Image quality The image quality of HTC Touch HD is what caught us totally unprepared. Noise is kept well under control and the amount of resolved detail is high - the Touch HD beats down even Nokia N82 on both parameters. The reproduced colors aren't too precise though but on most occasions they were close enough. There is also no extreme oversharpening, but the sharpening levels are too high for our taste. 
Still, the Touch HD image quality is hardly flawless. When shooting high-contrast scenes with bright sun and harsh shadows, the advantage of Nokia N82 and even Samsung i900 Omnia becomes obvious. The HTC Touch HD is really short on dynamic range and its fuses blow off (eradicating detail and clipping the highlights on large portions of the image) each time you give it a tough contrasty scene. 
So the HTC Touch HD camera is almost certain to fail capturing right your beach or snowy mountain shots. Still, the camera performance of the Touch HD is a huge leap forward for the HTC. We are quite positive that this is the best camera on a Windows Mobile PocketPC we have seen so far. The Touch HD has confidently closed the gap between the very best in business. Who knows - the way things are going maybe we'll have a WinMo contender in our next camera shootout! Video Unfortunately, the Touch HD video capturing capabilities are utterly unimpressive. All you get is CIF recording (352 x 288 pixel) at 30fps. It's not that bad: after all the VideoCD standard uses that resolution, but it's nowhere near what you would expect in a high-end smart device with ample processing power. The interface of the camcorder resembles that of the still camera. You can only adjust white balance, resolution and brightness and add some color effects. 
GPS navigation The HTC Touch HD features a built-in GPS receiver - it's the Qualcomm gpsOne chipset, which comes along with the 7201A platform. It's the same chipset used in earlier HTC models such as the Diamond and the Touch Pro. The HD also supports the Assisted-GPS technology, commonly known as A-GPS. It means you can download current satellite data over Wi-Fi or the 2G/3G network for a much faster satellite lock. 
The Touch HD doesn't have a GPS navigation application pre-installed, so you have to purchase one separately. With a dedicated GPS app installed, the handset can easily replace your dedicated GPS navigation unit thanks to the large screen estate. Given the huge pixel count, a lot more of the map gets displayed on screen at the same zoom level. Chipset sensitivity of the HTC Touch HD seems to be on the faster side when it comes to getting an initial satellite lock. Conclusion The HTC Touch HD is guaranteed to change the way people think of Windows Mobile. It is a bold and confident step, taking full advantage of all the hardware and software strengths and a worthy effort of addressing the weaknesses. There are still quite a number of performance issues but the problems of Windows OS are far too deep to disappear overnight. Still, if modding and tweaking is your game, you can fix quite a lot of the issues that come out of the box. But while this certainly isn't a flawless phone, the results are impressive indeed. The multimedia power of the HD is immense, and only a touch away on that huge screen. The high-resolution camera and the tons of software available, make the HD a truly attractive package. And with looks like those - what more can you possibly want in a phone. The great response and sweet thumb-optimized handling are remarkable (in WinMo terms) but that's hardly an achievement of the Touch HD alone. The company's headliner is the cutting edge of a consistent effort that started back with the HTC Touch and went sky-high with the Diamond. The crown of that effort, HTC Touch HD, is now set on a path pretty much signposted by iPhone. Its driving inspiration has brought to the scene a capable candidate for a hefty bite at the apple. |
