 HTC, the company behind many of today's most popular Windows Mobile smart phones, 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 smart phones, as we saw at CTIA 2007 with the introduction of the HTC Shift and HTC Advantage. And now, the company has once again pushed the limits of design with its latest project: the HTC Touch.
Design The HTC Touch is unlike any other smart phone 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 smart phone that we've seen in recent memory. The handset measures a petite 3.9 inches long by 2.8 inches wide by 0.5 inch tall and weighs just 3.98 ounces, fitting nicely in the palm of your hand and easily slipping into a bag or pants pocket. Compare that to the bulky Palm Treo 755p (4 inches by 2.3 inches by 0.8 inch; 5.6 ounces) or Cingular 8525 (4.4 inches by 2.2 inches by 0.8 inch; 6.2 ounces). In addition, the device features a soft-touch finish (a la T-Mobile Dash), to give the device a nice, rubberlike texture that makes the phone easy to grip. Moving on to the touch screen. First off, the screen itself measures 2.8 inches diagonally and displays 65,536 colors at a 240x320 pixel resolution. 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 smart phone with a series of finger swipes or taps. To complement this functionality, HTC 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 one-touch access to your messages, call list, frequently used applications, and even weather. Frankly, it reminds us of the Spb menu interface we saw on the Pharos GPS Phone 600e, and whether it's a copycat or not, we appreciate the convenience of this new interface. From there, you then can dig deeper into the smart phone 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.      In conjunction with the finger-friendly screen hardware, HTC has created software that's easy to operate by finger, using tap and gestures. HTC has created a special home screen and an application that provide large, touchable targets; and in fact HTC has written their own touch screen driver. Here's the challenge, HTC can't re-write the entire Windows Mobile operating system to make it finger-friendly and gesture-aware. We'd have to leave that up to the folks in Redmond who author the OS. So you won't see a major transformation of the Windows Mobile 6 we've come to know and (err, love?). The Programs and Settings groups look and work the same. So do IE, email, contacts, calendar and solitaire. You'll face the same stylus-sized scroll bars and tiny 'x" close box up top. Camera The 2 megapixel CMOS camera with fixed focus lens takes acceptable photos, though not as good as the HTC TyTN (Cingular 8525) 2 MP camera. Given how little room there is inside the phone for camera hardware, we're not surprised that image quality took a hit compared to its much bigger brother. Images suffer from excessive foreground sharpening (so much so that detail is actually obliterated) that jars with un-sharpened background areas and creates a sense of limited focus. When resized down to VGA or 800 x 600, photos look decent but they still lack natural detail and contrast and white out add harshness to the images. Images sometimes have a purple color cast, as you can see in the photo of the dark gray buddha to the right.   Here's where the Touch makes up for its weak CPU performance: battery life is superb by Windows Mobile Professional standards. The phone lasted 3 days on a charge with moderate use (about twice as long as the HTC TyTN/Cingular 8525) and longer with very light use. HTC claims 5 hours of talk time and 200 hours of standby and that's reasonably accurate according to our tests (we got 4.6 hours talk time). Standby was right on target. Given the wide range of things you can do with Windows Mobile phones, it's hard to describe an average usage scenario, but we tested the phone by making calls, listening to MP3s for an hour each day, watching a 2 minute video each day, looking up calendar and contacts information, checking email manually 8x/day and surfing the web over EDGE with Bluetooth left on at all times. WiFi will consume battery life faster, as will streaming media, though given the Touch's weak video playback performance we don't foresee many folks watching hours of video on the device. Conclusion There's a lot to like about the HTC Touch. It's small, sleek, and yet still powerful. It definitely a solid competitor for the iPhone. It's not for everyone, though. If you write a lot of emails or text messages on your smartphone, you'd be better off with a model that includes a built-in keyboard.
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