Since it's introduction a few months back everyone has had their eye on the HTC Touch. Both smart looking and versatile, the HTC Touch allows the owner to balance both fun and work. It is one of the smallest Windows Mobile devices on the market yet manages to be packed with features such as the innovative TouchFLO technology with finger sweep control, Wi-Fi, 2.8" touch screen TFT display, 2 mega-pixel camera and much more. To put the popularity of the HTC Touch in perspective, the very cool Apple iPhone sold one million units in about two and a half months. The HTC Touch moved 800,000 units in just Europe and Asia since the launch there in July. Obviously, management is thrilled.
Cool Features
* HTC TouchFLO technology
* HTC Home application
* Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g)
* 2.8" color touch screen TFT display
* 2 mega-pixel camera
* Bluetooth v2.0
* Large D-pad
* SIM card can be removed without removing the battery
Things I did not like
* Lack of 3G support
* 201 MHz processor and 128 MB ROM; insufficient on both counts.
* No FM radio
* Difficult to clean casing
The device is officially released in three colors; a soft black, wasabi green and a white version slated to hit by Christmas. Rumor has it that a new version will be released in dark red, with more memory, but so far this is only verified in the Asian markets.
Smart looking, smart thinking
The HTC Touch is currently the smallest Pocket PC, coming in at 99.9 mm tall, 13.9mm thick and weighing 112 g. Yes, the NeoNode is shorter at 88 mm, but it is 21 mm thick. The HTC Touch is a delight to hold and work with. Like most of the brand's recent models, the 201 MHz TI OMAP 850 is the power plant behind this Pocket PC. The hardware specs reveal the meager 64MB of RAM and 128MB of ROM.
The front panel is dedicated to the 2.8" 65K color touch screen TFT display with its QVGA resolution. Just over the display is the earpiece, which also has a status LED (showing charging, Bluetooth, coverage, etc.).
The next thing you will notice s the very large, comfortable D-pad just below the display, flanked by the call and end keys. the only difference between the keys is the red or green back-lighting.
The left side on the device has only the volume slider, which is a bit difficult to use unless you use a fingernail. The right side of the device contains only a dedicated camera key. The right side also has a lot of ornamental silver trim that serves as the cover for the microSD card slots and the SIM card. An apparent design flaw is that the back cover must be removed in order to access the slots.
The top of the HTC Touch features the On/Off key. The bottom side hosts the ubiquitous miniUSB port, the wrist strap eyelet, the microphone pinhole and the reset hole.
The back panel of the device is made of matte plastic with a somewhat tacky feel to it. It provides a firm grip, and doesn't catch fingerprints easily. The back is also home to the camera lense, the self portrait mirror and the loudspeaker grill.
Under the back cover is nothing but the 1100 mAh Li-Ion battery. Its quoted at 200 h of standby time and up to 5 hours of talk time. I found it would last about two days of heavy use and about 4 days of standby.
Touch and go
Overall, I think the 2.8" 65K color touch screen TFT display of the HTC Touch satisfactory. It's on par with most PocketPC screens out there and has the usual medium legibility under direct sunlight. Besides, the small system font of Windows Mobile doesn't do sunlight legibility much good either.
Easy To Use
When all is said and done, the HTC Touch is a telephone and a heck of one at that, offering tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support. The phone application is a custom built HTC application and it handles all the phone related features. I like the large touch screen keys, which makes it easy to dial one handed. Thanks to the smart dial feature, you may never need to open your phone book again.
The HTC TouchFLO technology is well used in HTC Touch. Manufacturers are slowly realizing that Windows Mobile Pro devices will lose the user-friendliness battle if stylus is the only way to move around the interface. The HTC Touch is the first device to feature TouchFLO and the TouchFLO Cube. Sweeping a finger on the display launches an animated, three-dimensional interface. The HTC Touch Slide promises even more TouchFLO fun as new gestures would allow zooming in and out of photos and other enhancements.
The cube is rotated by sweeping gestures across the display, providing access to frequently used features on three separate desktops, alternating as you roll the cube. TouchFLO enhances touch scrolling and browsing of web pages, documents, messages and contact lists.
No doubt a resourceful interface solution, the TouchFLO still needs to break from the shortcut-to-applications shell and offer broader content handling and third-party software management. Besides, adding a native TouchFLO-based keyboard for text input will be highly appreciated. The Communication Manager is where you turn all the connectivity features on, such as Bluetooth, WLAN, Data connection, and so on. The HTC Touch has a nice custom skin for the Comm Manager with large keys that cancel the need for a stylus.
The OS is designed in such a way that it should remain fast and stable without having to close running applications. Those of you with longer experience with this OS however, will surely agree that it does not always work this way, especially in the case of particularly heavy applications when the available memory seems to drain rather fast. The HTC Touch is not a top hardware performer either with the 200 MHz TI OMAP processor or with its 64MB of RAM.
As for theme changes, you are limited to the basic color changes allowed by Windows Mobile and the wallpaper changes. If you want more customization you will have to go to a 3rd party app, but those tend to hog your already meager memory.
Phone Home
The Windows Mobile OS has an unlimited contact list with a ton of available fields for each entry. Synchronization with MS Outlook is by the book. Sadly, there is no letter-by-letter search available in the phonebook so you're left using the alphabetic filtering or scrolling all the way through the list.
Very nice is the "last Call" feature. It displays the number and the time the particular contact was last called. A full log is displayed of calls to and from numbers belonging to this contact, as well as call duration and time of call.
Sending and receiving of messages is done through the centralized Inbox. It has separate folders for SMS, MMS and email. SMS length is near unlimited,just like the memory available for received and sent messages.
The Outlook Mobile email client supports both POP3 and IMAP accounts. You can have multiple accounts and you can set the client to automatically check mail at regular time intervals. It has full support for sending and receiving attachments. Windows Mobile 6.0 offers some upgrades to the email client in comparison to Windows Mobile 5.0 - now you have integrated search, plus support for HTML emails.
When it comes to text input, there are several options, but using a hardware keyboard is not one of them. The most convenient is the virtual QWERTY keyboard. It also recognizes text written with the stylus.
Managing your files
The built-in file manager of the HTC Touch is standard Windows Mobile. The file manager can create new folders, copy and move files, set tracks as ringtones or simply send files to other devices.
As on all Windows Mobile devices the HTC Touch uses the preinstalled Windows Media Player. Besides music, it allows watching video and streaming TV. You can sort tracks by artist, album or genre and you can create custom playlists.
HTC also installed the Audio Manager music player. It is a strange name for a music player but it does allow you to manage your music files easily - you can sort tracks by artist, album, genre, or composer. You can create unlimited custom playlists and the interface is optimized for finger operation.
The camera is underwhelming
When it comes to camera performance, Pocket PC's are at the bottom of the ladder. Thus, it is no surprise that the no autofocus 2 mega-pixel camera of HTC Touch produces poor photos, compared to other phones with the same mega-pixel count.
The camera menu is easy to maneuver with fingers only. White balance can be either automatic or custom set to daylight, night, incandescent or fluorescent. You can apply several color effects (Grayscale, Sepia, Cool, Negative) and use the special camera modes such as Sports and Burst. In Burst mode the camera takes a total of 30 snapshots relatively fast for you to choose from but they are in VGA resolution only. In Sports mode it takes a series of up to 3 shots. Unfortunately, the Panorama mode is missing, as opposed to the HTC TyTN II. The camera can also apply Date stamps to your photos.
The last tab in the camera menu is the "Advanced" tab, which holds different settings divided on three pages. Adjust menu item is responsible for setting the contrast, saturation, hue and sharpness. Generally, the camera interface is a bit slow. The camera is not among the worst 2 mega-pixel modules, but has to undergo significant improvements to achieve the quality level of, say, Sony Ericsson K750.
Connectivity
What everyone really wants in a PocketPC is connectivity, both wired and wireless. Here, the HTC Touch does not dissapoint. The miniUSB connectivity allows seamless synchronization with MS Outlook or you can also use Bluetooth 2.0 for that purpose. Speaking of wireless communication, there is no Infrared port, but you have Wi-Fi at your disposal. There are also GPRS and EDGE, so you always have data connectivity options available.
HTC Touch comes with the Internet Explorer Mobile web browser. You will no doubt want to replace this ASAP.
Same Office
Windows Mobile offers several time-management features , all of which synch with Outlook. The Calendar is a big improvement over the one used in Windows Mobile 5, as now it allows searching for events to come. It offers daily, weekly and monthly view. You can have the week start on either Monday or Sunday. You can also hide weekends form the Calendar if you use it for business purposes only.
With the To-Do list you can add tasks and assign them priority. The Notes also come in handy, as you can either type or directly write the text down on the screen. The Voice recorder files also get saved to the notes folder.
The Alarm clock has three alarm slots. As a frequently used feature, Microsoft should have put more effort into making the alarm clock easily accessible. Instead, it's buried deep down in the Settings menu.
Other interesting applications that come with the HTC Touch are the Office Mobile, Adobe Reader LE, the ZIP manager, the Windows Live service and the Search application. The Office Mobile features support for viewing and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint office files. The Adobe Reader LE opens Adobe PDF files, while the ZIP manager adds support for archived files.
The Search application is rather useful, as it searches throughout the whole file system and applications. You can set filters, so that the application searches only in places you need.
In Closing
The HTC Touch is a compact and stylish device with large display and above average functionality. The full-fledged touch navigation through TouchFLO provides for very friendly handling and makes the device seamlessly usable as a phone, regardless of the fact that it features no hardware keyboard at all. Among the downright drawbacks are the underpowered processor and insufficient RAM. The touch experience is well below the iPhone and the TouchFLO interface doesn't completely rule out the need for a stylus.
With a price tag of about 420 USD, HTC Touch will no doubt be enjoying a good level of demand. The appeal of the smallest PocketPC is likely to reach beyond the core of Windows Mobile Professional admirers to attract many new fans, who have abstained from buying Windows Mobile devices until now due to their large size. I guess sometimes good things do come in small packages.
  
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