HTC Touch CDMA Review

Camera:

The Touch features a 2.0 megapixel camera and camcorder. The camera has several shooing modes, including fun frames and 3, 5 and 30 multi-shot modes. There is also a setting to take a picture specifically designed to set as a contact ID. The user can adjust the resolution, white balance and brightness, and at lower resolutions digital zoom is available. Effects such as Sepia and Negative can be applied, and there are adjustments for metering mode and flicker adjustment. The camcorder features mostly the same options, although as you would expect the self-timer is only available in camera mode.

Camera performance was ok, but not great. Colors were rich, but the pictures were decidedly soft bordering on the edge of blurry at times. Indoor pictures were yellowed. Camcorder resolution is a paltry 176x144, and we see no reason why it should not be 320x240 or even 640x480. Load times were quick, and a from the Today screen a picture can be captured in about 4 seconds. However, after an image was captured it takes another 4-5 seconds to save and be ready for another picture, assuming the user sets the review time to none in the settings menu.



The picture album takes advantage of the touch screen, though not to the point that the iPhone does. Users can zoom in and out, rotate and go to the next and previous pictures all with finger gestures. The gestures, especially zooming, worked better with a stylus than a finger. Tapping on a picture while reviewing it brings up a context menu that allows the user to email the picture, set it to a contact, begin a slide show, delete the picture, get picture info or return to the album.


Multimedia:

MP3, WMA, AAC, AAC+, WAV audio formats are all supported, and Windows Media Player 10 is the default player. The Sprint Music Store can be used to download files over the air, as well as for playing MP3 and AAC/AAC+ files. It is a shame that HTC and Sprint did not include the HTC Audio manager found on the P3450.

Video playback is also handled by Windows Media Player. It can be viewed in either normal mode or full screen, which rotates the device 90o. It supports several codecs, but if WMP won’t play the file you need there are several other video players available, such as TCMCP, which will play more file types.


Software:

The Touch features 128MB of RAM and 256MB of ROM, making for a decidedly smoother experience than previous models such as the Mogul and P3450. It supports microSD expansion up to 4GB (though we speculate that any microSDHC class 4 card will work, including the newly released 8GB ones) and comes bundled with a 512MB card.

There are countless programs available for the Windows Mobile platform, but there are some of note which ship with this device. Office Mobile gives the user the ability to view and edit Word and Excel docs, and also allows for Power Point viewing. Adobe Viewer compliments Office Mobile by allowing for PDF viewing. Windows Live Search is a great program that offers local search, movie times, maps and directions. In addition to ones we have mentioned earlier, in our opinion other essential add-ons are Google Maps, Resco File Explorer, One Touch Organizer and a registry editor for advanced users. Personally we prefer the freeware PHM but Resco also makes an excellent editor.



A Java Virtual Machine is included with the touch, meaning Java midlets can be loaded and used on the device. Though we’ve seen it with Windows Mobile phones before, we were very happy to see this inclusion on the Touch. Importantly, this means Opera Mini 4 can be used for web browsing.

We tried to load the Skype mobile application the Touch without success. The CAB file would say it installed successfully, but when we tried to use the program it gave us a missing file error. Reinstalls and soft restarts did not resolve the issue, and we experienced this on two separate units.