HTC Touch HD Review

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.