HTC Touch Viva Review

Software:

The HTC Touch was the first phone of the manufacturer, using the personalized TouchFLO interface, and the Touch Diamond was the first one with TouchFLO 3D. The Viva uses TouchFLO 2D, which lacks the 3D animations and transitions of TF3D, taking a bit of its charm away, but on the other hand, it compensates by working really fast. As you can see from the screenshots, the digital watch from the “Home” tab has been changed with an analog one, which isn’t such a great alteration, but we decided that it was worth mentioning. The “People” tab is with a slightly different appearance. You can store up to twelve contacts in it, as you are able to see only six of them and in order to see the rest, you’ll have to slide your finger vertically over the screen. If the person you want to call isn’t among these twelve, you’ll have to tap on “all people”, which will take you to the classic WM phonebook.


You will find that almost nothing has been changed in the music tab. From there, you have access to the music library, but you can only examine it through the music player. We won’t describe the rest of the tabs, since they are the same as in the Touch Pro and the Diamond. Only the 3D effects are missing.

Lately HTC has been turning to Opera Mobile as the default internet browser in their devices and the Viva is not an exception. We speak favorably of it in every review, mentioning how well it renders even complex pages like phoneArena.com, but it definitely deserves it. It features a new element, which we witnessed in the Touch HD, namely the bar for zoom adjustment. It’s a nice and useful feature, which gives you additional control over the amount of information that’s being displayed.


Let’s take a look at the Viva’s multimedia capabilities. You have two options in order to listen to music, Windows Media Player and HTC Audio Manager (the latter of which is integrated in TouchFLO’s music tab). The first one is rather well-known, so we’ll just put it aside and examine the other one. It features a simple and handy interface, so one can easily interact with it by fingers. In the center of the screen you’ll see the album cover, and the ones from the ID3 tags are also recognized. Of course, you can filter your music by artist, album, genre, composer and you can also create playlists on the phone, but unfortunately it lacks the equalizers. As we mentioned on the previous page, you won’t happen to find headphones in the box, so we aren’t able to tell you how it’d sound, and the volume and quality of the loudspeaker are about the average.

Enough with the music, let’s pay some attention to the video capabilities. The H.263 and H.264 videos play smooth, as long as they are a 320x240 resolution. When we tried with higher res (640x272), the phone couldn’t cope with it and the video began lagging. This is not such a significant problem, since the screen resolution is QVGA and there is no clear point in playing videos with higher res. In addition, you have our beloved YouTube player on board, but whether the videos are going to lag depends thoroughly on your internet connection.




The camera of the Viva is 2-megapixel… yes, that’s all it offers. The interface is absolutely the same as in the Diamond, and it’s convenient for use with fingers. Unfortunately, the shots you can take with the Viva aren’t very high-quality. They lack the noise, but also lack the details and as you can see from the sample images, the leaves of the bushes almost merge into one another, instead of being easily distinguished. Besides taking pictures, the Viva is also capable of shooting videos, but the QCIF (174x144 pixels) resolution narrows their use totally, making them mostly suitable for attaching to MMS messages.