HTC Touch Review

iPhone has excited all concerned with mobile phones by the innovative way of navigating your device – by certain movements on the touch sensitive display. This is both natural and easy and seems really cool which makes it a new model to be followed by the other manufacturers. We saw a variation on this subject by Neonode at 3GSM event even in February. To use their model you have to know some movements which, performed at the right spot on the display perform actions such as ‘open menu’, ‘step back’ and the like.

On June 5, 24 days before the expected launch of iPhone, HTC announced their model including similar movements to help navigation and will try to attract part of the interest in the first Apple phone to itself. Its very name – ‘Touch’, indicates the innovation of this model compared to the other – the new way in which the Touch screen of Windows Mobile devices, known to us for years, is used.

The standard HTC phone set includes:

Untypically for the maker, however, the carrying case is not a leather one to put on your belt and stay there when you take out the phone, but the idea is to carry it in your pocket and take it out every time and then take the phone out of it. For us this is inconvenient and we prefer to carry the phone, which is certainly not of the smallest ones, hung on the belt.

By appearance Touch does not look like a product of HTC as its design language is completely different. The HTC models are like of a single family sharing common features and resembling one another, but Touch is different in appearance and typical features are missing. It is one of the smallest Pocket PC (Windows Mobile 6 Professional) phones, convenient to hold in hand when talking, but is thin and at the same time broad and for some people it will be hard to hold it tight and use it (press on the screen) with the same hand.

Model	Dimension (Inches)	Dimension (MM)	Weight (OZ)	Weight (Gramms)
HTC Touch	3.9" x 2.28" x 0.54"	99.9 x 58 x 13.9	4,0	112
Apple iPhone	4.5" x 2.4" x 0.46"	115 x 61 x 11.6	4,8	135
LG PRADA	3.89" x 2.1" x 0.47"	99 x 54 x 12	3	85
HTC P3300	4.3" x 2.3" x 0.7"	108 x 58.4 x 17	4,6	130

Its construction is very solid and there is no even minimum play. The typical weak point of almost all phones – the battery lid – has been designed as a whole one, covering the entire back panel and it never budges.


Logically, the front panel is dominated by the screen with a size of 2.8” and QVGA resolution – by specification this is the completely standard screen of almost all HTC phones but it can actually surprise us. The front part of the screen is leveled with the front panel, everything is smooth as a single surface, whereas with the other HTC (and Pocket PC) phones the screen is always sunken and surrounded by an edge of several mm due to the specifics of the touch matrix. The screen of PRADA phone looks similarly, too, but there another type of matrix is used activated by the fingers’ electricity. With Touch you can use both your fingers and a stylus or another object to press on the screen to be activated by the physical pressure.

The principle of operating the display is absolutely the same as with the other touch screens but the feeling is different since it is harder and when pressing it with a stylus there is almost no tactile feedback which is more palpable with the softer screens of other models. We were surprised by the fact that the screen is hard to stain or even when stained it does not show too much and the screen remains visible. And since it is flat, it is easily cleaned by a single movement, also when putting the phone in/taking out of the case. Because the screen is flat, the scroll in the right part of the screen is easy to use directly with a finger – with the phones with an edge you have to bend your fingers to reach it.

The screen is untypically bright for a touch screen of PocketPC phone and put next to another current model (Cingular 8525) is literally several levels better – it is quite brighter, white is really white and the colors are saturated. Its dynamics are high and the dividing line between the various levels of black is clearly seen.

A keyboard is out of the question with Touch because it has none. Generally, the devices with touch-sensitive displays do not have a full digital keyboard but the number of keys has been recently increasing. With Touch we see an opposite tendency – as less buttons as possible like with iPhone which has only one button on the front panel; thus the user’s attention is focused on the display to be used not only when necessary (insufficient functionality of the buttons), but always.

The convenient shortcuts and buttons activating the software keys have been removed, and only the unlit d-pad and the small answer/rejects which are palely lit, are found on the front panel. The 5-direction d-pad is conveniently pressed inside, but the four directions are hard to hit due to their small size and are hard to press. In almost all cases you will use the display for navigation what the manufacturer’s idea actually is.

The sound volume control slider which is hard to use, is on the left side and the camera shutter key is on the right side. The slider is hard to feel and you have to look at it, and the camera button is hard to press. The power button which switches on/off the display is on the left upper part. We find a location in the middle, just behind the speaker/LEDs more suitable, so that you don’t have to ‘look for it’. We are a little bit disappointed that it has not been replaced by the specific movement over the display as with iPhone.



As we have already mentioned, the two LEDs are placed behind the speaker guard, in the middle of the display. The same type of guard is used for the loudspeaker on the back side and according to us, in combination with the green-yellow color, it reminds of a military outfit and gives Touch a more aggressive appearance. The stylus, which is very short and non-extendable, is the same color. Touch is offered in another color version, too, where the green-yellow is replaced by the classic black.

When you remove the battery lid you see that its capacity is 1100 Мах and it is Li-Ion type. Now you can open the right side of the phone which is in fact a lid of the sim card and microSD card slot. If you try to remove the first one, the phone will shut down immediately, but you can replace the memory card since Hot-swap is supported.

The miniUSB port used as all-in-one cable/charger/earpieces connector is on the lower side.

Interface:

HTC Touch is Windows Mobile 6 Professional device and as a whole, its software and possibilities are almost entirely identical to the other phones using the same operating system. If you know it, then the possibilities offered by the phone including phone book, organizer, messages, media player, etc. won’t surprise you and will be familiar to you. Therefore you should bear in mind that certain problems and positive features of theirs are valid not only for the phone or make’s models, but for the models using this operating system (WM6 Professional), too.

What is new with Touch is the technology called TouchFlo – the simplest explanation is that certain actions can be performed by various movements over the screen. Run a finger or a stylus from the bottom upwards and the new shortcut interface will open, containing three separate pages which you can scroll by a similar movement from left to right or vice versa. The pages contain 1) functions to email/messaging/internet/organizer; 2) a shortcut to the contacts and phone functions, and 3) a multimedia page.

Another visible interface customization is the home screen split in two through the middle. The upper part contains 3 tabs with clock/messages/calls, Weather application and Launcher (9 shortcuts).

The lower part contains information on the upcoming appointments reminding a WM6 phone.

TouchFlo in the case of Touch only adds a shortcut menu and does not change radically the way you handle the phone. The only change used globally in the operating system is the possibility for a new scrolling – just run your finger from the bottom upwards over a page containing a vertical scroll. It works in a similar way for horizontal scrolling.

PhoneBook:

The phone book of WM6 is not much different from the phone book of WM5. It has no restriction on the amount of contact that can be added, depends only on the memory available. When you open the phonebook all contacts are displayed as a list; each field consists of the name and the number of the contact, while a letter placed beside them indicates what the type of the number is (w – work; m – mobile, etc.). Pictures are not displayed even if there is one attached to the contact.

The line displayed at the top of the screen is a search field, which starts searching through the names and numbers on entering a symbol – the more symbols you type, the more accurate the match is – it’s quite useful! This one searches all names entered for the contact, but if you want to find by other field like “company” for example, you have to use the “Search” application. There are tabs with different letters (divided in groups of three) just below it. This way you can arrange the contacts so that only the ones beginning with a given letter are displayed. These two search features are quite handy and they make finding a particular contact in the phonebook very quick.

Too bad that’s not the case when adding a new name to the phonebook; the device offers way too many capabilities, including multiple work and home numbers, but there’s only one for mobile –something quite inconvenient as that’s exactly where we wanted to add multiple numbers to. The numerous address, e-mail and other address fields confuse you even further – it would have been a lot easier if the most frequently used fields are highlighted in some way. We would choose this to be done with the Name, Picture, Mobile number and e-mail fields and thus finding them would have been easy, eliminating the need to go through the long list.

Personal photos and ringtones can be assigned to each contact; there’s no restriction on the size of the pictures but they are visualized in very small size even on an incoming call – we think they are useless. You can also add a note to each contact.

The problem of WM5 because of which you couldn’t add an unknown number from the call history to an existing contact, is eliminated here.


Dialer:

You can dial a number not included in your contacts by inputting its numbers. Since the phone does not have a digital keyboard, a virtual one is visualized on the additional screen on which you can input the desired number. To display this keyboard you have to press the green receiver once. You will see information on the last dialed number and you can call it by pressing the green receiver again.

Pressing the buttons you will start imputing the digits of a possible number, but at the same time you will search the phone book as if imputing a text by a predictive text input system. So, to call John you can press 5-6-4-6 and the matching contacts will be visualized in the list.

Organizer:

Alarms can be directly accessed through the home screen, by tapping on the clock. They are three, and they all can be configured to be active for certain days of the week, and you can also assign names and different sounds to each of them. All alarms can be active simultaneously, and overall they are easy to use and do what they are supposed to. We are rather disappointed that their number is limited to three, as it was in the previous version of the OS.

The next tab in this menu is the clock; there is a field called Visiting next to it which can be used as a World Clock – select another location and the phone starts using its local time. The clock has an option to be displayed on the title bar of all the menus, which is handy.

In the phone menu you can find your electronic calendar where you can save your appointments. They have fields for subject, starting/ending time/all day event, location, notes. You can use options like: reminder (PRIOR NOTICE 1/5/10/15/30/45 minutes, 1/2/3/4/5/6 hour/day/week), recurrence (Once, Every (same-day-of-the-week), Day (same-date) of every month, Every (same date-and-month) for every year, sensitivity (normal, personal, private, confidential). You can also add attendees (required or optional) from your contacts where e-mail addresses have been added and where meeting requests will be sent.

Examining the calendar can be done by day/week/month and you can choose starting day for the week and the week duration (5-6-7-day week). The appointments for the day are clearly shown in their time limits, so you can see your free time at a glance. This is one of the new things of WM6 compared to WM5.

You have Tasks menu, where you can add to-do items. For a given Task you can set subject, priority (normal, low, high), start/due date, reminder (to be notified if it’s due), category (business, holiday, personal, seasonal) and note. The Task can have recurrence (Once, Every (same-day-of-the-week), Day (same-date) of every month, Every (same date-date-and-month) for every year and sensitivity (normal, personal, private, confidential). Examining the tasks in a list you can easily see which of them are finished and which are not. The tasks options can be: sort by (status, priority, subject, start date, due date) or filter (all, recent, no categories, active, completed).

The Calculator is simple but its buttons are relatively big and can easily be pressed with your fingers. Features like scientific calculator and unit converter are still missing.

‘Notes’ are simple notes in which you can input text by the keyboard or by hand as an image. They can be synchronized with outlook.
Search is an application searching in all files in the phone. You can specify certain types of files (calendar/contacts/excel/messaging/notes/etc), but the best option is All Data which will rummage everything in your phone.

File Explorer is the mobile alternative of Explorer in Windows environment with computers. We use it to view the phone memory, including the system folders of the device which feels like working on a PC.

The voice recorder can record without limitations of duration but the microphone is not good enough for the purpose and even if you hold the phone next to your head you will not hear clearly. It is not of any particular use.

The HTC Touch doesn’t have a good voice commands system but only a possibility for voice dialing of contacts which you have to input in advance. This is quite an inconvenient, clumsy and old system and it’s a pity that the manufacturer has not used something better. The Eten and Nokia smartphones for instance, have a speaker-independent voice commands/dialing system.

Messaging:

Different message types are placed in a single menu - SMS, MMS and e-mails. There is nothing unexpected here. Entering text is done by one of the following touch display methods:

• Block Recognizer
• Keyboard
• Letter Recognizer
• Transcriber
  

We think that the on-screen keyboard is the fastest and most convenient way to do it, but if you train the other methods, they can also be quite handy! Combined with the T9 predictive system, entering text with the phone is really quick. Still, it must be done with the stylus, as the keys are very small in order to press them with fingers. We are disappointed that Touch doesn’t offers new way to enter text with fingers.

Just a few steps away is the option to add your e-mail account (POP3 or IMAP) and to use it on your mobile phone. Very nice extra is that the phone can try to get the email settings automatically from the internet, and so we configured our Gmail Account by entering only the username and password. Windows Mobile 6 already supports HTML formatted e-mails. The client is very similar to the Outlook on a computer, you can filter your inbox to see just some results, reply to message or forward it to other person. The support for attachments allows you to download or send one, in addition to the text body. The phone can be set to synchronise with your company Exchange Server.

As standard, Windows Mobile comes preloaded with the mobile version of Live! Messenger (MSN). Windows Live account will be added in Messaging when you add your e-mail account. You can add third party application for other popular instant messengers like AIM, Yahoo! Chat and ICQ.

Connectivity:

Untypically for a HTC phone, Touch is a three-band model instead of four-band, which restricts its use as a global phone. Supporting 900/1800/1900 MHz, it will work on the 1900 MHz band in the USA, which excludes the areas where only 850 MHz is used. (The North American version (most probably 850/1800/1900) has been announced for the second half of the year)/For Internet via the operator it has EDGE data; like iPhone and PRADA it does not support the third generation (3G - UMTS/HSDPA) which would offer much higher speeds.

Standard for a smartphone, WiFi and Bluetooth are available. Bluetooth is mainly used for connecting to other nearby devices, as accessories (earpieces, car-kits, multimedia devices) and for data transfer (transfer of files to/from another phone/PC). The technology helps wireless connection and the data transfer speed we achieved was about 40KB which is quite slow compared to the wire connection by a cable which was 8 times higher – 320 KB meaning that a song in MP3 format with average size of about 5 MB will be uploaded in 16 seconds. Like all other Windows phones, you need to have ActiveSync installed on the computer to connect to it. The program will let you easily synchronize the phone (contacts, emails, organizer) with Outlook.

With WiFi you can connect to a wireless LAN network covering you, use it as an Internet source and view the shared documents (input \\name-of-computer in Internet Explorer and you will see what is shared). In our test the connection was 50KB/sec.

Internet:

The mobile version of Internet Explorer is used for internet browsing; loading standard pages in full size is not a problem, because of the relatively high resolution (320x240 pixels) of such devices but you have to scroll horizontally as well as vertically almost all the time. If you want to read a text, it is almost sure you will not be able to fit the whole row in those 240 (or 320 if you put the phone in landscape mode) pixels. Full-screen usage is almost mandatory when the page has loaded.

There is also One Column View option which eliminates the need for horizontal scrolling but increases the need for vertical scrolling. The page is narrowed and thus it changes its initial look.

As it is a Pocket PC, you can always use third party software to replace the original one. We prefer using MicroSoft Deepfish browser instead of Internet Explorer but unfortunately it is still in beta mode.

Camera:

Nowadays it is almost impossible to see a phone without an inbuilt camera; these are either models designed for people who cannot bring in a camera-phone to the place they work at, or ultra-budget solutions. But Touch does not belong to any of the two groups and has lens for a 2-megapixel camera on its back. There is a small ‘mirror’ next to the lens but there is no photoflash LED.



Its interface is started 4 sec. after pressing the shortcut on the right side. It is similar to the interface of other models (P3300) but it has an optimized section with large buttons so that they could be pressed by a finger. 3 seconds after pressing the shutter button the photo is done and after recording thereof is instructed, it needs another 6-7 seconds which gives an interval between two shots of a total of 10 seconds. This is very slow bearing in mind that no time is required for focusing since the phone is with fixed focus.

We were surprised by the results when we looked at the photos taken by HTC Touch because they were quite strange. When we took photos of objects at a greater distance such as buildings and the like, we noticed that the greater part of the photos (almost everything but the center) were blurred as if not focused, but it is not logical for the central part only to be in focus since the phone DOES NOT have an automatic focus but a fixed one. There were problems with the white balance and in bright sunlight some of the photos were with purple tinge; as a whole color rendering is not good and the colors are not saturated enough in most cases.


During the test indoors we shot from quite a closer distance and obtained better results. Under strong light the details are much more than on the remote photos but still noise appears in the darker zones which blurs them. When decreasing the light the device tries to compensate for it by changing the shutter speed and the photos are again quite light but more blurred. The noise reduction system takes care for them not to be covered by much noise.


You can record video clips with sound, too, but their size is 176x144 pixels only, which renders them unusable. A size less than 320х240 pixels is of no use for computer viewing and 176х144 is exactly 3 times less as resolution.

Multimedia:

HTC Touch is equipped with the standard mobile version of Windows Media Player. It is a multimedia player for music and video files. MP3 format is supported, as well as WMA and WAV. After updating the library with files, all supported types are found, and they can be added to playlists. This function is not well implemented and organizing them is quite hard. Songs can be viewed by artist, album and genre, as these are taken from the ID3 tag of the files.


The supported video formats are MPEG4/H.263, WMV and 3GP, while the quality of the latter is pretty low. They can be viewed in fullscreen and the picture quality is quite good and looks very nice on the almost-three-inch display. Although the processor is not very fast, we are happy that no frames are skipped. Unforunately you can not playback video in MPEG 4/H.264 format which gives the best results.

The options buttons (next/previous, Play/Pause, etc.) are small and inconvenient both during Music and Video playback. When audio files are played, the video visualization window is still displayed, which is a lapse as it only takes up place on your screen. You can have these problems solved by adding new skins for the Media Player or by using another music player.

Touch comes with Audio Manager which is for music only. Its interface is so made as to be more convenient for working directly with fingers on the phone screen. You can sort your music in play-lists, by artist, album, genre and composer. While listening to music, the interface has comparatively large and easy to press buttons.

Listening to music is not the strongest side of Touch – it has only one small play speaker which is weak even at maximum volume where it crackles and you have to turn it down to about 85% where you hear it even poorer. This could be expected from a phone which is not designed for music in the first place, so we switched on the earpieces of the set with the hope of making things better. Unfortunately we were disappointed – although looking very good, with solid cables and shiny surface, the earpieces sounded just terribly: the music sounded flat, no low frequencies whatever were heard, the middle ones were hard and the high – unnatural and intrusive when present. This is definitely not a device to replace the iPOD, since connecting of other earpieces must be done either via a miniUSB-3.5 mm adapter, which is not that easy, or via the A2DP, of which, although convenience is a compromise, you cannot expect excellent results in terms of sound quality. We hope this battle will be won by IPhone without any problems!

Task manager

Software:

The Touch has 64MB ROM and 128MB RAM that is normal, compared to other similar models. Internal memory capacity can be expanded through the microSD card slot . It comes preinstalled with Task manager, which is located on the top right corner of your homescreen. Here you can tap and close the loaded applications in a second, in order to free RAM memory.

WM for PPC provides unlimited capabilities for installing software. The only restrictions are the memory available and the hardware of the phone. The first problem is easily solved by getting a memory card as there are microSD cards with capacity of up to several GB. Every WM6 Professional phone comes with programs that are modified, “pocket” versions known PC applications. Such programs are the mobile versions of (Microsoft) Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Explorer, Media Player, etc. The Office applications allow you to view and edit documents of the most-used types and the phone opens them without any error. Even a complicated Excel document with a few sheets is not a problem. Touch also has Adobe PDF Reader preloaded, which like the Office works flawless. We opened a big document (1.5MB) and scrolling through pages, when zoomed to 100% is almost immediate. Many more programs could be downloaded from third party sources.


There are numerous programs created for this platform, almost as much as the ones intended for PCs with Windows operating system. The most popular are the various utilities for personalizing the PPC, multimedia players, file explorers, Instant Messengers, etc. You can download third party applications to be used instead of the preloaded ones.

Performance:

We are not pleased with the operating speed of HTC Touch, the fault for which lies with the 200 MHz processor used in most 2G other manufacturer’s phones. Yet it has been optimized for the device and there are no serious delays, but you often have to wait a little when moving trough the menus and applications. Symbian S60 OS which is much faster in the new smart-phone models of N76, 6120, N95 has a serious advantage here.

We are happy that the Touch can use Skype application for VoIP calls. The processor is not very fast and the system lag when you are during a call, but still you will be able to switch to different tabs and send a chat message for example, while you talk. The Voice is not lagging if you are using fast internet connection. For Skype calls, Touch uses the loudspeakers and you will not be impressed by its quality, but it is still usable. The other party hears you clear, but some echo also appears. For the test, we used WiFi connection.

We also installed Fring application, which connects to both Skype and Google Talk, but strangely, we weren't able to do a call. The application said that the phone has to restart in order to do a voice call, but after a few restarts nothing changed. In order to get installation file for Fring, we had to choose the phone model from the Fring's webpage. The Touch was not listed, so we selected an another HTC smartphone with touch-sensitive display.

We used Spb Benchmark to compare the Touch system performance with other PocketPC Phones. We are pleasantly surprised by the results, showing way better performance than the Wizard, although the two have similar system resources.

During our typical test with decreasing signal Touch did not perform very well and the grade mark we give it is 3.75/10, which places it in the category of Poor, below the standard level. The manufacturer claims 5 hours of talk time, but we are surprised that in our test it scored 6 hours of continues talk time. This is just an excellent result!

We are disappointed by the incoming sound during conversation and particularly by its volume: the loudspeaker is not heard very strongly and as the one for music snuffles at ‘max’ position and has to be turned down. On the other hand, voices through it sound very close to reality, clear and distinct.

Not so however in the opposite direction – you are heard just perfectly, very strongly, clearly and realistically. We have no remarks in this respect.

Conclusion:

We remain with mixed feelings about Touch – the Touch Flo technology is a good idea, but poorly realized and its actual functionality is quite limited opening only one shortcut menu and scrolling through long pages. To be competitive to what iPhone will be, a number of new extras should probably be added, such as a new way of imputing text with fingers, a more innovative display locking/unlocking, menus handling (back/forward), photos handling (zoom in/out, previous/next), etc.

On the other hand, Touch is a small and beautiful WM6 phone with the full functionality of the operating system and with all personalization possibilities, which, on functional level, places it to some extent above iPhone, PRADA and Samsung F700 which are not smart phones. Unlike them, Touch is very flexible thanks to a heap of 3rd party applications. Its interface may be not as interesting and beautiful as that of the competitors – the fashionable PRADA and the innovative iPhone, but if you want a really good-looking small phone using Windows Mobile 6 Professional, Touch is your perfect choice.