HTC Touch

Although their executives deny it vehemently, our opinion is that the HTC Touch was rushed to market in our part of the world to take advantage of the iPhone fever that is currently sweeping the globe. Of course, it will be a while longer before the iPhone shows up in this part of the world, and dollars gets you doughnuts that a clone from China or Taiwan will hit the streets of KL long before any iPhone shows up.

In the box

• Handset Transceiver
• Battery (standard battery)
• Charger & Adapters
• Data cable

Exterior

On its own, the Touch doesn¡¦t really look like much when it comes out of the box, or a crumpled paper envelope in our case. There was no manual, which makes a terribly difficult piece of hardware even harder to use.

The rubberised shell made the rather slim Touch stick to the hands. We think that is good because a slippery surface would have caused the device to slip out of the user¡¦s hands a lot owing to its rather small size.

Every single review we could find made disparaging remarks about the slot for the SIM and data card. We can do no different. This is absolutely the worst example of a SIM card slot that I have ever seen in a phone, and I have seen plenty. It is difficult to pry open and the joint is made out of cheap transparent rubber. That demeans what is otherwise a nice device, and I would not pay money for this kind of slipshod engineering.

The camera shortcut on the right side of the phone does not activate the camera, but goes to the Comm Manager application instead. The USB port is at the bottom of the phone, and the lanyard is supposed to be fixed to the bottom left of the device.

Buttons/Screen
There are no buttons other than the pick-up and end-call buttons at the bottom of the screen. Of course, there are a couple of shortcut buttons around the side of the phone, but for all practical purposes, the HTC Touch is a completely touchscreen device.

We found that the stylus was a bit too short to be comfortable, but was acceptable for general usage. The screen was not very sensitive at the corners but did just fine in the centre of the screen. One more thing to note is that the TouchFlo system does not work in landscape mode.

Software/Messaging
The controls are focused primarily on the TouchFlo system that reads a finger being tapped on or dragged across the screen. Movement in different directions bring up different parts of the menu. This menu looks like the ¡¥cube¡¦ menu of an Apple or Linux interface in that it rotates like having a solitary die on the screen.

Other than that, the interface is unique and displays a large clock on its home screen. This is different from the usual Windows Mobile desktop and is quite a pleasant change from the norm.

The on-screen keyboard is much too small and entering text was a bit difficult as you had to hunt and peck for the character that you wanted. However, the number pad for dialling phone numbers was of a good size and pretty easy to use.

PIM
MS Office is now Office Mobile on the Start menu, and selecting this brings up a window that displays Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile and Word Mobile on the screen. These are the mobile counterparts for similarly-named products for regular Windows OS PCs.

Of course, the Calculator, Notes and Calendar applications are built into the OS already. This is boilerplate Windows OS, and not something new to talk about. Chances are, you won¡¦t be making much data entry into the Touch because of the rather small onscreen keyboard.

Camera/Video
The 2.0 megapixel camera is capable of 8x digital zoom, and there are the various resolution settings as usual. However, the on-screen controls were not sensitive and this would be a handicap when you need to shoot a quick picture.

The viewfinder was slow to respond to changes in the direction the lens was pointed in. All in, there is little to suggest that cameras are anything but afterthoughts in most of the Windows Mobile Phones that we have looked at thus far.

There is a self-image mirror next to the camera lens. There is no flash light but there is a setting for night shots. The usual plethora of effects settings is also available for the digital camera and the video.

Multimedia/Voice
Apparently, the processor used is a 201 MHz TI OMAP processor. There is 128 MB of ROM and 64 MB of RAM. Video playback is rather jerky, and music playback drains the batteries real fast.

There is a voice recorder in the program menu that you can use to record your own notes. You can even record your own sounds that you want to use as the ringtone.

Connectivity
The HTC Touch supports Bluetooth, but not infrared. likewise, it has Wi-Fi support built in, but does not have 3G capabilities.

As we mentioned earlier, the card slot is really bad and you would not want to be prying this open all the time to exchange SIM or memory cards. Chances are, you will be transferring most of your data in and out of the Touch with the USB cable which is a lot easier to access at the bottom of the Touch.

Games
Windows phones have two default games, which are BubbleBreaker and Solitaire. This hasn¡¦t changed in years, and much as it bores me to write this, it must be even more excruciating for you to read about it. Let¡¦s spare each other the agony.