Video tour of the HTC Touch's New Finger Interface

HTC Touch

HTC Touch

HTC Touch

[Note: Jump to the next page to get directly to the video clips. -editor]

Last night I had the pleasure of meeting HTC's Touch (code-named Elf), the Windows Mobile 6 Professional (Pocket PC) device the company launched. The HTC Touch is the first HTC device to make use of what the company is calling its TouchFLO technology. TouchFLO uses of a new type of touchscreen and a series of changes to WM6 itself to allow users to control a device with their fingers as well as the traditional stylus.

The new user interface extensions totally change the way you interact with the device. Scrolling is accomplished by grabbing the screen with your fingertip (not the fingernail) and dragging it up or down. You can cause it to scroll on its own by grabbing the screen and "throwing" it with a quick up or down motion. It can be sped up even further with an additional flick of the finger. Tapping stops the scrolling action. Most scrollable screens on the Touch, including the Pocket IE web browser, now support this feature.

Other new UI elements include HTC's separate suite of finger based menus. Running your fingertip with some pressure from below the screen (roughly from the HTC logo) upwards brings up the new menu. From there, swiping your finger from left to right, or vice versa, will flip, in a 3D cube style that Apple iPhone fans will recognize, between the three pages available: picture speed dial, multimedia functions, and quick app access. HTC offers its own finger-friendly media player, in addition to standard Windows Media Player, in order to keep things easy to use. Even the home screen is now finger friendly, offering three views: time, weather, applications.

All of this is possible because of the new type of touchscreen display used in the Touch. The touch sensitivity of the device extends well beyond the edge of the display's pixels. This allows the phone to far more easily recognize the intended target for finger presses near the edge of the screen. As a result, the tiny X/OK button in the top right corner of most stock WM6 apps as well as the Start menu can both be easily pressed with a finger, with very high accuracy.

Coming hot off the heels of an LG KE850 Prada phone review, this kind of display technology is something I am thrilled to see, as it would have fixed a few of the Prada's usability problems. HTC is promising more TouchFLO enabled devices in the future, including some with sliding QWERTY keyboards.

The HTC Touch is available currently in the UK, and will starting making its way across Europe and Asia in the very near future. HTC expects the Touch to launch in the US with a carrier in early Q4.

Check out the next page for additional live photos of the HTC Touch, as well as 3 video clips showing the new finger based TouchFLO interface in action.

HTC Touch

HTC Touch

HTC Touch