Review: HTC Touch - A Totally Touchable Smartphone

HTC Touch

HTC Touch

HTC Touch

Mobile phones with finger based user interfaces appear to be all the rage these days. LG and Prada's KE850 was first to the party, with Apple announcing its hotly anticipated iPhone a few months later in January. The latest player to try its hand, or finger, at the game is HTC. HTC announced the Touch, also known across the net as the P3450 or Elf, last week at different events around the world. The Touch takes a different approach to a finger based UI than the other players. Apple and LG/Prada started from the ground up, building a new system that works only with a finger. HTC, on the other hand, decided to instead build upon the existing Windows Mobile 6 platform and add finger friendly controls to it.

The result is a traditional stylus equipped Pocket PC that just happens to be quite usable with a finger for most tasks.

It is no accident that the HTC Touch's codename was the "Elf." At 100mm x 60mm x 15mm (3.9" x 2.4" x .6") in size, the Touch is very slightly wider than the original Motorola RAZR V3, while being roughly the same height and thickness. At 116g (4.1oz), it is also pretty light for a Pocket PC device. By comparison, HTC's own P4350 (aka T-Mobile Wing) looks like a giant next to the Touch and weighs 53g (1.9oz) more.

The smooth lines that make up the design of the Touch's body, along with its compact dimensions, make the Touch one of the most comfortably held Pocket PC devices ever made. The 77mm (3") long stylus is not going to please a lot of people, though, as it is too short to be comfortably used for an extended period of time.

Luckily, the driving force behind the Touch is that its large 2.8" (44mm x 57mm), 65k color touchscreen display is finger friendly, meaning that users will be able to get away with using the stylus less than with typical Pocket PC devices. Unlike most stylus compatible touchscreens, the display on the Touch is flush mounted to the frame, and the touch sensitive surface extends well beyond the limits of its 240x320 pixel resolution. Not only does this make it easier to hit on-screen controls that are located by edges or corners of the display, but it means that we finally have a Pocket PC device whose screen can easily be cleaned with a quick swipe on a pants leg. My only complaint with the display is that it can be a bit hard to read in direct sunlight, though running it at maximum brightness level mitigates the problem to some extent.

Beyond the large screen that dominates the Touch, there is relatively little else to talk about. The small d-pad that is located beneath the screen is well designed and easy to use. It is flanked on either side by very small green and red call control keys. A chrome edge separates the dark blue front and rear faces of the Touch. A volume slider is located on the left side, a dedicated camera key on the right. The power key is found on the top of the Touch, and the typical miniUSB power/data port is on the bottom edge. The 2 megapixel camera and self-portrait mirror are located on the back cover. The entire back cover can be removed, with some difficulty, to expose the battery and allow the unique SIM/microSD card slot cover on the right edge of the phone to be opened.

While I liked the idea behind this SIM/microSD cover, I ran into some problems with it that required a bit of minor surgery to bypass. When the rear phone cover is removed, the SIM/microSD cover can be popped off and left hanging by two rubber strips. That part worked fine. The problem was that after having gone through this a few times due to the swapping of memory cards, the rubber strips would not go back into the body of the phone, preventing the cover from snapping back into place. After about 10 minutes of futzing with it, I used a hobby knife to remove the rubber strips. The cover could then be put securely back in place.