With the planned rumors and later on with the official hype (iPhone does seem to have set a new standard for hypes surrounding a product) that buzzed around, industry analysts did set their eyes on the launch of the HTC Touch. We did too and although there is lot to the Touch, there seems to be little to give HTC credit for. You will love the new Windows Mobile 6, but will hate the machine its on. Read on.
Design
We had only seen it on the internet, and the Touch looked so avant-garde and like everything you ever wanted with its ultramodern form factor, that we had to call it in sooner or later. This goes without saying that you are more likely to gasp a loud ‘wow’ when you undo the packaging than when you actually get down to using it.
The Touch comes very light and compact in a Black rubber finish throughout. A handful of buttons are so placed as to simply deck the phone with tiny light green and red lights. There’s also the five-way D-pad made of a thin squared line of steel. And of course, you have the screen leveling the front to give the Touch its candy bar look. The phone measures 99.9 x 58 x 13.9 mm and weighs 112g.
We have learnt from past experience that no product comes without its own set of follies. This one too, if you depart from the scrutiny of a casual onlooker, features a major design flaw, which otherwise could have meant nothing but outright innovation — the Hot Swap Slots. I have mentioned earlier the brilliance in the idea of building a phone with hot swappable ‘everythings’, right from the memory card to the SIM card. The Touch does just that. The hot swap slots are housed on the left side, but you will require long nails or sharp objects to dislodge the cover. In fact, with the piece that we had, I hated accessing any of the cards.
The HTC touch is one of the slimmer and sleeker Windows Mobile devices. Though its functionality may need a bit of tweaking (and hopefully that’s been taken care of already since our review) the phone does have some upsides. It uses Touch Flow system for navigating a few menus and runs on Windows Mobile 6.0 that obviously allows this. Interestingly, it has a hot-swap slot for not only a microSD card but also for the SIM card. There's a 2 megapixel camera with a video and music player, and a voice recorder. Like other Windows Mobile devices, it has handwriting recognition. Connectivity-wise it’s well-equipped, with support for Wi-Fi, EDGE, Bluetooth and USB.