HTC Touch Review: An iPhone It Is Not
- June 11th, 2007
- Read 24488 times
- 103 Comments
With Apple’s iPhone quickly approaching its release date, HTC and Microsoft knew they had to squeeze something out to compete. Granted, they’ve been working on this concept for years before they even knew about the iPhone — that’s how the industry works. That said, HTC’s Touch looks to offer big features in a small package that relies heavily on a touch-interface. It uses Windows Mobile 6 combined with an overlaying GUI called “TouchFLO” that provides a similar experience to that of the iPhone. But can it compete with the #1 product that isn’t even out yet?
No, but it’s still an interesting phone. See, the HTC Touch won’t even be out in the US until Q4 of this year and will most likely see its way to T-Mobile. Recently released in Europe, the Touch has nice features that are becoming more commonplace on HTC devices. Inside you’ll find a 200MHz TI CPU, 64MB of RAM with 128MB ROM, an included 1GB microSD card, 802.11b/g WiFi, and Bluetooth. On the outside, the Touch features an impressive 2.8-inch QVGA screen with a 320×240 pixel resolution and a 2-megapixel camera. The Touch runs Windows Mobile 6.0. Looking for 3G? Like the iPhone, the Touch has also gotten the 3G shaft.
A brief video overview of the HTC Touch
The interface is much better than that of previous HTC and Windows Mobile models. Windows Mobile 6 makes Windows Mobile remotely usable, unlike past versions. Add on the Touch’s special overlay GUI and the phone becomes interesting enough that you’ll want to constantly play with it. You can use the included stylus or your fingers if you have some fingernails worth typing with. A home screen features quick shortcuts to things like a weather widget, your contacts, and text messages. Overall it’s pretty easy to use.
To control the Touch like the iPhone, there are certain ways for you to swipe your index finger across the screen. For instance, swiping your thumb upward from bottom to top will bring up the TouchFLO GUI, which you can then browse through by rotating it like a cube with your thumb. Useful? I suppose, but it’s more of a gimmick.
The TouchFLO interface
You can access your media via the aforementioned interface and playback music and video you’ve recorded with the flick of a finger. Included are USB headphones, a data cable, and a carrying case to make your experience a little more enjoyable. Nothing fancy, but it’s always nice to get included earbuds for rocking out. It’s a shame that the Touch’s “2-megapixel” camera acts more like a glorified 1-megapixel camera. Don’t even try using this thing in low light or darkness. No flash is included and the CMOS sensor is downright terrible. One of the more disappointing cameras I’ve seen on a phone lately.
I do enjoy texting and making phone calls on the Touch however. The interface is “surprisingly” easy to control and doing simple things like calling a buddy in my contacts list is very easy to pull off. Just tap a button here, a button there, and I’m ordering a pizza. Big props to Microsoft and HTC for collaborating on this one.
As far as the WiFi and EDGE go, they work fine. Internet Explorer on WM6 works fine. Pages work fine. It works, it’s decent. There really isn’t much more to say. If you’re looking for something more, use a laptop. The Touch actually did come in handy when a friend and I were stuck looking for a house and we had to pull up Mapquest on it. It took a little longer than expected to load, but we got the directions and made it to our destination on time. That’s one way this device can be handy.
But is the Touch an iPhone competitor? Absolutely not. The Touch isn’t even released in the US yet and doesn’t really feature all the same technology as the iPhone. For instance, on the iPhone, I can rotate the phone and the screen knows I’ve flipped the device. On the Touch, I have to go into a menu to manually rotate the screen. Plus, the Touch will most likely be available for T-Mobile, which gives non-AT&T customers an option if they don’t want to leave their provider.
Overall, the HTC Touch is one of the better Windows Mobile phones I’ve seen in awhile. The lack of a QWERTY keyboard can be overlooked after a few days of practicing using the on-screen keyboard. Plus the screen looks fantastic, the WiFi is fast, and the TouchFLO interface is pretty fun to use. On the other hand, no US release date, a terrible camera, and the fact that it’s still a Windows Mobile device make the Touch seem unappealing at times. I’d recommend getting it when it comes out here if you’re a T-Mobile customer and don’t want to switch or if you don’t want to shell out the big bucks the iPhone commends.
A valiant effort by HTC, but it still falls short of Apple’s upcoming phone.
“A valiant effort by HTC, but it still falls short of Apple’s upcoming phone.”
So a phone you’ve had a hands on of is worse than the iPhone that no-one will see before June 29th? Nice idea, but hardly gives you any credibility now does it.
I actually have one of these, got one of the first 100 in the UK. I am sure the iPhone will be considered a cooler device by many. But I doubt it will offer seamless integration with corporate Exchange servers. I doubt it will run much VPN software. In know for sure I will have difficult time editing emails with MS Office attachments. In short, the iPhone will have few of the features that many smartphone users demand - business class integration and business features.
The Touch actually DOES have all the corporate standards that many people want and need, AS WELL as being a very sexy, very phone-centric device (unlike most other HTC offerings). It plays a boatload of media standards (including Apple’s and Microsoft’s, as well as some higher-quality non-compressed standards for true music afficianados that Apple can’t play!). The only real downfall of the Touch as a media player is the damned 2GB limit on MicroSD capacity - at least they give a 1GB card in the box to start with. Team it with an HTC S100 bluetooth stereo headset, and you are rocking.
And, from what I have seen of the iPhone, I believe the Touch is smaller to pocket as well…but I haven’t checked the numbers. Certainly, the Touch is the best Windows Mobile attempt to be slim, shapely, and sexy. I brought mine out on Saturday in London, and had people lining up to see it and take pictures of it. Sexy, media friendly, AND intelligent enough for business use - that the iPhone (and Prada, which I have also used) have a difficult time stacking up against.
Future Shock
Yes, he’s right, it is already an afterthought compared to the iPhone. I love how people are so stuck in Microsoft rut that they think the iPhone will not be compatible with anything MS makes. Mac OS can communicate with Exchange servers. Mac OS can also edit and open ANY MS Office file. So, before everyone writes the iPhone off because they’re so scared to think of anything but MS, do some research and/or use a Mac for an extended period of time. Once you see that everything can be done on the Mac, and in a far less frustrating manner, you’ll see why everyone loves their Macs so much. When’s the last time you heard someone say they loved their PC? Probably not ever. And now that MS’ latest rip-off OS is out, you’ll hear a lot less.
I’m guessing you guys are IT guys who NEED MS to stay in business so that you’ll still have a job because of their flawed code and insecurity!
Future Shock:
People who are really sexy (since you mentioned it no less than 3 times in your comment), as well as all “true music afficianados,” know that “afficianado” is spelled: aficionado.
Vince, I second your opinions on Windows Mobile. Like many others, I personally am holding off getting work to upgrade my old phone until Apple releases the iPhone in Australia.
My wife and I currently both have Windows mobile-powered HTC-designed PDA-smartphones (O2 Mini and O2 XDA IIs) which try to do everything, but end up doing nothing well.
I have got to the stage of loathing my XDA IIs as from the user interface perspective, it is the worst phone/PDA I have ever used. The OS crashes and freezes daily, texting, the address book, connecting to wifi, launching apps, the blasted start menu etc are all some of the worst-designed pieces of software I’ve ever seen. If you let the battery go too flat it erases all the data you’ve got on the internal 128MB of flash (who the heck thought that was a good idea!!?)
Physically my XDA IIs has so many plastic buttons and a slide-out keyboard half of which don’t work anymore that I am about to go back to using my old Sony Ericsson P900 PDA phone which despite it’s own problems is so much better as a phone and PDA it’s like night and day. The Windows mobile PDAs used by upper management at our campus cause an out-of-proportion number of support problems with synching faults, connectivity issues etc.
Windows Mobile is a terrible phone OS with tiny on-screen buttons for choosing contacts to phone, horrible SMS texting and is as flaky as Windows 95 (Mac OS 7 was never this bad!) with regular freezes and required resets and the number of convoluted steps required to connect to our campus wireless LAN is unbelievable and sometimes it works but more often it doesn’t. Most Windows Mobile PDA users on campus have given up trying to connect to the campus wifi (including our the campus Telecom manager!) I’m growing to hate it more and more every day. It’s like death from a thousand cuts.
The iPhone’s OS X is a far more robust, capable OS than Windows Mobile and being a direct subset of the desktop Mac OS X promises to be far more powerful and flexible than the shoddy Windows CE (Windows Mobile) which bears no relation to Windows XP other than superficial looks and that horrible Start menu (on a tiny screen – why for the love of Pete!). Heck Windows Mobile is crammed into only a dozen or so megabytes on the XDA IIs while OS X on the iPhone is a fully featured 500MBs in size.
My Windows Mobile O2 XDA IIs PDA phone ta few days ago chose to do a hard reset for no discernible reason (the battery didn’t go flat). This means I lost all my data off the internal 128MB storage.
I’ll now have to find and re-install all of my programs, and I’ve lost all my preferences and settings so will have to set it up again for all the wifi networks I connect to (or should I say TRY to connect to). Aaaaaahhhhh!
To add insult to injury, every time Windows Mobile hard resets, it forces you to go thru a tutorial on clicking and dragging which you can’t escape from as if you had never used the PDA before. Who the #@#$%&* designed this operating system should be taken out and buried head first in a pile of wet kippers. It is unbelievable.
Microsoft not only has no taste, they have no idea what well written software is like or how to make computer/electronic equipment friendly. Apple may not be perfect but they are a quantum leap ahead of Microsoft in these areas.
Hurry up iPhone. Please….
-Mart
Well, i have a HTC touch and i found it perfect nothing of what you say has happen to me, so i think there is a big change from that time til now.
Could someone clue me in on why push email is so important?
Every computer I know of uses “pull” protocols like IMAP and we still get the email within a minute or so of the time it’s sent.
Mail in the iPhone supports this same standard and I don’t see why it would matter significantly whether you get mail 10 or 60 seconds after it’s sent.
Obviously 10 seconds is preferable to 60, but by a fairly small margin, so it doesn’t seem like the deal-breaker many are calling it.
Am I missing something?
D
Shawn,
A Mac is not an iPhone…same company, but very different products. To think that just because a Mac can interface with MS product X means that the iPhone will do it is totalliy incorrect. For example, not one preview has mentioned that the iPhone will support running MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to edit attachments - at this late date, believe me, you would have heard. Same thing with Exchange integration - sure the Mac can do it, but again, probably isn’t going to be out of the box for the iPhone, although that (and VPN) may get added by third parties. But then if you open it up to third parties, then you have to consider all the third party software that can be bought to assist Windows Mobile, especially all the SPB products, and it’s a never ending argument.
And Matt - nearliy every argument that you made against Windows Mobile (many of which I AGREE WITH as an owner of an HTC 9000 for the past 12 months!) are the things that the Touch fixes - at least on the physical interaction side. And WM6 itself has some help for some of the other niggling issues.
As for the iPhone being a subset of OS X, that should be a good thing - but I will really want to see how it deals with it’s own pre-emptive multitasking issues, and how it fares on battery life. It’s all well and good to talk about how much more STUFF the iPhone has inside it - but it is still built on the same battery technology and circuit tecnology as everything else on the market. Preemptive multitasking OSes take more resources, the iPhone has more RAM to support that - let’s see what the battery does.
David - PUSH vs. PULL shouldn’t be much of an issue for most people…but smartphones are used by a lot of people in sales and financial services, for whom a minute on the market or response to a client may make a difference. Or at least they like to think so.
And lastly, CapnVan - resorting to personal attacks over a simple spellilng mistake shows one of two things - you either lack detailed knowlege to debate this issue effectively, or you are simply a fanboy. Take your pick - neither is attractive.
I comment on the Touch’s sexyness for ONE reason - HTC is known for producing bricks with screens. Butt ugly (even the Dash), their phones look like they could have been designed in Soviet Russia. So for them, the Touch is a fantastic styling achievement, one more suited to LG, or perhaps, Apple.
Future Shock
I absolutely agree with Future Shock, i recently moved from the blackberry from hell world to the very sexy ;) htc touch. This phone is great and does everything you want it to do. I know that it sounds cool to say bad things about anything Microsoft does or collaborates on and it sounds also cool to be a “Mac” style of person but the reality is that if you use your phone as a work tool an not just to dance around on a white outfit, you really need to be objective and spend some good time using both phones as I did.
A Canadian guy (that managed to get his hands on an Iphone)
I personally am an Apple person. i love my Ipod, and my MacBook, but i dont think i’ll be touching the Iphone. my boyfriend has the HTC Touch and i love it.. i plan to get one on a contract with Bell in 36days (i’m been counting for months..), on my bday. :]
I havent had any big problems with this cell other then trying to get used to the texting set up.. but then again, its not my cell. so i guess i’ll update in about 36days :]
thats all<3
KBean.
We have been testing the latest version of Microsoft’s new mobile operating system, Windows Mobile 6, this week on what we believe is an excellent new mobile device called the Touch from HTC. The Touch is an innovation in touch screen PDA’s with a new front end user interface for the Windows Mobile platform. First of all, a look at the physical device.
http://www.airtimemanager.co.uk/activesync/HTC_Touch.aspx
It might not be an iPhone, but I’m sure it won’t set you back $500 like the iPhone
at bell its 350$ for a 12 month contract so… its getting up there.
Only one word for you:
GPS
Does the iPhone support it? NOOOO
Does the HTC Touch support it? YESSSSS
Actually here is Aus it’s price is AU$699 (US$600),
so it’s the same as the iphone.
But it doesn’t require a 2 year contract at least.
People are comparing with the iPhone in many aspects. What about the speed? The 200Mhz processor seems like the low point of this PDA phone. Could anyone give some feedback on the performance of the Touch?
It’s not a particularly fast processor but having had the phone for a week now I can honestly say that it does the job for me. Sometimes the screen refresh is a tad slow but we are talking about 1/10ths of a second here, not full seconds!
I purchased the Touch over the iPhone solely because my work environment required an MS OS product as the iPhone is not supported by our IT dept.
Having said that, I have been very happy with the Touch. Sure, the GUI is a little gimmicky but it works fine. The business apps work great. it synched up to our Exchange server in a few seconds and I loaded up all my mails, contacts and events in a few minutes. That is VERY useful indeed.
I would love an iPhone but the Touch does just fine. All this fanboy stuff is a little tiring. If there are people with an opposing opinion, that’s fine but please remain mature enough to not resort to mudslinging. They are only phones after all!
Martin Hill:
both the PDAs you hold are not HTC designed!
it is always better to know the facts before leaving a comment!
Shame about the 200mhz processor…400mhz is the way to go with WM, whcih means HTC Tytn.
There’s a interesting iPhone/HTC comparison at:
http://neilberman.blogspot.com/
Hi Vince,
I need some help. Would really appreciate it if you can reply to my mail. Bought a HTC Touch recently but as I’m using a mac, I can only install the Getting Started cd in my mac Parallels Windows XP. However, when i try to intall the cd, it has an error message that says that the cd needs Adobe Flash player to view and I’ve already installed the Flash player but yet, it still can’t detect my flash player. Can you help please? Is there a compatible issue with the mac Parallels Windows XP? If so, what can i do about it?
Those free Iphone testers are finding out the bugs.. :) I bet they will find more bugs..
Thanks
TimuM
To Dado or anybody else who can answer this:
you say HTC Touch supports GPS - I was trying to use it with Tom Tom Navigator 5 and first with my Parrot CK3300 GPS, then with an other external bluetooth GPS- but GPS doesn’t connect. I contacted the support from Tom Tom and Parrot - and they don’t know how to get it to work. There must be some settings to get them to work together. Please help.
Bebe: Turn on your GPS, turn on bluetooth on your Touch and pair up the two. On the Com Ports tab, add a new outgoing port. Run TomTom select Change Preferences, Show GPS status, configure. Pick Other Bluetooth GPS Receiver, and the new outgoing com port you selected earlier. Move your GPS receiver where it can get a decent view of the sky and you’re all done.
Thanks KevW, but I already tried all these steps and i couldn’t get it to work. Do you know the exact com ports I need to use? I tried the most common ones like com 5, 8, 1 and for hardware com 6 or 7 - these are the ones i can but it doesn’t connect. I’ve read about some PAN and DUN incompatibility. Any ideas?
I did all this steps and I was unable to connect. Any particular com ports i have to use?
Video record?
HTC Touch - YES
iPhone - no
MMS
HTC Touch - YES
iPhone - no
Voice Command to dial, play music, start applications, etc.
HTC Touch - YES
iPhone - no
Voice announement of incoming calls, incoming text/email, appoinment reminders, low battery, etc.
HTC Touch - YES
iPhone - no
Interactice Voice response to commands. (”What time is it?”, etc.)
HTC Touch - YES
iPhone - no
Ability to listen to streaming internet radio
HTC Touch - YES
iPhone - no
Ability to initiate remote wipe of data if lost or stolen.
HTC Touch - YES
iPhone - no
Ability of remote hackers to obtain your contacts, text messages, etc.
HTC Touch - no
iPhone - YES
It really isn’t a fair comparison.
I just bought one of these, and though I’m a Mac user, I’m giving the iPhone a miss.
Dave hits the nail on the head with his comparisons - they’re features which I needed and the iPhone could never ever match up to them.
been using my HTC touch for a month
still no solution to sync with my mac .
any idea guys ?
please share
I have found that missing sync works great with a mac. you can find it at http://www.markspace.com I couldn’t get anything else to sync with my mac book but this worked first time.
Have you seen this: (sync tool for WM6 and mac)
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/missing-sync-v4-released-supports-windows-mobile-6-284502.php
I am interested to buy this phone (HTC touch), but can anyone tell me is it a 3G Phone? Thanks.
hey,
can anyone who has been using the HTC Touch for a while tell me about its battery life. I have been using the O2 XDA Exec for a while now and one of the main problems with it is the battery. Also, it loses signal very easily for some reason and if u are on roaming then you have had it. Have you experienced anything similar with the HTC Touch?
Thanks
I get great service and I leave my bluetooth on all day. by the end of the day it needs charged but it lasts all day even with it on. I just charge it at night.