HTC Touch HD - Review

Has HTC finally created a viable competitor to the iPhone, or is the Touch HD just another good-looking phone that struggles to cope with Windows Mobile?

HTC was the first company to bring to bring a Windows-based mobile phone to market in 2002, known in the UK as the Orange SVP, and has stuck loyally with the platform for its smartphones ever since.

In that time Windows Mobile (as it is now known) has become more refined and user-friendly. It has also become a far more demanding operating system, requiring ever more powerful devices to run it, which in turn has created problems for device makers trying to balance performance with battery life.

Nonetheless, HTC has succeeded in producing several exceptional devices that have been rich in features but have struggled to compete against smartphones from RIM, Apple, Nokia and others.

This time round, HTC thinks it is on to a winner in the form of the Touch HD. It's available in the UK on a contract exclusively from Orange, but you can buy also buy it SIM free for use with other networks.

Opening the box, you soon realise this is not a cheep and cheerful smartphone. The Touch HD is solid, well, built and very tactile, despite having the most minimalist interface of any smartphone on the market. It’s like a large, sleek pebble, and far removed from the business-like industrial designs of previous HTC devices like the TyTN 2 and the Touch Pro. The HD fits nicely in your hand and is on a par with RIM’s BlackBerry Bold for size and weight.

The HD is very clean, with four touch-sensitive surface buttons for answering and ending calls, accessing the home screen and exiting applications and these have haptic feedback, which literally gives you a buzz when you press them.

An On/Off button on the top handles device power and turns the display on and off, with a volume control on the left side for earpiece and ringer volume. Other than that, all functions are controlled via the touch screen.

At 3.8in, it's the largest TFT-LCD touch screen display HTC has produced and the 480 x 800 makes good use of it. The benefits of this are that for the first time, you can realistically use 90 per cent of the phone’s features with just your fingers.

However, despite HTC’s customisation of the user interface, some parts of Windows Mobile 6.1 are still not finger-friendly. For this reason, the Touch HD still has a stylus, accessed from the base of the phone and held in its slot with a magnet.

For the most part, you’ll use the Touch HD via the TouchFLO user interface HTC has grafted over the top of Windows Mobile. Key applications and services are accessed by a scrolling ribbon along the base of the display. This gives you access to contacts, text messages, email, a web browser, share prices, the camera, music, weather reports, the main settings menu and a quick launch screen for your favourite third party applications and web links.

The default browser is not Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, though this is still installed on the phone. Instead HTC is the latest smartphone maker to adopt Opera as a default web browser. However, despite the TouchFLO screen, forget about easy iPhone style gesture controls for zooming in on web pages. Instead you have to use a scroll bar along the base of the display to zoom, or by tapping on the screen.

One nice touch is the use of the vibrate motor to provide force feedback when pressing on-screen buttons. This provides a nice tactile experience not found on most touch screen phones, with the exception of the Storm, which has a physically clickable display area.

Moving on to the camera, we see a major step up on previous Windows smartphones. The HD has a five megapixel camera with auto focus. However there is no flash. Pictures are bright with reasonable colour depth. However, even with auto focus images frequently came out with an element of blur (even when the freeze-frame on screen was pin sharp), as the HD is very unforgiving of hand shake. Meanwhile the lag between pressing the shutter button and the image being taken is a good three seconds.

Despite the large, bright display, the battery life on the HD is very good indeed. Manufacturer quoted times are up to 420 minutes in 3G mode and a slightly baffling 680 hours in standby, the latter being a full third more than the quoted GSM standby time. We tested on the Orange network with a full strength 3G signal and with moderate use (30 minutes of phone calls, one hour of browsing), managed a respectable 129 hours standby. This was helped significantly by the HD switching its display off at every possible opportunity to conserve power, a normal and welcome Windows Mobile feature.

Other nice touches include a 3.5mm audio jack for normal headphones, along with being able to access the microSD card slot without removing the battery, though you still have to remove the battery cover. Charging and syncing is done via a mini USB port, so chargers and cables will be plentiful in the accessory market.

While we really like the HD as a device, it is held back by HTC’s choice of software. Windows Mobile 6.1 is a mild update to the smartphone OS, but retains many of the characteristics of 6.0, including being very slow and juddery. Even HTC’s TouchFLO interface lacks the finesse of rival platforms.

In an ideal world, users would have a choice of what operating system they could run on their phone. The Touch HD would be a great case in point as there is little to fault about the physical device other than the average camera. How well would this phone work if it were running Symbian or Android – that’s the real question?

Specification

Size: 115mm x 62.8mm x 12mm
Weight: 147 grams
Display: 3.8inch TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive screen with 480 x 800 WVGA resolution
Mobile phone: Quad band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), Dual band 3G (900/2100 MHz)
Data support: 2Mb/sec up and 7.2Mb/sec down (if supported by network)
Wireless: Bluetooth® 2.0 with EDR and A2DP, 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi
Camera: 5 megapixel with auto focus, VGA CMOS front-facing camera for video calls
Talk time: Up to 420 minutes (3G), 480 minutes (GSM)
Standby: Up to 680 hours (3G) 440 hours (GSM)
Video call time: Up to 140 minutes
Memory Expansion: microSD slot (SD 2.0 compatible)
On-board memory: 512MB ROM, 288MB RAM
Operating System Windows Mobile® 6.1 Professional