The Bottom Line
- It is thin and lightweight like the iPhone and smaller than most other PDA phones.
- The sound quality was fine and the speakerphone was powerful.
- It is too sluggish for impatient users.
- The camera produced blurry pictures, no matter how hard I tried.
- The battery life was acceptable but limited.
Description
- The HTC Touch CDMA weighs 3.95 ounces and its dimensions are: 3.93 x 2.28 x .54 inches inches.
- It features a 240 x 320 LCD display with 65,536 colors.
- It has a 2-megapixel camera.
- It should typically let you talk 5 hours and/or remain in stand-by for up to 8 days.
- It features an iPhone-like picture viewer: For example, clockwise or counterclockwise gestures zoom in or out of a picture.
- Memory: 64MB with a MicroSD memory expansion slot
- Operating System: Windows Mobile 6
- Bluetooth
Guide Review - HTC Touch CDMA Review
The HTC Touch seems to be well-crafted and looks to have a strong shell with few openings or things that could break. There are small green and red buttons ("Talk" and "End") and a center navigation and selection button but that's it. All the rest is touch-controlled either with fingers or the included stylus.
A few things strongly dampened my HTC Touch experience, however. The software lagged most of the time and it seemed to me like everything I did with the Touch required a one-second or so wait. The lack of a physical keyboard on the HTC Touch is a real disappointment: The display is smaller and you can't type text without using the stylus. You end up thinking that, after all, the HTC Touch might just be a Windows Mobile PDA phone without a keypad. So what's the point?
Another annoyance was that there is no cheek protection (one of the iPhone's most innovative feature) and, since the display is flush with the casing, my cheek would inadvertently "press" the "speaker on/speaker off" function during conversations. To avoid switching the speakerphone on and off continuously, I had to hold the top earpiece to my ear while keeping the rest of the HTC Touch away from me. Try to get used to those gymnastics! This soon drained my patience and got me edgy.
That said, the call quality itself was pretty good, both in handset and speakerphone modes. Music sound quality was good too.
The HTC Touch has a 2-megapixel camera but you won't see all those pixels since it is extremely motion-sensitive. If you can't stand totally still, the result will be blurry. I was simply unable to take any decent pictures.
