| Tuesday, February 12, 2008 |
| Reviews - HTC 3450 Touch |
who is thinking of making the leap from a cell phone to a smart phone--and it's certainly a step in the right direction. It's fun to use, so we didn't feel like we were using a corporate-geared device. We also absolutely welcome the innovation in technology and design, as it opens up the doors to smarter and cooler phones. That said, we're not sure the HTC Touch is quite ready for mass consumption yet. There are some niggling design quirks, and performance can sometimes be sluggish. But mostly, if the company can find a better solution for text input (perhaps by the time it's finally released in the States?), then the HTC Touch could certainly catch on. Bottom line: it's a good first effort, but we'd hold off for now.
Finally, we'd be remiss not to mention the Apple iPhone here. With its touch screen capability, there's a natural inclination to compare the two. In fact, the Touch has already solicited a few, "Oh, so it's like the iPhone?" responses from casual observers. Will it rival the iPhone? We'll know in just a couple of weeks.
Design
The HTC Touch is unlike any other smart phone the company has produced in a number of ways. Obviously, the TouchFlo interface is the biggest story, but the Touch also is the smallest touch screen smart phone that we've seen in recent memory. The handset measures a petite 3.9 inches long by 2.8 inches wide by 0.5 inch tall and weighs just 3.98 ounces, fitting nicely in the palm of your hand and easily slipping into a bag or pants pocket. Compare that to the bulky Palm Treo 755p (4 inches by 2.3 inches by 0.8 inch; 5.6 ounces) or Cingular 8525 (4.4 inches by 2.2 inches by 0.8 inch; 6.2 ounces). In addition, the device features a soft-touch finish (a la T-Mobile Dash), to give the device a nice, rubberlike texture that makes the phone easy to grip.
Moving on to the touch screen. First off, the screen itself measures 2.8 inches diagonally and displays 65,536 colors at a 240x320 pixel resolution. That's all pretty standard, but what sets the screen apart from other smart phones is the TouchFLO technology behind it. Basically, it allows you to operate certain portions of the smart phone with a series of finger swipes or taps. To complement this functionality, HTC also made some interface and menu changes so you can more easily access your messages, applications, and other pertinent information.
Starting with the home screen, if you've used Windows Mobile devices before, you'll notice a new look and feel right away. On top of the shortcuts to your contacts and calendar, you now have one-touch access to your messages, call list, frequently used applications, and even weather. Frankly, it reminds us of the Spb menu interface we saw on the Pharos GPS Phone 600e, and whether it's a copycat or not, we appreciate the convenience of this new interface. From there, you then can dig deeper into the smart phone by dragging your thumb from the bottom of the screen (around the HTC logo) to the top. That will take you to a new screen where you can cycle through a 3D interface of three menu choices: Applications, Contacts, and Media by swiping your finger left to right or vice versa. Launching a program only requires a tap on the appropriate icon. To get back to the home page, just sweep from the top to the bottom of the display.
Performance
We tested the tri-band (GSM 900/1800/1900; GPRS/EDGE) HTC Touch in San Francisco using Cingular/AT&T service, and call quality was OK. We could hear a slight background hiss when we talked to friends; not enough to prevent us from having a conversation or interacting with our bank's voice response system, but enough to be annoying. On the other hand, our callers reported excellent sound with crisp audio and little to no interference. Unfortunately, we didn't get great results from the speakerphone; voices sounded far away and echoed on both ends of the conversations. We were able to pair the Touch with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset with no problems.
Armed with a 201MHz TI OMAP850 processor and 128MB ROM/64MB RAM, general operation was a tad slow. With about 12MB of free program memory, there was often a few-second delay when opening applications. At first we thought our device just didn't register our touch commands, but it was really a performance issue. Launching any of the multimedia functions really did a number on the Touch, as the screen sometimes froze midway between the music player and menu screen. This happened on a number of occasions, and got to be quite frustrating. Listening to music through the phone's speakers isn't bad. There's plenty of volume, but it's lacking in bass, and unfortunately, you don't get much of a boost with the included pair of earbuds. Video clips were watchable in short spurts.
The HTC Touch's battery is rated for 5 hours talk time and up to 8.3 days of standby time. In our battery tests, we were able to get 6 hours of talk time on a single charge
Reviewed by: Bonnie Cha
Source: http://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/htc-touch-unlocked/4505-6452_7-32465595.html?tag=prod.txt.2Labels: Mobile Phone Reviews |
posted by Raisa @ 4:01 AM  |
|
|
|
|
|
