Introduced several months ago, the innovative HTC Touch is the device, after which the world of Windows Mobile will probably never be the same. Chic, smart and versatile, the HTC Touch brings together an array of communication, entertainment and business capabilities enabling mobile consumers to balance work and fun. HTC Touch initiates an intriguing line of smartphone devices to feature the innovative TouchFLO technology with finger sweep control, making full use of the HTC Home application add-on. One of the smallest Windows Mobile devices is up to every standard with the package including Wi-Fi, 2.8" touchscreen TFT display, 2 megapixel camera and rich business applications. Since Apple managed to move a cool one million iPhones in some two and a half months, HTC Touch strikes back with officially reported 800,000 units sold in Europe/Asia since the launch of the device on July 5th. The HTC management admits this result beats even their most positive forecasts.

Key features

HTC TouchFLO technology allows smooth finger scrolling and panning
HTC Home application
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
2.8" 65K color touchscreen TFT display of QVGA resolution
2 megapixel camera
Sturdy build, quality casing and compact dimensions
Bluetooth v2.0
Large and comfortable D-pad
SIM card accessible without removing the battery

Main disadvantages

No 3G support
Inadequate 201 MHz processor and insufficient 128 MB ROM
No FM radio
Hard to clean casing


Leveraging the good functionality of Windows Mobile 6 Professional, the HTC Touch includes the Outlook Mobile and Office Mobile applications and extended compatibility with third-party applications. HTC Touch, a.k.a. HTC P3450, is based on the HTC Elf 100 platform. HTC Touch also goes by the MDA Touch alias for T-Mobile customers, as well as Vogue for Sprint customers.

At this stage, there are three color versions of the device officially available - the elegant soft black, the alluring wasabi green, and the white version, which is due for Christmas.

Hot information revealed on the Asian HTC site only, showcases a new enhanced version of the Touch that will be available in white or dark red. The difference from the initial HTC Touch is the doubled memory (RAM and ROM) to respectively 128 MB and 256 MB instead of 64 MB and 128 MB. A sticker on the retail box will clearly indicate the enhanced variant of the phone.

A recent HTC announcement of the 3.5G enabled slider HTC Touch Dual with a sliding semi-qwerty keyboard must have made Windows Mobile fans ecstatic. Another hot announcement is the HTC Touch Cruise phone, which is the third member of the HTC Touch product family and the first to feature built-in GPS, with 3G/HSDPA and wireless connectivity also onboard. To sum it up, the HTC devices to offer full TouchFLO support are the HTC Touch, HTC Touch Dual and HTC Touch Cruise. Today we will be reviewing the first of trio - the original HTC Touch.

Smart both ways

The surprisingly compact HTC Touch is the smallest PocketPC, measuring the respectable 99.9 mm in height, still keeping its slimness to 13.9 mm. The 112 g weight is the only indication of the load of features this gadget is carrying. Neonode N1 is the only Windows-based smartphone to beat the Touch in height with its 88 mm, but this comes at the expense of the significant 21 mm thickness. Stylish exterior and rounded edges make HTC Touch a contemporary device, somewhat of a crossover between conservative Windows Mobile smartphones and design-centered handsets. The HTC Touch is pretty comfortable to hold in hand and working with it was a pleasure.

Like most of the brand's recent models, the 201 MHz TI OMAP 850 is the power plant of this Pocket PC. The hardware specs reveal the meager 64MB of RAM and 128MB of ROM.

he front panel is dominated by the 2.8" 65K color touchscreen TFT display. It supports QVGA (320x240 pixels) resolution. Above the display is the earpiece grill, which also serves a status LED indicating network coverage, battery charging, Bluetooth on, etc.

The large and comfortable D-pad below the display is the next thing to draw attention. On both sides are the implicit call and end keys. The thin oblong keys only differ from one another by the green and red backlighting on each of them.

The left side of the HTC Touch hosts only the volume control slider. It is really hard to slide up or down unless you use a nail.

On the right side only the dedicated camera key is to be seen. When the phone is in power-saving mode, the only way to start the camera is to first bring the phone back to standby by pressing the power button, and then press the camera key. Most of the ornamental silver trim on the right side serves as a cover for the SIM and microSD card slots. Unfortunately, to remove the cap and access the slots the back cover has to be released first. Both the SIM and memory card slot have a quick-release mechanism, which pops the cards out. At the upper corner is the slot for the stylus, which is the regular non-telescopic one we're used to seeing on recent HTC devices.

The top side of the HTC Touch features the On/Off key. The bottom side hosts the standard miniUSB port, the lanyard eyelet, the microphone pinhole and the reset hole.

The back panel of the device is made of matt plastic with a somewhat rubbery feel to it. It provides a firm grip, and doesn't catch fingerprints easily. However, once it gets smudged with fingerprints over time, it's really hard to clean it up and return its new looks back. Beside the camera lens and the self-portrait mirror, which also is a cover for the external antenna connector, there is a round loudspeaker grill.

Removing the battery cover reveals only the 1100 mAh Li-Ion battery. It's quoted at 200 h of standby time and up to 5 hours of talk time. In reality the handset lasts around two days with a single charge when used heavily. Otherwise, it lasts for the good 4 days.

Touch and go

We find the 2.8" 65K color touchscreen TFT display of the HTC Touch satisfactory. It's on par with most PocketPC screens out there and it has the usual medium legibility under direct sunlight - especially when it has fingerprint smudges all over. Additionally, the small system font of Windows Mobile doesn't do sunlight legibility much good either.

Now, there are a lot of people out there grumbling about display colors, since 65K seems rather old school, right? Well, old it is, but it's really not that bad. 262K colors is not a native thing to a 32-bit processor with 8KB data cache and 16 KB instruction cache. Those processors prefer either 65K colors or 16M colors. However, displaying 16 million colors would certainly compromise performance (it's double the bits compared to 65K) - so it's a fair trade-off really. We know that there are some manufacturers claiming their PocketPCs have 262K color displays, but that's all they have - displays. Even if it's a 262K display, it still shows the same 65K colors everybody is grumbling about. And another thing - we really don't think that any of these disgruntled consumers have checked the actual difference between 65K and 262K colors when viewing a photo. There is none whatsoever - at least to the human eye, that is. The only scenario that you may get to spot a difference is with two-color gradients.

Comfort Dial

We need not tell you that HTC Touch is more than a regular PDA. It's a mobile phone too and offers tri-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support. The Phone application is in charge of all call-related features. Custom-made for HTC, it has large virtual keys that allow easy one-hand operation (other manufacturers have rather similar solutions). In the upper right corner there's the Backspace key, below it is the Calls Log key. The thing we like most about Windows Mobile devices is that you hardly ever need to open your phonebook in order to dial a contact. You just open the Phone and use its built-in Smart Dial feature. As soon as you've punched a few digits, it automatically filters the available contacts by their numbers… and their names. It uses the letters assigned to each number key for that - but unlike a feature phone, it checks all the available combinations (much like T9 when writing). Smart dial even searches in your recent calls list.
Rolling the dice: HTC TouchFLO cube

Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional OS has been around enough for everyone interested in Pocket PC to have become familiar with it. To start with, all Windows Mobile devices are pretty much the same software-wise. Essentially, any PocketPC is just a software platform, which you can expand according to your needs - there are so many applications out there and it's a growing business. So we acknowledge that any current PocketPC user would hardly need a review of the default Windows Mobile applications that come preinstalled with the device - they are always the same. The reason why people change their PocketPC with new ones is only the hardware equipment - they simply want snappier and more user-friendly hardware to run their favorite applications on. So as a rule, PocketPC fans and users will only be interested in the hardware part of this review. If perhaps some manufacturer comes up with an innovative preinstalled application of their own, the hard-working PocketPC scene will take care of passing it on to older models. We saw it happen with the HTC TouchFLO technology already. So really, buying your Windows Mobile device is just the start - much like your desktop Windows. You hardly ever think of the built-in functions of your desktop OS, you just use it to run useful applications on it, right? We think that should've made the point. Anyways, we'll still give you something on the software part for people new to PocketPC.

he first thing you'll notice when you power up the HTC Touch is the custom HTC home screen. Of course, it's an add-on that simply comes pre-installed - you can install it on your PocketPC no matter what make it is. It's a really handy plug-in, as it offers five separate tabs with frequently used functions. The Home tab displays info about the time and date plus status indicators for unread messages, mail or missed calls. The Weather tab is rather self-explanatory - it even gives you a weekly forecast, but the default screen displays only the current day forecast. The third tab is the Launcher that stores several configurable shortcuts. If you have already noticed, the Home screen of HTC Touch differs from the home application on HTC TyTN II, where the five tabs had Favorites and music functionality. The latter are omitted here as the TouchFLO cube does that job and more.

Now, for those of you that are not familiar with PocketPC, we should probably explain that those handsets have no "main menu" the way feature phones or Symbian S60 devices do. Instead, here you have the Programs menu and the Settings menu - they are almost all you need to access the PocketPC features. They are both accessible through the Start menu which, unlike the one in the desktop Windows, is a user configurable list of shortcuts to some favorite applications. Again, unlike the desktop Windows, the Home screen is not necessarily a place for your applications - instead you usually use the Start menu to access them. There is slight difference in the start menu in normal and landscape mode - the recently accessed programs appear as icons on the top, while in normal mode, they are listed as icons with text in the middle of the start menu.

The HTC TouchFLO technology is at its highest in HTC Touch. Manufacturers are slowly realizing that Windows Mobile Pro devices will lose the user-friendliness battle if stylus is the only way to move around the interface. The HTC TyTN II we reviewed recently, just touched base with TouchFLO, as finger sweep navigation was limited to scrolling only. The HTC Touch is the first device to feature TouchFLO and the TouchFLO Cube. Sweeping a finger on the display launches an animated, three-dimensional interface. The HTC Touch Slide promises even more TouchFLO fun as new gestures would allow zooming in and out of photos and other enhancements.

The cube is rotated by sweeping gestures across the display, providing access to frequently used features on three separate desktops, alternating as you roll the cube.

The three main screens of TouchFLO cube display the Contacts, Media and Applications content. Each of them offers shortcuts to predefined, as well as user configurable entries. The Applications section has 6 square keys: email, SMS/MMS, internet explorer, tasks, comm manager, and calendar. The Media section has the Music, Photos and Videos tabs. The Contacts segment has a 3x3 grid of keys, for assigning your favorite contacts. Under the grid, there are another four buttons: dial pad, call log, contacts, and favoiurite contacts manager. The 3D cube can be launched from within any application or menu location, while exiting the 3D cube will restore the last accessed application.

TouchFLO also enhances touch scrolling and browsing of web pages, documents, messages and contact lists. To get a better idea of how the TouchFLO works you can watch a full flash tutorial on managing the cube and its functionality at the HTC website.
Undoubtedly a resourceful interface solution, the TouchFLO still needs to break from the shortcut-to-applications shell and offer broader content handling and third-party software management. Besides, adding a native TouchFLO-based keyboard for text input will be highly appreciated. The Comm Manager (short for Communication Manager) is where you turn all the connectivity features on or off, such as Bluetooth, WLAN, Data connection, etc. The HTC Touch has a nice custom skin for the Comm Manager with large keys that cancel the need for a stylus.

Windows Mobile 6.0 offers full multi-tasking to the extent that it makes it quite hard to shut down open applications. The OS is designed in such a way that it should remain fast and stable without having to close running applications. Those of you with longer experience with this OS however, will surely agree that it does not always work this way, especially in the case of particularly heavy applications when the available memory seems to drain rather fast. The HTC Touch is not a top hardware performer either with the 200 MHz TI OMAP processor or with its 64MB of RAM. The Task manager for the currently running processes is hidden deep in the Settings menu, so you'd be better off installing a third-party application that allows quick access. Luckily, HTC have preinstalled such an application for us. A quick press on the upper right corner on the Home screen opens a list of the currently running applications. No system processes are shown, so you won't get confused by all those enigmatic names you've probably seen in the desktop Windows Task Manager. Unfortunately, the quick access application can only be accessed on the Home screen.

Windows Mobile traditionally offers customization through themes but they only change the color scheme. You can of course change the wallpaper on the Home screen too, but that's pretty much all you get. In order to apply some more advanced customization, you would need a third party application. Those kinds of applications however usually eat up your RAM.

Calling Dexter

The Windows Mobile OS has an unlimited contact list with a plethora of available fields for each entry. Synchronization with MS Outlook is textbook. Unfortunately, there is no letter-by-letter search available in the phonebook so you're left with using the alphabetic filtering or scrolling all the way through the list.
Note: Display screenshots with 3G network indication are taken from the HTC TyTN II review, as its user interface is virtually identical to those in HTC Touch.


There is a very practical additional field to each contact - the "Last call". It displays the number and the time the particular contact was last called. A full log is displayed of calls to and from numbers belonging to this contact, as well as call duration and time of call.

Sending and receiving messages is done through the centralized Inbox. It has separate folders for SMS, MMS and email. SMS length is virtually unlimited, as well as the memory available for received and sent messages. Inside the multimedia editor you will find the useful option to create multi-page messages containing more than one melody, image or text.

The Outlook Mobile email client supports POP3 and IMAP accounts. You can have multiple accounts and you can set the client to automatically check mail at regular time intervals. It has full support for sending and receiving attachments. There is also support for Direct Push. What it means is, instead of checking mail at regular intervals, your messages are delivered to you immediately once they are received by the mail server. The only condition is that your company's Microsoft Exchange server supports Direct Push. Windows Mobile 6.0 offers some upgrades to the email client in comparison to Windows Mobile 5.0 - now you have integrated search, plus support for HTML emails.

There are several text input methods with the HTC Touch, which doesn't have a hardware keyboard whatsoever. The most useful and convenient is the virtual QWERTY keyboard. The keys are small enough to force the user to write with the stylus only, but free third party applications offer really large and convenient keyboards, allowing finger typing. Other stylus-optimized typing methods include support for handwriting recognition. The Block Recognizer allows handwriting with single-stroke gestures, so you have to learn how to write that way (writing is done in a special box). The Letter Recognizer offers a more natural way to write, as you can input normal characters (writing again is done in a special box). With Transcriber you can write wherever you want on the screen in whatever style you may wish.

Here is how these keyboards look, when composing a message. We have also installed a free third-party keyboard optimized for finger typing, which has something in common with the iPhone keyboard.
Managing your files

The built-in file manager of the HTC Touch is the standard Windows Mobile variety. It does a good job finding the files you are looking for. The file manager can create new folders, copy and move files, set tracks as ringtones or simply send files to other devices.

The Picture gallery of Windows Mobile is an application called Pictures&Videos and, as the name implies, you use it to browse the multimedia files in question. As far as pictures are concerned, you can zoom in and out, as well as preview them in landscape mode. The files are shown as either thumbnails or as a plain list. There's a shortcut that allows you to turn on the camera directly from this application. You can even do some basic editing on the images.

The primary multimedia player of all Windows Mobile devices is the preinstalled Windows Media Player. Besides music, it allows watching video and streaming TV. You can sort tracks by artist, album or genre and you can create custom playlists.

HTC have additionally installed the Audio Manager music player. It is a strange name for a music player but it does allow you to manage your music files easily - you can sort tracks by artist, album, genre, or composer. You can create unlimited custom playlists and the interface is optimized for finger operation.

The Streaming Media application is another HTC touch to the software package of the phone. It allows you to watch or listen to streaming content. It follows the same stylus-free design of the Audio Manager.

We installed a TCPMP player and the needed codecs to play DivX and XviD video files. Playing movies at near-VGA resolution with the HTC Touch is a hard case. We were forced to convert those to near-QVGA in order to play them properly. This was a result we expected, given the mere 200MHz processor. The slow processor is really the Achilles' heel of the phone. In a contemporary hi-end device like HTC Touch the last thing to expect is an inadequate 200MHz processor, the kind that used to power smartphones back in 2004. A 400MHz processor is the minimum nowadays for a hi-end PocketPC, running on Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional. Currently, around 40 phones run on 201 MHz TI OMAP 850, most of them by HTC and operator-branded devices based on the HTC platform. Among them: MiTAC Mio A501, A502 and A702; Asus P526 and P527 and, finally, Hewlett-Packard iPAQ 514. As regards HTC, the devices are: HTC P4350, HTC P3350, HTC P3400, HTC S710 and HTC S630.

Downed by the camera again

PocketPC are probably bottom of the ladder when it comes to camera performance. It's not about the megapixel count. It's just that their photos are really nothing to speak of. Regrettably, the no autofocus 2 megapixel camera of HTC Touch produces poor photos, compared to other phones with the same megapixel count.


The camera menu is easy to operate with your fingers only. White balance can be either automatic or custom set to daylight, night, incandescent or fluorescent. You can apply several color effects (Grayscale, Sepia, Cool, Negative) and use the special camera modes such as Sports and Burst. In Burst mode the camera takes a total of 30 snapshots relatively fast for you to choose from but they are in VGA resolution only. In Sports mode it takes a series of up to 3 shots. Unfortunately, the Panorama mode is missing, as opposed to the HTC TyTN II. The camera can also apply Date stamps to your photos.

The last tab in the camera menu is the "Advanced" tab, which holds different settings divided on three pages.

The Adjust menu item is responsible for setting the contrast, saturation, hue and sharpness. Generally, the camera interface is a bit slow.

Photos taken with HTC Touch suffer detail loss, sharpening artifacts and chromatic aberrations. We were unable to interpret the results using EXIF data, as no readings were available on ISO level, lens, speed and other relevant data. Generally, the camera is not among the worst 2 megapixel modules, but has to undergo significant improvements to achieve the quality level of, say, Sony Ericsson K750.


The HTC Touch camera captures MPEG4 video in the ancient QCIF resolution (176x144 pixels) at 10fps, which is way unacceptable. Do you remember the first top selling smartphone Nokia 6630 revealed in mid 2002? Well, it too records unlimited video in the same resolution, but at 15 fps. So, after more than five years of break-neck development, HTC are pulling the wool over our eyes. Video camera settings outdo the video camera performance for sure. Alongside white balance and color effects, you can also set the Flicker adjustment, contrast, saturation, hue and sharpness.

Data transfers

Now, back to what PocketPCs are really about - connectivity, both wired and wireless. The HTC Touch has enough to offer in that department. The miniUSB connectivity allows seamless synchronization with MS Outlook. However you can also use Bluetooth 2.0 for that purpose. Speaking of wireless communication, we should mention there is no Infrared port, but you have Wi-Fi at your disposal. There are also GPRS and EDGE, so you always have data connectivity options available.
HTC Touch comes with the Internet Explorer Mobile web browser. It falls behind most of the third-party browsers out there and a few PocketPC manufacturers even ship their devices with an alternative web browser preinstalled.
The Internet Explorer has several interesting view options. You can have it fit the text to the screen, show everything in one column or show the website as it is. Landscape mode and fullscreen mode are also available.

Office as usual

Windows Mobile offers several time-management features and all of them are easily syncable with MS Outlook. The Calendar is improved in comparison to the one used in Windows Mobile 5, as now it allows searching for events to come. It offers daily, weekly and monthly view. You can have the week start on either Monday or Sunday. You can also hide weekends form the Calendar if you use it for business purposes only.

The To-Do list allows you to add tasks and assign them priority. The Notes also come in handy, as you can either type or directly write the text down on the screen. The Voice recorder files also get saved to the notes folder.

The Alarm clock has three alarm slots. Each Alarm can have its own repeat pattern. As a frequently used feature, Microsoft should have put more effort into making the alarm clock easily accessible. Instead, it's buried deep down in the Settings menu. Alongside, you will also find the dual-zone clock. The Calculator is another well-known application (as ugly as it gets).

Among the other interesting applications that come with the HTC Touch are the Office Mobile, Adobe Reader LE, the ZIP manager, the Windows Live service and the Search application. The Office Mobile features support for viewing and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint office files. The Adobe Reader LE opens Adobe PDF files, while the ZIP manager adds support for archived files.

All the applications can work in landscape mode, too. The screen rotation feature is nothing new though, as it has been available ever since Windows Mobile 5.0 and unfortunately does not rotate automatically, but through a dedicated system setting.

The Search application is rather useful, as it searches throughout the whole file system and applications. You can set filters, so that the application searches only in places you need.

Windows Mobile 6 integrates Windows Live replacing the MSN search and messenger, which we know from previous versions. You can also download the application Live Search for free. With it you can find information on local businesses, restaurants, places of interest and even gas prices (the service is currently available only to US and UK). It has nice support for speaker-independent voice recognition that you can use to do your searches.

A Windows Mobile device is a rather versatile gaming platform thanks to the widely-available third-party developed games. Beside Java you also get the games developed natively for Windows Mobile. However, manufacturers usually go the more conservative route and ship their devices with only the default Windows Mobile games: Bubble Breaker and Solitaire, none of which is that amusing.

Final words

HTC Touch is a surprisingly compact and stylish device with ample display and above average functionality. The full-fledged touch navigation through TouchFLO provides for very friendly handling and makes the device seamlessly usable as a phone, regardless of the fact that it features no hardware keyboard at all. Among the downright drawbacks are the anemic processor and insufficient RAM. The touch experience is well below the iPhone and the TouchFLO interface doesn't completely rule out the need for a stylus.
With a price tag of about 420 USD, HTC Touch will no doubt be enjoying a good level of demand. The appeal of the smallest PocketPC is likely to reach beyond the core of Windows Mobile Professional admirers to attract many new fans, who have abstained from buying Windows Mobile devices until now due to their large size. We will conclude by confirming that great things come in small packages, indeed.