Life with an HTC Touch: Week 1
By Tim Danton
Posted on 5 Jul 2007 at 10:43
To accompany Ian Wrigley's Life with an iPhone article, we've decided to run a parallel piece about Life with an HTC Touch. Think of it as a blog-review, as Tim Danton, editor of PC Pro, provides a hands-on, personal, real-life view of using the Touch day to day.
Look out for updates every Monday.
First impressions
Let me start with a confession. The reason I'm writing this is because yesterday, as I ran for the bus, my trusty HP iPAQ hw6515 fell out of my pocket and onto the pavement. It is no more. It is an ex iPAQ. So, I needed a replacement and my eyes fell upon the lovely, sexy HTC Touch. I struck a deal with our Reviews team that I could borrow it, so long as I shared the experience on the PC Pro website. Desperate and phone-less, I agreed.
The HTC Touch has absolutely the right name: it feels great in the hand, with an almost velvety finish. Its size is perfect too. Not too light, not too heavy, and it's so slim and compact that it fits without any problems into my trouser pocket. It's even stylish. Whereas I'd always feel slightly ashamed with the iPAQ clamped to my ear, the Touch looks far more like a phone, and one I can toy with in meetings or the pub while pretending to be fashionable.
Those excellent first impressions carried on after I booted it up. HTC has added a layer of touch-friendly software on top of Windows Mobile 6, and it is extremely swish: swipe your finger from top to bottom and a "wall of contacts" appears - you then add people from your contacts list. Swipe your finger from right to left, and a new screen rolls into view, giving finger-friendly shortcuts to email, tasks, calendar, texts, internet explorer and Comms Manager (where you can switch off and on all the radios inside the Touch).
But, as Dave Stevenson points out in his video review, it doesn't take too long for the cracks to start to show. I expected browsing the internet to be a simple task, with large, finger-friendly icons to represent all my favourite sites - but no, I was thrown unceremoniously into Pocket Internet Explorer, and had to fiddle around with the stylus and on-screen keyboard to get to BBC Sport.
At this stage, though, I'm still feeling generous towards the Touch. Sure, it's a shame the touch interface doesn't extend further, but the fact remains that HTC has produced an incredibly compact Pocket PC that looks great. And, unlike the iPhone, it will sync perfectly with Outlook. I'll see whether that feeling of goodwill is still there after I've used it for a couple more days - look out for my update on Monday.
Click here for details of week 2
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