HTC Touch review: Smart to touch the spot

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 Calendar offers daily, weekly, monthly and yearly view

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 To-Do list • putting down a handwritten note • the Voice recorder looks like the Media player

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).

The Alarm clock • the dual zone clock • the calculator

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.

Opening an Excel document • reading a Word document • listing available ZIP 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.

Editing an Excel and Word files • Adobe Reader LE allows multiple zoom levels

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.

A search for Dexter returns the contact entry plus an image named the same way • filtering your search

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.

"... 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 ..."

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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.

Bubble Breaker • Solitaire

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.