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The much-anticipated iPhone finally made it into the hands of consumers, leaving in its wake many bemoaning its glitches and an equal number cooing that it's the “coolest gadget ever" with its touch screen that responds with the slide of a finger. Asian consumers who can't wait a year before the iPhone arrives may be glad to know that they can get to experience right here and now, a mobile device that also responds when fingers slide across the screen. It's the HTC Touch.
OK, so the name may not be that cool, even unfamiliar. But it does offer the same finger-slide screen technology that has people oohing and aahhing over the iPhone, so what’s your excuse?
The HTC Touch was launched in mid-June with its patented TouchFLO technology which allows users to call up their contacts list and launch video, photos and music as well as programs just by sliding across the screen from left to right, or from bottom to top and vice versa.
The slide technology which will appeal to those who don’t care for keyboards and buttons, can be habit-forming as one user confided. It is easy to flip from page to page or from one program to another just by sliding a finger or the thumb across the screen, while cradling the phone in your palm.
The tricky part is working out the right touch and movement. It does take some amount of experimenting,as I discovered, before you and the device get to know each other. Yes, the phone can and will, become an extension of you.
The touch screen responds not just to the touch of your hand but also to the metal feel of the stylus.
Amazingly, with the TouchFLO technology, the device will offer a different response according to the touch it receives. If the stylus is used to run down a page, items become highlighted and ready for editing, for instance. When the same page and action is done with the finger tip, the page simply scrolls up and down in a read response.
You can choose to launch programs by tapping the touch screen or by using the most visible button on this phone, which sits unobtrusively on the front panel.
The frame around the squarish button is not just there for aesthetics either, but serves as a five-way navigation option. Although thin and barely there, you'll find that it isn't hard to use should you decide to choose it for moving through the phone's menu.
Both the frame and the button sit flat on the phone so users can run their fingers across the device smoothly from side to side.
The designers at HTC also made sure the phone is seamless, so even the volume slider and camera buttons on the side appear part of the silver edging that accent the matt black phone.
The decision to be minimalist however means that you might find yourself searching very hard to find just where your SIM and memory cards (of up to 1GB) will fit into.
The 2.8 inch screen is clear and again, designers have made sure that the device will serve the user well. The special home screen offers the weather and time in extra large numbers, so you can always make a discreet note of how long you’ve been in a meeting without offending anyone.
The device runs on Windows Mobile 6 and offers all that consumers will expect from a smart phone, from music on the go with Windows Media Player 10, to the ability to read and write documents with Office Mobile and both Outlook Mobile and Direct Push Email.
The device which comes with a 2 megapixel camera also offers Chinese text support through CE-star, Voice Commands and WiFi connectivity.
You’d expect a device that’s heavy in technology to carry matching weight, but the HTC Touch is surprisingly light, small and slim.
It can’t compare to some of the wafer-thin phones on the market but weighing just over 100 grams and measuring almost the same size as a standard name card, the HTC Touch does make other smart phones appear like bricks.
Those who remain unsure of the service and technology being offered by HTC need only look to Dopod which it recently acquired after being the brains behind the brand for some years.
The Taiwanese company which was founded some 10 years ago prides itself in product innovations and launched the first Microsoft Pocket PC back in 2000 which it developed as an OEM for its partners which include Palm, HP, O2, Verizon, NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone just to name a few.
It was only in 2006 that HTC decided to come out of the shadows and in 2007, launched two devices in addition to the HTC Touch.
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