HTC Touch HD review

HTC Touch HD Review

Reviewed by: Andrew Lim

Reviewed on: 7 November 2008

The Touch HD is an exciting new phone from HTC which takes Windows Mobile to the next level. An attractive phone that features a massive VGA screen, the HTC Touch HD looks set to take the UK by storm. It will be available very soon for free on an Orange contract.

Design
HTC has a history of making serious-looking business phones that don't always inspire us, but the HTC Touch HD is beautiful. Everything we expected the HTC Touch to be but didn't quite see is encapsulated in the Touch HD -- it feels and looks superb.

Not too heavy and not too light, the HTC Touch HD houses a large VGA touchscreen that we found more responsive than any HTC device to date (not counting the T-Mobile G1) and is excellent for viewing pictures and videos.

The Touch HD's convenient 3.5mm headphone jack

The Touch HD is as thin as the iPhone 3G and fits comfortably in a pocket or bag. Thankfully HTC has added a 3.5mm headphone jack at the top so you can plug standard headphones in without an adaptor, cutting out all the cable mess.

On top of the smooth backside of the Touch HD lies a 5-megapixel camera recessed into a metallic bump -- we wanted it to act as a lens cover, which it didn't, so that's a shame. Overall, though, the Touch HD is HTC's most attractive device yet.

Features
While we'd like to say that the Touch HD runs Android like HTC's other phone, the T-Mobile G1, it actually runs on the less exciting Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. On top of the Windows interface, HTC has added its TouchFLO 3D menu interface.

TouchFLO 3D is HTC's attempt at making Windows Mobile more finger-friendly, and to some extent it works. But it's not as deeply integrated as we would have liked. You still have to use the stylus at times when you need more accuracy.

It's worth noting that Windows Mobile and TouchFLO 3D ran faster during testing than we expected, and felt slightly smoother than the HTC Touch Pro, which uses the same chipset and features the same amount of ROM and RAM.

Many of the features on this phone really benefit from its large screen size, including Google Maps and the Opera Mobile Web browser

At your disposal is all the Windows Mobile 6 functionality that you'd expect, including Exchange email support, Microsoft Office documents editing and viewing capabilities, and Windows Mobile media player, which supports various codecs.