HTC Touch Review - Display & Audio

Touch features a 2.8” touchscreen capable of 240 x 320 pixel resolution at 65,000 colors. The display has a hard plastic surface that's meant to be poked and swiped with fingers and styli alike - it's more scratch proof and durable than standard membrane-based touchscreens, if not quite on par with iPhone's hardened glass display surface.

Touch's display specs are pretty middle of the road by current smartphone standards, but I found the screen to be sharp with good color saturation and plenty of brightness in almost all lighting conditions. Text, graphics, and images all displayed clearly and accurately, and issues I had with playback of Sprint TV video seemed to have more to do with my connection to the network and service than with Touch's display or processing power. Videos played from a memory card via Windows Media Player looked much better.

Mogul’s touchscreen sensor also worked well, though again I must draw two comparisons: Compared to other Windows Mobile touchscreen devices, Touch is a revelation for everything except text input. The combination of a revamped UI and a finger-friendly display works very, very well - it's a pleasure to be able to pull the device out of a pocket and quickly swipe and tap to read a new message or check weather or news updates. While this is technically possible on a standard WM6 handset like the HTC Mogul for Sprint, Touch is made for it - the difference shows in large menu choices that respond to fingertips, as opposed to tiny links that respond only to fingernails wielded with surgical precision (or, of course, the stylus). One thing you can do on Touch that you can't do on other WM touchscreens is sweep to scroll - Touch recognizes the difference between a tap and a sweep, which comes in handy for quickly moving up and down Inboxes, long messages, and Web pages.

Compared to iPhone, however, Touch sports yesterday's technology. Swiping, in particular, is where Apple's tech outdoes HTC's. Flicking a finger across iPhone's display works every time. Touch requires a more careful touch - I had to get the hang of a more deliberate "press and move" motion to consistently garner the reactions I wanted from the TouchFLO UI.

The other area in which Touch lags is the onscreen keyboard. Touch features a 20 key virtual QWERTY board that's similar in layout to the SureType keyboards found on BlackBerry phones and the new HTC Juno (aka Shadow to you T-Mobile fans). The virtual keys are large enough to hunt and peck at with fingertips, but I pretty quickly grew frustrated with that method and reached for the stylus. iPhone's keyboard isn't perfect, but I'm able to two-thumb type on it with pretty good success, which I attribute to the multitouch display, the predictive text software, and practice. I'll never get there on Touch - the display simply isn't responsive enough for two thumbs to fly around on. Writing a message on Touch meant using the stylus, either with the virtual keyboard or in handwriting recognition mode.

If you're not used to an iPhone, you'll likely neither notice nor care about the comparison I just drew - Touch's interface works well and, again, is a big step up from other WM6 devices in terms of intuitive ease of use. But it's definitely a noticeable step behind the current state of the art.

I tested the CDMA Touch in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Voice calls were generally loud and clear with a little bit of fuzz here and there but no notable reception problems or dropped calls. The internal speaker was plenty loud for voice calling, and people I talked to all said the quality of my voice end on their end was excellent.

Unfortunately Touch's speakerphone leaves a lot to be desired. It's neither loud enough nor clear enough, and was basically useless. Okay, you can make do with it in a pinch, but a phone like Touch is not supposed to be about merely making do.

A set of wired stereo earphones with an inline microphone is included. The phones connect to Touch via a mini-USB plug, and a USB-to-2.5mm adapter is also included. I used the earphones quite a bit for handsfree calling and found them to be a bit better than your run of the mill stock earbuds in terms of both comfort and audio quality. The earphones also make for decent music listening, though a 3.5mm jack/adapter would make it much easier to plug a good set of stereo phones into the device.

Touch supports mono and stereo Bluetooth audio, and I had no trouble pairing headsets with the device. Audio quality over Bluetooth was very good, both for voice calling (mono) and music playback (stereo).

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