Short review of the HTC Touch HD which I received 10 days ago.
Battery life: Quite impressed, will last over a day with light use, maybe even two days. Today it lasted all day with 2 hours of sat nav work, a couple of calls, a bit of internet, and email checking every 15 minutes.
Screen: Without doubt the 3.8″ screen is the star of the show, and with 800x480px resolution you get great detail. And doesn’t need full backlight brightness to be visible.
TouchFlo 3D: HTC’s own interface masks Windows Mobile nicely, looks good and is pretty responsive. You will need to move out of TouchFlo to view the Inbox etc but I think it works well as a first line of operation. The standard Windows dialogs are sufficiently big in most cases to avoid stylus usage, but the stylus is there if you need it (I have hardly used stylus in 10 days of use).
Internet: The 800×480 resolution gives a lot of space for Opera 9.5 to display sites. A slight niggle is that you cannot select a link without zooming in a bit (solved: go into opera:config, adaptive zoom, change min zoom from 60 to 65), but overall it is very usable and I haven’t found a site yet which didn’t display the same as on a desktop. Full access to secure SSL sites as well, so you can login to your banking, control panels etc.
Music playback: Windows Media Player synchronisation can be a bit of a pain, but once set up (and providing you have a large MicroSD card) then you can get all your music on there. The 3.5mm plug for headphones is a bonus, and the sound quality is good.
Photos: Again, Windows Media Player synching get in the way, and kept converting all my 800px photos into small ‘thumbnails’ more suitable for display on 320×240 phones. I had to turn off ‘conversion’ but this setting seems to also apply to music files, more work needed on that. Once onto the Touch HD, the gallery features are a bit limited, and searching is a bit of a pain, but again the 3.8″ display shows off photos superbly in a slideshow.
Video: Video playback takes a bit of work. The TouchFlo 3D video player utilises hardware acceleration but is restrictive. VGA home videos were choppy and initially I was very disappointed. However… if you follow the advice on the XDA Developers forum then progress can be made. Video encoded as FLV in AVI wrapper at 560×304, 24fps 1200bps plays very nicely in the excellent Core Player (third party software). Core Player is also working on QTV support for the Touch HD which will unlock the hardware acceleration for even better performance.
Camera and video recording: Camera is 5mp autofocus and is fine, except no flash. Video recording is QVGA (320×240 pixels) as is ‘adequate’! All in all, acceptable performance, but don’t sell your Digital SLR yet…
GPS: Some reports are complaining of GPS lag when used with Sat Nav software or Google Maps but I haven’t noticed any problems when used with CoPilot 7 Sat Nav software.
Email: I use Microsoft Exchange and this has worked with no issues. A patch is now available for Windows Mobile 6.1 which fixes an SMTP problem that I believe some people have encountered (this problem applies to any Windows Mobile 6.1 device, not just Touch HD).
Summary: I have moved from another HTC Windows Mobile device (HTC Hermes/T-mobile Vario II) and am extremely impressed with the HTC Touch HD. The obvious comparison is with the Apple iPhone 3G and this phone comes closer than any other in challenging as an ‘iPhone killer’.
Looks good. How much does it cost ? Anddoes it have a built in GPS too ?
Hi Tania,
You can get it for around £450 without contract, or you can get it from the Orange shop for a lot less upfront cash if you commit to a contract. Yes, it has GPS and AGPS.
I have had a go on this phone, and it does look pretty good tbh… I think overall they are much better than the iPhone, but I don’t think that it will be a great competitor just yet.
What do you think?
smart phone ,and i wonder how can i got it ,i am in Hongkong now.
Can’t say I’ve seen a lot of promotion for the Touch HD so a lot of potential buyers probably don’t know there is an alternative to the iPhone…
I think the iPhone and Touch HD (and others like the Samsung Omnia) have different strengths and customers should try them before they buy. It’s been worth the wait from my point of view, I didn’t buy the original iPhone as it didn’t have 3G, then I was on waiting list for iPhone 3G til I realised it’s omissions (no cut/paste, no video recording, no MMS etc…), and then the Touch HD was announced and it has met my needs (almost) perfectly.
I’m sure you will find one in Hong Kong if you look hard enough
From your review, I think maybe the BlackBerry Storm is closer to an iPhone killer than this HTC is. It sounds like the Storm’s internet and email capabilities might be better.
Spot – the Storm is worth looking at but real world reviews have been lukewarm in general. I think the ‘press’ touch screen (rather than ‘touch’) is proving to be a drawback. The Storm’s screen resolution is smaller as well, and it doesn’t have WiFi.
Thanks, admin. So far I’ve only played around with the Storm at the store, but I thought the press screen worked really well. But, yes, that lack of wifi is a big one. In terms of internet surfing, how would you compare the HTC to the iPhone?
Looks very cool, but I think I’ll wait for a couple version updates before I splurge on one. Give them a little time to work out any small issues