You do get some tactile controls on the HTC Touch. Below the display, you get tiny Talk and End buttons and a five-way navigation toggle. Along the right side, you'll find a camera-activation key and a microSD slot, which is protected by an attached cover. However, the flap is incredibly hard to open--we tried using our nail, the stylus, and other sharp objects to crack it open. In the end, the easiest way to access these slots is to take off the back cover, then jimmy it open. All in all, a frustrating experience.
There's a volume rocker on the left side, a mini USB port and lanyard loop along the bottom edge and a power button at the top. And finally, the phone's speaker and camera lens and self-portrait mirror are located on the back. The HTC Touch for Sprint comes sleekly packaged with a travel charger, a wired stereo headset, a 2.5mm headset adapter, a 512MB microSD card, a USB cable, a protective pouch, a cell phone dongle, and reference material. Check out our cell phone accessories page to learn how you can further personalize your device.
Features
Behind all the flash of the new interface, the HTC Touch doesn't offer anything revolutionary in the features department. At its core, the HTC Touch is still a Windows Mobile smartphone, running the latest Windows Mobile 6 Professional Edition. This means you get the full Microsoft Office Mobile suite for viewing and creating Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, and new enhancements to the Calendar, Contacts, and more. You can learn more about the operating system in our review of Windows Mobile 6.
For messaging, the HTC Touch ships with Microsoft's Direct Push Technology for real-time synchronization with Microsoft Exchange. The smartphone also supports Sprint Mobile eMail, which is available as a free download to its data subscribers and gives you access to up to three e-mail accounts. The carrier also included its instant messaging suite with AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live clients, and while we appreciate this, the lack of a spacious keyboard makes it a bit difficult to quickly and easily compose text. The Touch is definitely more of a device for checking messages rather than sending them.
The Touch's phone features include a speakerphone, smart dialing, voice commands and dialing, and text and multimedia messaging. The address book is only limited by the available memory, and you can store up to 12 numbers for a single entry as well as home and work addresses, e-mail, IM screen name, birthday, spouse's name, and more. For caller ID purposes, you can pair a contact with a photo, a caller group, or one of 15 polyphonic ringtones. Sprint's HTC Touch also has a dial-by-picture photo caller ID screen where you can easily tap a contact image to make a call.
Wireless options on the HTC Touch include Bluetooth 2.0 and EV-DO support. Unfortunately, it loses the integrated Wi-Fi that was on the unlocked version, but the 3G capabilities certainly soften the blow a bit. The smartphone supports Bluetooth profile wireless headsets, hands-free kits, object exchange, file sharing, dial-up networking, and A2DP for stereo Bluetooth headsets. We should note that if you want to use the Touch as a wireless modem for your laptop, you will need to sign up for the Sprint Power Vision Modem Plan, which runs $39.99 per month for 40MB or $49.99 per month for unlimited. Finally, 3G brings broadband-like speeds to your device--around 300Kbps to 600Kbps--so you can enjoy faster Web browsing, data transfer, and streaming music and video.
To get the most out of the 3G support, the HTC Touch for Sprint supports the carrier's various entertainment services, including Sprint TV and the Sprint Music Store. With the former, you can watch short clips from a variety of channels, including CNN, Fox Sports, and the NFL Network, and you can listen to live streaming music and talk radio from Sirius, VH1 Mobile, and MTV Mobile. In addition, you can access Sprint Exclusive Entertainment, which is a made-for-mobile sports and entertainment video programming network. For more content, check out the carrier's On Demand feature, which pulls all the current headlines for the user's region (based on ZIP code) from the Web and delivers it right to your Touch. Sprint offers these services as part of the Sprint Power Vision pack, which ranges in price from $15 to $25 per month.
Finally, the HTC Touch is equipped with a 2-megapixel camera with 5x zoom and video recording capabilities. The options are pretty standard for a camera phone. You have your choice of five resolutions and four quality settings. There's no flash, but you do get white balance settings, including one for night shots, and various image effects. There's also a self timer, a time stamp option, a picture counter, and a flicker adjustment, among other things. For video, the Touch can capture clips with or without sound in MPEG4, Motion JPEG, or H.263 format. There are only two resolution choices, but you get the same white balance and color effect settings from the still camera.
Picture quality was pretty poor. Though images were clear, there was an orangey, brownish tone to the colors. Video quality was also subpar, as clips look extra pixelated.
Performance
We tested the dual-band HTC Touch in San Francisco using Sprint service and call quality was good. For the most part, we enjoyed clear audio with the exception of a slight background hiss but it wasn't bad enough to prevent us from having a conversation or interacting with our bank's voice response system. Meanwhile, our friends reported excellent results and said they couldn't tell we were on a cell phone. Unfortunately, we didn't get the same praises for the speakerphone; voices sounded tinny and echoed on both ends of the conversations. We were able to pair the Touch with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset with no problems.
Armed with a faster 400MHz processor as well as 128MB of ROM and 256MB of RAM, general operation was OK but much improved over the slower unlocked version we reviewed earlier. With about 151MB of free program memory, there was often a few-second delay when opening applications but not more than other Windows Mobile devices we've tested. The Web browsing experience was great as pages loaded quickly, thanks to Sprint's swift EV-DO network, as were downloads from the Sprint Music Store. Multimedia performance was less than stellar. As we saw with the speakerphone, the Touch doesn't have the best speaker system and songs sounded harsh and one-dimensional. We also watched several clips from Sprint TV, and the picture was often pixilated; occasionally, audio and video weren't synchronized.
The HTC Touch is rated for 3.5 hours of talk time and up to 10 days of standby time. In our battery drain tests, we were able to get 4.5 hours of talk time from a single charge. According to FCC radiation tests, the Touch has a digital SAR rating of 1.25 watts per kilogram.
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