Jumping squarely with both feet on the touch-screen bandwagon, Taiwan’s HTC, the world’s number one maker of Windows Mobile ’smart devices’ (phones and stuff), has just announced its new ‘Touch’ phone. For those looking to add a little funk to their Windows Mobile life, it could be right up their street.
Running Windows Mobile 6 beneath a new ‘TouchFLO’ interface, the Touch is due to hit the UK in the very near future — before anywhere else in the world. Orange will be the first operator to pick up the new handset, although at time of writing there was no sign of the Touch on the Orange website (nor a press release from its PR team). But of course, as soon as the words ‘touch’ and ’screen’ appear, the first question that has to be asked is ‘how does it compare to iPhone’?
Judging by the demo on HTC’s website and a few of the videos that have popped up on YouTube, the cleanly-designed TouchFLO interface works reasonably well — albeit with one or two shortcomings. Imagine a cube with the various elements of the interface mapped on each side; a cube that you can rotate around in front of you to access the different areas of the interface.
Sounds good, except that to rotate the cube you have to run your finger across the middle of the screen (where there are icons you might accidentally launch things with), and to leave the TouchFLO interface and return to the front screen you have to sweep your finger down the screen (same problem).
The other issue with this is that there’s seemingly no indication on screen that you can do it, nor that when you’re on a cube screen there is more to be seen to the left and right. Also, from the looks of things, there aren’t four screens in the cube system but three — which seems confusing to us. There also seems to be no sign of any multi-touch input, which instantly puts it on the back foot against the iPhone.
Obviously we’ve not yet had chance to get our grubby mitts on a Touch but at first glance this seems as though Apple’s interface designers can rest easy — at least for now. That said, the basic idea of the TouchFLO, the rotating cube, is a nice concept and one that definitely has room for improvement.
The Touch’s full specs are:
- Dimensions: 99.9mm (L) x 58mm (W) x 13.9mm (T)
- Weight: 112g with battery
- 1GB microSD storage card included / 64MB RAM, 128MB ROM
- 2.8″ LCD touch screen with backlight, 240 x 320 dots resolution with 65,536 colours
- Battery Life: Rechargeable Li-Ion battery with a capacity of 1100 mAh
- Standby time: Up to 200 / Talk time: Up to 5 hours
- Camera: 2.0 mega-pixel CMOS colour camera
- Windows Mobile 6® Professional with Direct Push Email and HTML email support
- Wireless Connectivity: GSM/GPRS/EDGE Tri-band: 900, 1800,1900, Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11 b/g and
- Bluetooth® 2.0
- Choice of two colors at launch – elegant soft black or alluring wasabi green
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