HTC Touch HD Review
Introduction:
Since we have extensive experience with all types of phones, we rarely see something that makes us gasp or eagerly wait for it to see the light of day. Touch HD is one of those devices. From its announcement, it made a lot of hearts beat fast, because it’s HTC's most feature-rich model, which on the other hand is the leading Windows Mobile phones manufacturer. Basically, Touch HD has the potential to become the best ever device running on that OS.
Design:
Let’s analyze its name – Touch HD. The first word shows that the device belongs to the Touch series, known for its optimized interface in order to be finger-friendly. But what does HD stand for? HTC doesn’t explain it but we know it very well - High-definition, i.e. high resolution images/videos. This is the key feature of the Taiwanese monster. The large 3.8” display has a WVGA resolution of 480x800 pixels. To give you a better idea we’ll tell you that this is 4 times larger than OMNIA’s (standard for widescreen) and 2.5 than iPhone’s resolution – impressive! This not only gives better DPI (dots per inch) ratio, but is handy for viewing text and Internet pages, visualizing more content. The color reproduction is at a good level when viewing pictures despite the OS limitation of 65 536 colors. We are impressed with its sensitivity – it’s resistive and you have to rather press it instead of just touch it, but still reacts very well and the difference with the capacitive iPhone screen is insignificant, to the advantage of Apple’s creation. However, it is the apparent winner in the comparison in direct sunlight; the iPhone remains fully usable, and HD turns into a 3.8” mirror.
The first thought that comes to mind after seeing the device is “It is huge!”, but we think it’s actually small for what it offers. It’s not easy having a very small phone with a large display. HTC have done a great job and HD’s face is slightly bigger than its display. Nevertheless, the quality build is visible and the device feels solid. It’s not metal, but the rubber-coated back is very nice to the touch. The same material has been used for the side buttons (volume rocker on the left and power on top), аnd in combination with their shape (narrow but long rectangles) and relief they are simply excellent. Even though we are not very positive about the touch sentive buttons on the front, they still perform OK.
The large display and the quality make definitely make a good impression but we are slightly disappointed from the package the phone comes in and its contents. It’s not that there’s something missing – we have a case, beautiful charger, cables, handsfree and even an 8GB card, but everything is jammed in the box. As if there was no attention to detail...
Conclusion:
We were excited when we started testing the phone, hoping that we’ll see something great and revolutionary. Sadly, the reality is different. Hardware wise, the Touch HD is impressive, with a large display and a quality make. As a phone, it offers many functions and a very good sound during a call, but the software is not innovative at all. TouchFLO 3D, which we’ve seen in Diamond and Pro is the best for a WM smartphone, but not for a multimedia device what we wanted to discover in the HD. The music player is good, we can live with the mediocre camera, but why the bad video capabilities and not the multiple codec/format support like seen in the rivals? This would have made it possible for the users to really enjoy HD clips. So far, the Touch HD is a good smartphone but doesn’t have what it takes to be a good multimedia phone. As we’ve said before, we hope this will be fixed by future software updates, making the HD the leader running on that OS. By the way, we would love to see the Android OS on that beautiful screen, but that’s not expected officially.
