HTC Touch

The HTC Touch has materialised, wraithlike, in the wake of the iPhone's touchscreen hype bonanza. It too is a phone aiming to shift the focus away from the usual arrays of keys and onto a touch-screen. Its touch-screen dominates its face and is powered by "TouchFLO" technology, which helps it recognise the difference between impressions made by a finger and a stylus.

In form the Touch is eerily similar to the iPhone, particularly considering that it's been said the Touch wasn't designed specifically as an iPhone competitor. It's offered in two colours, a nice glossy black (reminiscent of Sony's NWA series) and a decidedly unbusiness-like vibrant green. Comparisons between the two lean pleasantly in the Touch's favour, it being slightly smaller than the iPhone. This does mean that the Touch is somewhat less impressive a prospect as a video player, but those looking for a sleek, slim smartphone could do far worse.

The TouchFLO system deserves some elaboration of its own; it offers a finger based, gesture style control system to allow users to shortcut their way around the Touch's features, neatly circumventing any potential difficulty swapping applications.

TouchFLO is so profoundly trustworthy that the Touch sports only three actual buttons (pick up, hang up and a d-pad). In fact, the biggest complaint to be levelled against TouchFLO is that it doesn't go far enough; once you've opened applications, you tend to be back to standard controls (except in touchscreen form, of course). In this respect at least, the iPhone's much touted gesture based controls and multiple-point sensitive touch screen cast a shadow on the Touch.

Like the hw6900 series, the Touch runs Windows Mobile, though where the hw6900 is old school in using version 5, the Touch utilizes the newer Windows Mobile 6. Like the iPhone it features an on-screen keyboard (again "qwerty"), though because of the premium placed on on-screen real estate, it's likely that you'll be forced to use the stylus helpfully located at the back of the Touch. Otherwise, unless you're the lucky possessor of very small hands, you'll be forced to endure more hapless fumbling. The problem of course is that you are then typing messages out one letter at a time on an on-screen keyboard, which somehow feels as though it defeats the purpose of a touch-screen altogether. Why replace keys with on-screen controls if keys would prove more efficient regardless? It'll be interesting to see how well the iPhone's keyboard deals with this issue.

Like the hw6900, the Office functionality provided by Windows Mobile (while somewhat hampered by the on-screen keyboard) means that anyone with an interest can edit documents on from the device. The Touch also has space for a microSD card (with support extending only as far as 1GB), though this pales in comparison to the iPhone's capacity, it's at least worth noting that the option to add some storage is there.

So, like both the Pearl and the hw6900, the Touch is matches up well against the iPhone in terms of business use, but loses marks in the multimedia department.