HTC Touch HD

HTC has been plugging away with its own-brand Windows Mobile smartphones for a couple of years now, and its steady stream of new handsets has been pretty impressive, by and large. And “large” is certainly an adjective that can be applied to its latest model – the HTC Touch HD.

Although no bigger than an iPhone (in fact it’s virtually the same size), the HTC Touch HD packs in a screen that is not only huge, but also very high resolution – 3.8in from corner to corner, with a whopping 480 x 800 resolution. This is by far the largest, high-resolution screen on a Windows Mobile smartphone – or any pocket-size portable device, for that matter (see it in action in our hands-on video).

As you might guess from the name, the Touch HD is the latest device in HTC’s Touch range of smartphones and the similarities with the original Touch handset are clearly apparent. Although it’s not as rounded as other models in the line-up, the Touch HD fits nicely in the hand and it has a solid, weighty feel, which is a design aspect that some other smartphone manufacturers seem to ignore.

Seen in isolation in photos, the Touch HD looks like a large handset and you might imagine it to be a bit on the chunky side, given its 3.8in screen. Nothing could be further than the truth – it’s actually only marginally larger than the Apple iPhone.

The Touch HD’s back cover has a pleasant rubbery feel, but there’s a sliver of glossy black plastic along the bottom edge, much like that on the iPhone 2G. The lens for the 5-megapixel camera is surrounded by a stylish brushed-aluminium bash-plate, the speaker grilles are fashioned from metallic mesh and the black metallic screen surround makes a change from the usual silver. All small touches, it has to be said, but the devil is in the details and it’s this level of attention that elevates the Touch HD from the rank and file Windows Mobile smartphone crowd.

HTC has opted for a minimalist aesthetic for the Touch HD and the only physical buttons are those for power and volume up/down – the four buttons below the screen are simply touch-sensitive areas. The loss of the four-way control pad would ordinarily be a bit of a blow to usability to any Windows Mobile device, but HTC perhaps hopes that the large, finger-friendly screen will be enough.

The screen is certainly very striking, not least because it fills almost the whole front face of the Touch HD. The 480 x 800 resolution doesn’t make a huge amount of difference to the TouchFLO 3D interface and it looks much the same as on the last HTC smartphone we saw, the Touch Pro. Text does look so much smoother than on a lower resolution screen though, and graphics less pixellated. HTC has wisely resisted the urge to cram more information into TouchFLO 3D’s elegant Today screens, but anyone who has trouble reading small on-screen text will happy with the jumbo font used in Windows Mobile’s menus.

Excel Mobile is one application that obviously benefits from the extra screen space and at the application’s lowest 50% zoom setting, you get a similar view on a spreadsheet as you would on a laptop screen. It’s a pity that Office Mobile doesn’t exploit the Touch HD’s accelerometer to put documents into landscape view when the phone is flipped on its side, though. Even more annoyingly, there isn’t even a manual option to flip a sheet into landscape mode manually.

There’s no such silliness with the bundled Opera Mobile 9.5 – it behaves just as you would expect when the Touch HD is tipped on its side. As with Excel Mobile, the web browser is a much better fit on the 480 x 800 screen than the usual Windows Mobile 240 x 320 resolution, but it’s not the seamlessly smooth experience you might wish for.

Opera Mobile’s context-sensitive zoom is hit and miss, and often fails to correctly identify the column of text you want to magnify with a double-tap and zooms in too far (something that the iPhone’s Safari never does). When zooming does work properly, Opera Mobile tends to reformat the text column to fit what it seems to think is a narrow screen, which is pointless on a screen with a generous 480 pixel horizontal resolution.

Dragging a web page around and clicking with a fingertip works well on the Touch HD’s large screen, but it’s easy to click when you want to drag, and vice versa. The problem is that as excellent as the large screen is, it still uses traditional resistive technology that requires finger (or stylus) pressure to activate.

HTC’s TouchFLO 3D user interface and applications like Opera Mobile are starting to push resistive touch-screen technology to its limits, which is why finger-centric devices like the iPhone, T-Mobile G1 and BlackBerry Storm have abandoned it in favour of far more sophisticated capacitive touch-screens. Since HTC actually makes the G1, it’s odd that it didn’t use a capacitive touch-screen in the Touch HD – perhaps HTC is keen to avoid disenfranchising people who use handwriting recognition (capacitive screensdon't work with a stylus), which is a much more viable input method on a screen this size.

Update: Handwriting recognition is the reason HTC is sticking with resistive screens on its Windows Mobile smartphones, as explained in this statement: 

We believe that the role of a mobile phone is to provide quick and easy access to the information that our customer finds most valuable. The Touch HD, with HTC's TouchFLO 3D technology, leverages the power of Windows Mobile 6.1 and provides simple and intuitive access to the functionality people want and need with a flick of their finger.

Above all else, HTC strives to offer its customers choice and flexibility. We include a stylus (and thus a resistive, rather than capacitive screen) with the Touch HD to give our customers the choice to switch between that and their finger, depending on what feels most comfortable to them.

So, as it stands, the Touch HD is easily one of HTC’s best Windows Mobile smartphones to-date, and easily the best touch-screen-only model from any manufacturer. The specification is excellent (there’s even a 3.5mm headphone socket!) and the TouchFLO 3D interface looks fantastic on the large, high-res display – it’s just a shame HTC didn’t go the whole hog and use a capacitive touch-screen.