I have been living with the HTC Touch HD (also known as HTC Blackstone) for little over a week and this is my take on the real first iPhone contender that is out on the marked.
My previous telephone was a Nokia N95 that I have been using for little over 2 years now but I have grown a little tired of the Symbian S60 operating system and have wanted to try Windows Mobile for some time now. It stood between 2 models from HTC, Touch Pro 2 and Touch HD.
I got the Touch HD because it had a bigger and better screen than the Touch Pro 2, an important factor for me since I watch TV series on my way too work and I surf the web on a regular basis, it also have a 3,5 mm audio jack while the Touch Pro 2 just have a mini USB.
It is supplied with an 8 gig memory card.
So far I have not regretted my choice of phone.
Let’s start with the main reason for getting the Touch HD, the screen. The phone has a 3,8” LCD screen (while iPhone have 3,5” screen) that makes surfing the web and watching movies a dream, the phone comes with a screen protector that I had a PITA putting on right.
The phone has a 5 mega pixel camera (iPhone 3 mega pixel) and you might think that the camera would be good, but it’s not. My previous phone N95 had an amazing 5 MPX camera while the HTC Touch HD is crap, well the camera itself is not crap but the lack of a flash is, as long the picture is taken in bright light then the pictures are good but when it starts too become dark then it don’t hold up at all.
This is taken with the Nokia N95
This is taken with the HTC Touch HD
The battery on the Touch HD is pretty good comparing too other phones. I have been using the phone quite much since I bought it. Playing games, surfing the web, watching movies, listening to music and having the Wi-Fi turned on and the battery have lasted for about 2 days before I need to charge it.
The operating system on the HTC Touch HD is Windows mobile 6.1 but HTC have putt their own TouchFLO 3D on top of Winmobile so you have quick and easy access to your music, pics, SMS and email but right underneath the TouchFLO you have Winmobile.
The home page
Contacts
Programs
There is much more to show but I'm lazy.
Writing SMS and emails on the Touch HD is ok, you can chose from 4 different methods of writing
Full QWERTY
Compact QWERTY
Regular mobile phone layout
Windows layout
At the moment I have some problems writing SMS and emails on it but that is mainly because I have to get used to it. But one of the biggest problems for me is that if I use full QWERTY then the buttons become too small, or maybe it’s my finger that’s to fat so I have too use the stylus that comes with the phone, so it can take some time too write a message. Using the mobile phone layout is much easier and don’t require that you use both your hands. The one thing I don’t like, but I will have to get used to it also, is the pressure that you have to use when texting, if you don’t touch hard enough then it will not register.
When it comes to emails then the phone is excellent, it should also be since it is using outlook. I have hooked up my Gmail, hotmail and a pop mail account and managing all of them easily.
The mp3 player on the phone is ok and suites my needs just fine, the only thing that annoys me a little bit is the way you change albums. When you are listening to music you change songs by swiping your finger up or down, I want to have the possibility of changing albums by swiping my finger from right too left instead of going in to a albums menu and choosing from there. But this is just minor details for me and if I’m not happy with this then I probably can find an mp3 player from a third party.
One of the reasons for buying the phone was for its big screen and watching movies. Since the OS on the phone is windows based then I thought that it would play xvid and avi files from the get go, it turned out that it will not do that and that it prefers the MPEG 4 format. So if you have a bunch of movies or TV episodes on your hard drive that is in xvid then you have to convert them or download a player that supports that format.
The first movie that I attempted to play on the phone was a file that I converted to the MPEG 4 format but every time I played it the movie didn’t play smoothly, it started and stopped constantly while the audio was perfect. I found out that the reason was the converter and that was easily solved by getting a new one.
Looking at pictures on the phone is also dream because of the big screen and you easily flip through the pics by swiping your finger across the screen, is there something you want to zoom in on, then you easily can do that by making a circle with the clock around the place of interest.
Surfing on the web with the Touch HD is awesome, the phone comes with Internet Explorer (of course, its windows) and Opera. My opinion is that you can remove IE since it’s just there taking up space.
I love this phone but there are some things that I don’t like and is missing. There are two major things that I feel should have been on the phone from the start. A flash for the camera and a navigation program like TomTom’s Navigator 7, why on earth HTC made this phone without any of these on it is beyond me. Sure Google maps is already installed on it but you can’t compare it to something like TomTom.
But I do love this phone and HTC have done a great work in making a competitor to the iPhone and I’m looking forward too se what the upgraded version will look like.
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