HTC Touch Cell Phone Review - Making/Receiving Calls
|
Alfredo Padilla Published on November 07, 2007 Comment on this |
|
|
|
|
Dialing Speed (2.87)
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| HTC Touch | 6.98 | 2.87 |
| Helio Ocean | 3.10 | 6.45 |
| BlackBerry Curve 8320 | 3.16 | 6.33 |
| HTC Mogul | 6.16 | 3.25 |
| Palm Centro | 3.62 | 5.52 |
| Apple iPhone | 3.96 | 5.05 |
Talk and End Buttons (7.0)
The talk and end buttons on the Touch are small rectangular buttons located to the left and right of the d-pad. Since the Touch lacks many buttons, its send and end buttons are adequately spaced away from other controls. This means that despite their relatively small size you won't be making any mistakes when going for them. They are also easy to find by feel, as they are raised above the surrounding plastic and provide decent travel and tactile feedback.
Call Management (7.0)
The call history features on the Touch are no different than any Windows Mobile device. You get a chronological list of phone calls that show the number called and the time of the call. When you activate an item you are taken to a screen with details like duration of the call. You can filter the call history by incoming, outgoing, or missed calls. There are no counters for total calls made or data sent/received.
During a call you get a different interface than the standard Windows Mobile phone, but only cosmetically. The left soft key opens the keypad while the right soft key opens a menu where you can access functions like creating a note, speed dial, and mute. On screen are six large buttons that mostly replicate what you get in the menu – speaker, mute, note, and contacts, as well as call and end buttons, which simply replicate the functions of the real buttons that fulfill those functions. As a multi-tasking operating system, Windows Mobile on the Touch also allows you to access just about any other program you need, although anything that requires a data connection won't work during a call.
Startup to Call (1.42)
We do this test to see how long it will take to start the Touch and make a call if you need to in an emergency. We used the same five phone numbers we used in our dialing speed test, and again took the average time for our score. The Touch took 70.24 seconds to complete this process. As you can see below, this is a very poor score, even for a smart phone. The HTC Mogul, which also runs Windows Mobile Professional, took about 15 seconds less than the Touch. Point is, don't expect to whip this phone out and make a call quickly if you've turned it off.
| Cell Phone | Time (sec) | Score |
| HTC Touch | 70.24 | 1.42 |
| Helio Ocean | 9.50 | 10.53 |
| BlackBerry Curve 8320 | 7.12 | 14.04 |
| HTC Mogul | 55.00 | 1.82 |
| Palm Centro | 42.66 | 2.34 |
| Apple iPhone | 26.12 | 3.83 |
Ring Volume (8.48)
To measure the volume of the ringer on the HTC Touch we turned the phone's volume to maximum. We then used a sound pressure meter to see how loud each of the phone's ring tones got. The Touch's ring tones got as loud as 84.8 decibels in our test. As you can see below this is right about the same as our comparison phones, each of which are within a decibel or two of the Touch's performance. This is pretty standard, as most phones are around 85 decibels in this test.
| Cell Phone | Volume (decibels) | Score |
| HTC Touch | 84.8 | 8.48 |
| Helio Ocean | 85.4 | 8.54 |
| BlackBerry Curve 8320 | 85.6 | 8.56 |
| HTC Mogul | 85.7 | 8.57 |
| Palm Centro | 85.5 | 8.55 |
| Apple iPhone | 84.9 | 8.49 |
Ringtone Customizability (8.0)
Like other Windows Mobile phones we've reviewed, the HTC Touch provides you with excellent customization options for your ring tones, allowing you to drop any MP3, AAC, or WMA file into the ring tones folder to use for incoming calls. You can also use recordings you make using the voice recorder as a ring tone. What you can't do is create your own ring tone from a song on the device, as Sprint's version of the Touch lacks HTC's new music manager that supports this functionality.
Non-Audio Alerts (12.0)
As with other Windows Mobile devices, the Mogul gives you a notification on screen when a call comes in, with the option to dismiss or accept the call. The vibrate alert on the Touch was pretty decent – we were easily able to feel it in a pants pocket, and it might be sufficient in a jacket pocket, but if it's sitting in your bag you may miss it.
| Previous Next | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
