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HTC Touch Cell Phone Review - Software

Alfredo Padilla Published on November 07, 2007 Comment on this

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Intro Making/Receiving Calls Software Other Features

Tour & Design Messaging Battery Life Value & Comparisons

Audio Quality Organizer Connectivity Conclusion

Imaging Multimedia Hardware Ratings & Specs

OS (8.5)
The HTC Touch runs Windows Mobile Professional, the touch screen version of the Windows Mobile platform. Windows Mobile Professional is a powerful and mature smart phone platform that gives users a great deal of flexibility. One of its best features is the ability to install a wide variety of third-party applications to address any shortcomings or lack of features you might find in the standard OS. On the Touch, HTC has added its TouchFLO interface on top of the standard Windows Mobile Professional, with most of its features available on the home screen. Our score for smart phone operating systems is standardized based on the operating system used.

Home Screen Score (8.0)
HTC developed its TouchFLO interface to improve the interface of Windows Mobile Professional, using finger touches instead of a stylus. The biggest impact of TouchFLO is found on the home screen of the Touch, where the interface is significantly different than other Windows Mobile Professional devices. In place of the standard Today screen you have a tabbed interface with large buttons that are easy to use with your fingers. At the top of the interface is a large clock, and below it are three buttons to access your e-mail, text messages, and missed calls. Below that are four tabs, each of which change the upper half of the screen to a different view, including weather, launcher, and profiles. Below those tabs are four more buttons that give you access to the phone, music store, album software, live search, and Sprint TV. Finally, the bottom quarter of the screen shows you a list of upcoming appointments.
All of these are plug-ins that run on top of Windows Mobile Professional's today screen, so you can turn them off and get a more typical Windows Mobile screen if you wish. We found the interface to be useful, but we were disappointed to see you can't customize the plug-ins. For example, you might want to change the applications found on the launcher, but you can't. In addition to these custom plug-ins, another key addition to the home screen brought by TouchFLO is a secondary interface accessed by swiping your finger from the bottom of the screen to the top.


This interface has three "pages," and you can switch between them by swiping your finger across the screen, producing a cool rotating effect. Two of the modes are more application launchers, and the third is a contact manager that allows you to place nine contact photos on the screen. Although the effect is cool and the contacts page might be useful, we are annoyed by the fact that you can't modify the software shortcuts on the other two pages. For example, the music button takes you to Sprint's music software, so if you prefer to use Windows Media Player you're out of luck.
Overall, we have to say the TouchFLO enhancement found on the HTC Touch is pretty to look at but of limited utility. You can get much of the same functionality and much more customizability from third-party software. That said, the typical Windows Mobile today screen is still sitting there underneath all this stuff, is powerful and very customizable, so users who absolutely hate the TouchFLO interface can go back to a more familiar home screen. Because we didn't find the interface particularly compelling, we have given the Touch the same score in this section we would give any other Windows Mobile device.

Extensibility (9.0)
As a Windows Mobile Professional device, the HTC Touch is very extensible. Not only are there thousands of native third-party applications available to install, but HTC and Sprint have also included a Java virtual machine so you can install Java applications. The ability to add such a wide variety of software makes the Touch a true smart phone, unlike the iPhone, which won't support third-party applications until early 2008.

Customizability (9.0)
As with all Windows Mobile Professional devices, the HTC Touch is very customizable. Not only can you change the home screen easily by installing and turning on/off Today plug-ins, you can also change the theme of the device, which changes the color of all the menu bars and background. You can also set any background photo for your Today screen. There are also options to change the size of the font used throughout the interface, and you can easily change the applications assigned to your Start menu. We only wish it was just as easy to change the applications assigned to all of the launchers HTC includes with its TouchFLO interface.

OS Responsivness (7.5)
We found the HTC Touch to be a very responsive device when using most standard Windows Mobile applications. We saw little lag and most programs launched quickly. Where we did see some problems was when using the TouchFLO interface's scrolling feature. This allows you to scroll up and down lists or scroll around websites by moving your finger along the screen like you would on the iPhone. Unfortunately, the implementation here needs some work, as scrolling was not very smooth or sensitive. We would sometimes start a screen scrolling and then have trouble stopping it. And sometimes we would just want to move down a page or so but it would go into auto-scroll. We can't ding the Touch too much for this, as most Windows Mobile devices lack this feature altogether, but they're going to have to do some work to improve their implementation here, especially if they truly want to compete with the ease of scrolling on a device like the iPhone.

Browser Features (8.0)
The HTC Touch uses the same Internet Explorer Mobile browser found on all Windows Mobile Professional devices. Internet Explorer Mobile does a solid job of supporting most websites, with support for both WAP and HTML pages. It also supports Javascript, frames, images, encryption, and cookies. There is no support for more advanced technologies like RSS feeds, password management, Java, and Flash. You can download and install a Flash player that will allow you to view some Flash-based websites, although not Flash-based video like on YouTube.

Browsing Interface (6.5)
The browsing interface on Internet Explorer Mobile hasn't changed much over the years. You get three view choices. One Column takes all the content and reorders it so you only have to scroll up and down. Fit-to-Screen take the content on the screen and organizes it into columns one screen wide, and Desktop allows you to view the page as you would see it on your desktop browser. You can also choose to view the page in full screen mode, which removes the menu bars at the top and bottom of the interface, allowing you to use more screen real estate to view content on the page.
The history on the browser is a simple list of sites visited. You can sort the history by page title or address, but there's no support for searching. The bookmarks are arranged in a nested folder design similar to BlackBerry devices. You can create new folders and add bookmarks to them. You can also edit existing bookmark names and URLs, but for some strange reason you can't move an existing bookmark to another folder. This seems odd, as the ostensibly less-advanced standard version of Windows Mobile allows you to do this.
When browsing, the d-pad moves you from link to link on the page. If you hold down the d-pad in one direction it will begin browsing in that direction. One upgrade that comes with HTC's TouchFLO interface is the ability to use your finger to move around the page, but as we've seen in many scrolling situations with TouchFLO this has its problems. We frequently found ourselves going into the "throw and scroll" mode, when all we wanted to do was move down the page a little, and the software also often failed to correctly interpret our attempts to scroll. This is in stark contrast to the iPhone, where finger scrolling is smooth as silk.
Aside from this TouchFLO advance, the interface is vanilla Internet Explorer Mobile. The left soft key is assigned to the back function, while the right soft key opens a menu where you can access a variety of additional functions. The address bar is permanently attached to the top of the page unless you go into full screen mode. One issue with this mode is the lack of physical soft keys. On standard Windows Mobile Professional devices, when you go into full screen mode and you press one of the soft key buttons the menu bars appear again. On the Touch, however, the lack of physical buttons means you have to press and hold on the screen to bring up a contextual menu, then turn off full screen mode from there.
Although Internet Explorer Mobile gives you a decent browsing experience, it lags behind the more modern browsers we've seen on devices like the iPhone and modern Nokia Series 60 devices. These browser provide you with a true desktop browsing experience, and allow you to zoom into the parts of the screen you want to view. Compared to most other mobile browsers, Internet Explorer Mobile does a passable job, but it lags behind compared to what's now state of the art.

Browser Access (5.71)
To see how easy it is to launch Internet Explorer Mobile and browse to a website we counted the number of steps it takes to go from the home screen unlocked until we browsed to our website. We used steps here instead of a timed test because we don't want network issues to affect the test. We counted entering the URL as a single step. The HTC Touch took seven steps to complete this process. As you can see below, this isn't particularly impressive, as most of our comparison phones took two or three fewer steps. The Touch was hurt by the fact that, unlike other Windows Mobile Professional devices we've reviewed, when Internet Explorer Mobile launches it doesn't automatically highlight the address bar, adding a step. We also had to manually open the keyboard since it didn't pop up automatically.

Cell Phone	Steps	Score
HTC Touch	7	5.71
Helio Ocean	5	8.00
BlackBerry Curve 8320	11	3.64
HTC Mogul	5	8.00
Palm Centro	5	8.00
Apple iPhone	4	10.00

Gaming (5.17)
The HTC Touch comes with the standard Windows Mobile Professional games: Solitaire and Bubble Breaker. Both of these games are good enough for killing some time, but neither is particularly compelling. The d-pad on the HTC Touch is good, and should provide solid controls for games. The lack of hardware soft keys may be an issue, however, especially when using Java games that aren't optimized for a touch screen. There are a large variety of native games that run on Windows Mobile Professional, and some Java games are supported, as well.

Calculator (6.0)
The calculator on the HTC Touch is the same as found on other Windows Mobile Professional devices. It's good enough to do simple arithmetic equations with a couple of advanced functions, but it won't replace a scientific calculator.

Alarm (8.0)
We have always like the alarms available on Windows Mobile Professional devices, and the HTC Touch is no different. You can create three different alarms, each with its own ringtone, and can also create complex recurrence patterns. This is significantly better than the very basic alarms found on Symbian Series 60 phones or BlackBerry devices.

Document Software (6.0)
The HTC Touch comes loaded with Office Mobile for your document needs. This includes mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, although you can only view documents, not edit them, with PowerPoint Mobile. HTC and Sprint have also included a viewer for PDF files, which should cover all your major file types.

Other Software (2.0)
In addition to the software we've already discussed, the HTC Touch comes with a couple of other programs of note. The first is a file browser that allows you to easily move, copy, and delete files on the device. The second is Windows Live, which combines search and mapping services with wider integration with Microsoft's online services like Hotmail.

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