The HTC Touch Family is Gaining Momentum

Every time we check lately, there's another glowing review of an HTC Touch mobile device online. This Engadget story is one of the latest, linking to a German review calling the HTC Touch HD an "iPhone killer". The praise mentions features including the TouchFLO 3D interface, the Opera web browser, and the large display. We're seen raves for the HTC family of devices before, but this is the first time the phrase "iPhone killer" has leaped out at us. Could it be?

What all is the "HTC family", you ask? Well, besides the Touch HD, it's...

-The HTC Touch Pro - The Pocket PC/smartphone hybrid. More on that later.

-The HTC Touch Diamond - The predecessor to the Pro. But unlike the Pro, has no slide-out keyboard, less memory, and with a built-in 4Gig hard-drive.

-The HTC Touch Cruise - Earlier than the Diamond, this is a handset system with GPS built-in.

-The HTC Touch Dual - Even earlier and like the original, this was a handset device with a camera and a lack of wi-fi support.

Of the whole line, our sure bet for the peak of the series is probably going to have to be the HTC Touch Pro. Engadget gave it its own glowing review, calling it "HTC's most impressive handset to date". We see it as the strongest argument yet for technological convergence, because it feels and operates very much like a smartphone, a PDA, and a Pocket PC all rolled into one. The slide-out keyboard feels like a magic trick, the TouchFlo 3D interface is the slickest, most intuitive, and downright prettiest interface we've ever seen on a mobile device, and every little detail seems to be well thought-out.

Just some of the features that make up our minds:

-Sliding out the stylus automatically turns it on. Just to save you that little extra move hitting a power button every time.

-The scroolbar menu. It packs some 20 icons in the space for five, and sliding the selector to the right scrolls the menu to the left with a cool parallax effect. Just to save that extra work of having to scroll repeatedly.-The message and email previews. We've had some 20 years of looking at email
as blah boring text, so it's very unique to have the email previewed in a
little envelope.

-Web browser: Opera. You're spoiling us rotten!

-Going into 'all programs' from the programs tab gives not the typical Windows Start menu, but a larger and more usable scrolling list.

-Even though the slide-out keyboard is always available, if you're just doing something quick in portrait mode in the 3D interface and don't want to bother sliding it to landscape mode, you can have an onscreen keyboard anyway.

Add to this, the HTC packs in gobs of memory. With all the bells and whistles, you'd think the screen would lag once in a while, but every action on it is crisp and snappy. Now it's also a camera, media viewer, music player, web browser, organizer... the list goes on for pages, and you're eventually asking yourself "What can't it do?" And that's where we think it's hit the point for technological convergence. We're predicting that the HTC Touch Pro will go down in history as the first mobile device that makes a better phone, PDA, or PC than any of those devices separately.

Filed Under: Product Reviews