HTC Touch2 Review

The HTC Touch2 is one of the first Windows Mobile 6.5 devices to hit retailers but with so many nice alternatives available and more coming very soon how does the Touch2 do and where is its place?

HTC Touch2

What’s in the box:

• Phone
• Battery
• Charger
• Wired Headset
• USB Cable

Also take a look at Matt’s HTC Touch2 unboxing video to see what the device has to offer.

The ten second review:

Device: HTC Touch2

Price: £285.20

Summary: A small yet feature packed Windows Phone.

Best of: WiFi, A-GPS, TouchFlo

Worst of: Size, Video Recording

Buy it now from: Clove Technology

HTC Touch2 Specification:

• Operating System – Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional
• Processor – Qualcomm MSM7225, 528 MHz
• Memory – RAM – 256 MB / ROM – 512 MB
• Display – 2.8-inch TFT-LCD touch-sensitive screen with QVGA resolution
• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE: Europe/Asia: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
• Bluetooth 2.1 with Enhanced Data Rate and A2DP for wireless stereo headsets
• Wi-Fi: IEEE 802.11 b/g
• 3.5 mm audio jack
• HTC ExtUSB (11-pin mini-USB 2.0)
• Internal GPS antenna
• microSD memory card (SD 2.0 compatible)
• Audio supported formats AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR-NB, QCP, MP3, WMA, WAV, MIDI, M4A
• Video supported formats WMV, ASF, MP4, 3GP, 3G2, M4V, AVI
• 3.2 megapixel colour camera with fixed focus
• Zoom bar
• Up to 370 minutes for WCDMA
• Up to 440 minutes for GSM
• Battery – Rechargeable Lithium-ion battery 1100 mAh
• Dimensions – 104 X 55 X 12.9 mm (LxWxT) (4.1 X 2.16 X 0.51 inches)
• Weight – 110 grams (4 ounces) with battery
• Warranty – 2 Years

General:

The top of the device contains only the 3.5 mm headset jack.

HTC Touch2 Top

The bottom house the USB port and the microphone.

HTC Touch2 Bottom

The microSD card slot and the up/down rocker is situated on the left side of the phone.

HTC Touch2 Left 

The right side is empty apart from the stylus at the base of the handset.

HTC Touch2 Right

On the back of the device is the camera lens and also the speaker grill.

HTC Touch2 Back

Highlights:

• WiFi
• A-GPS
• Windows Mobile 6.5

Lowlights:

• May be too small for some people
• Video capture is not good at all.

Review:

Wow, my first Windows Mobile 6.5 device to play with. I was a little excited when Matt told me the HTC Touch2 was on its way. If you have read many of my reviews you may of noticed I’m a big fan of HTC!

In this review I am not going to focus too much on the changes that 6.5 has brought us but instead will be focusing on the device in general.

First impressions when unboxed were pretty good. The device looks nice. Its a little different than many of HTCs other devices as it has a kind of satin silver band around the front of it. The back cover is also silver and extremely smooth. Below the screen is the zoom bar which is a touch sensitive strip allowing users to zoom as much or as little as required on certain features on the phone, such as web browsing of viewing photos. This bar has been on a few HTC handsets now and although I tend not to use it myself it does work.

Under the zoom bar are the phones hard keys. These consist of a send and end key, a back button, a windows button and finally a home key. These are a new design for HTC and we will also see them in the HD2 (Touch2s big brother) which is due out very shortly. The keys are flush with the device but all give a proper click when pressed. They work perfectly and feel nice to use.

Touch2 Front

As I was writing this I remembered I hadn’t opened the MicroSD card slot so I gave it a try. Could I do it – NO. After a minute of faffing about I realised I needed to remove the battery cover. Now not only is this a bit of a pain as I have not had to do this on any of my previous HTC devices but the little door that covers the card slot feels really cheap and bad quality. Once opened it dangles on a bit of plastic and I thought to myself that I wonder how long this is going to last. I know that most users will not be swapping SD cards very often but you never know.

When it comes to the homescreen on the Touch2 you have two options. The first is to use the new Windows Mobile 6.5 screen. This is much better than the previous version and has no real similarities.

6.5 Home Screen

As you will see above, the screen gives you a list the most common features and this allows quick access to them. Each header can be swiped left or right to give more options. For example if you press on the pictures tab you can swipe to see the next picture (and you will see a thumbnail of the image) and so on.

The second option is to use HTCs TouchFlo which I prefer.

TouchFlo

This gives access to similar features as the Windows version but in a different format. There are a couple of changes in TouchFlo now. The first is that the weather is incorporated into the main screen and sits below the clock. This can be set to update automatically if required. The other main change is that the tabs at the bottom are now in colour. Prior to the Touch2 these were just white on a black background.  The whole homescreen now looks a lot more colourful and modern. You can swipe along the 11 tabs really easily and its so smooth. I love it!

Pressing the windows key on the device is the same as pressing the on screen start key at the top left hand side. This drops you into the main menu where the icons are set out in a new format. Again these are super colourful and look great. You can rearrange the order of them but it is done in a strange way. When you select the icon you wish to move the only option that is given is to move it to the top. Not perfect but I can live with that. On the TouchFlo tab bar there is a “favorites” option where you can store up to 18 of your most used applications. This certainly makes life easier!

The resistive screen on the Touch2 is only 2.8 inches which in this day and age is small for a smartphone, however it works very well. Its responsive to touch and glides well. The main reason for Microsoft upgrading the software to 6.5 was to make it more finger friendly and they have. The Touch2 does come with a stylus and I have only used it once which is good news as I hate using them.

As the Touch2 is a Window Phone it comes with all the stuff you would expect. You can view, alter and create Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote docs, you can have practically unlimited phonebook entries and messages. Contacts and calendar can be synced with Outlook. Windows Live and Messenger are included as well as Adobe Reader.

There is a nice YouTube client which is the same as on other HTC devices and its great! An added bonus is that a CoPilot Live 8 trial is thrown in for good measure. You can use it for 15 days free of charge. Please see my review of CoPilot for further details.

Social networking apps work a treat with the Touch2. From the new Windows Marketplace I downloaded Microsoft’s  Facebook and MySpace apps and they are pretty good. There are also many Twitter apps for Windows Phones and I used both Pocketwit and Twikini on the device and they did there job well. If you use Twitter please follow us – twitter.com/tracyandmatt for regular updates.

Web Browsing on the Touch2 was not bad. It comes pre-installed with the latest Internet Explorer as well as Opera browser.  Opera is the one I prefer but again this comes down to personal choice. As its Windows, if you don’t like either of these then there are lots of other browsers you can use.

I was expecting the music player on the Touch2 to be good like on there other devices and I wasn’t wrong. Through the speakers the quality was reasonable and fairly loud but through the headphones the quality was outstanding. Good job HTC!

The camera did a pretty good job to for a 3MP. It took pictures very quickly and it uses the same interface as on other HTC phones. The quality was better than expected (click here for sample),  but when it came to viewing some videos I had taken, on my PC they were so so bad! It looked like I had used a mobile phone from when video recording was first introduced. I don’t know how it can go so wrong!

Watching movies on the device is a different ball game altogether. As its a Windows Phone you can download software that will allow you to watch pretty much any format. I convert my DVDs to MP4 format and can then watch them on my phone whenever the need arises.

Messaging was simple on the handset. Although the screen is only 2.8 inches the various onscreen keyboards are great. There is the standard WinMo compact qwerty which can only be used with the stylus, a phone keypad giving you three letters on each key and finally a full qwerty which is my preferred choice. All use haptic feedback.  I was surprised how good the keyboard worked on such a small screen.

Conclusion:

The HTC Touch2 is a great little phone. If you want a small, pocketable device that does pretty much everything then you cant really go wrong with it. It will never compete with the forthcoming HD2 or the recent HTC Touch Pro2 or HD but it’s not supposed to. A fantastic little device HTC, you’ve done yourselves proud again.

Posted by: James