HTC Touch2 review, Price, pictures, Details, model specifications
Affordable isn’t the most common word in the HTC vocabulary but a company whose sole line of business is smartphones is not quite expected to speak the language of the masses. That said, we really need to define affordable first. It’s what HTC Touch2 tries hard to be but… let’s face it… doesn’t get too close to. After all, there’s little a PocketPC full of high-tech goodies can do about it.
But there’s much a company needs to do to keep pace with an evolving market. HTC are busy updating their portfolio and the Touch2 is yet another in a growing line of sequels. Alright, it may be a small step for PocketPCs but a solid move for HTC in the midrange.
The launch of TouchFLO is a landmark but the original Touch will also be remembered perhaps as the first HTC device to actually have some exterior design and compactness. No offence, but prior to that PocketPC’s were just big enough to get away with the lack of style.
Anyway, the Touch Viva and the Touch 3G followed soon after – near clones that tried to give PocketPC’s mass appeal.
HTC Touch2 official photos
So, that means the HTC Touch2 will be trying to walk in three pairs of shoes and give the company some flexibility in the midrange. The newbie is smart, fast (in fact, surprisingly fast), compact, and friendly. The sharp contemporary looks are a definite asset but there’s more than enough stuff under the hood to motivate upgraders too.
Key features
- 2.8″ 65K-color QVGA display
- Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional OS with TouchFLO
- Qualcomm MSM7225 528MHz CPU and 256MB RAM
- Quad-band GSM support
- 3G with HSDPA 7.2Mbps
- Wi-Fi connectivity
- Built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS support
- Stereo FM radio with RDS
- 3 MP fixed focus camera
- microSD card slot
- Touch-sensitive zoom bar
- Standard miniUSB port and Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP
- Standard 3.5mm audio jack
- Great audio quality
- MS Office Mobile document editor
- Opera 9.5 web browser
- YouTube client, Facebook integration
- Excellent video playback performance
Main disadvantages
- Low-end display resolution
- Camera lacks auto focus, flash, geotagging or a dedicated camera key
- No accelerometer sensor
- Poor screen sunlight legibility
- Preloaded CoPilot Live navigation software is a trial version
- No secondary video-call camera
- No handwriting recognition
Actually, the real troublesome bit is screen estate. The QVGA 2.8-incher on the HTC Touch2 is so 2000-and-late – an unpleasant surprise in a phone that takes meticulous care to upgrade its predecessor. Less than the Cookie and on par with the Corby is hardly a compliment for a PocketPC, be it midrange. While the user interface is quite thumbable, the display does feel small at times and the stylus unavoidable.
HTC Touch2 live shots
At the end of the day though, the Touch2 seems to have enough to make up for this misfortune. And if size looks like an invitation to lower your expectations don’t be too keen to take it. The Touch2 – among other things – is the first HTC phone to run Windows Mobile 6.5.
Keeping it slim and compact was a priority for the HTC Touch2
Even if sticking to the size limit was vital, HTC were quite generous with the equipment of the Touch2. From processing power to connectivity – the Touch2 is a solid and extensive upgrade. The smartphone runs the latest WinMo, packs Wi-Fi, HSDPA and an inbuilt GPS receiver. The fixed focus camera is not much of a perk but the standard 3.5mm audio jack will sure come in handy.
There is quite a lot to test so let’s open the box and meet the handset in person. We’re back after the jump with unboxing, design and construction. It’s Touch2 time.
Design and construction (continued)
At the top of the Touch2 there is a standard 3.5mm audio jack. Now we’re talking.
The 3.5mm audio jack broadens the connectivity options on the Touch2
The bottom features the miniUSB port for connecting the data cable and the charger. The other thing to note here is the stylus compartment, which isn’t magnetic like on the HTC Touch Diamond or not even active as on the HTC Touch Diamond2. We really miss the functionality of launching the relevant applications as you pull out the stylus – that was quite neat.
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The miniUSB port at the bottom • the stylus compartment isn’t active
The backside of the Touch2 features the 3-megapixel fixed focus camera lens and the loudspeaker grill. Don’t look for a flash, there isn’t any.
The camera lacks autofocus and flash
Opening the battery cover reveals the 1000 mAh Li-ion battery that powers the HTC Touch2. The original Touch had a 1100 mAh unit but the Touch2 is obviously running on a much more power optimized platform and can claim up to 500 hours of stand-by against the 200 hours of the predecessor. The talk time of the Touch2 is quoted at 7.5 hours.
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A 1000 mAh Li-Ion battery may as well be enough, given the small and low-res screen
The build quality of the HTC Touch2 is quite impressive. During the week we spent with the device we had no reason to doubt its construction and long-term durability. When it comes to comfort – the Touch2 handles very well and has a commendably solid feel in hand – especially for such a small handset. In essence, the Touch2 is a compact and friendly phone and that’s a good premise for a wanna-be-popular smartphone.
Compromises were obviously inevitable though to keep within size and price limits. Our main concern is screen size, a three-incher would’ve been more like it. Some improvements in the camera department would have certainly made a difference – such as adding auto focus. On a different note, the 3.5 mm jack and zoom bar are more than welcome.
The HTC Touch2 is compact and friendly
More TouchFLO, less 3D
The TouchFLO goes without saying on the HTC Touch2 but the attractive and user-friendly plug-in has lost some of its 3D embellishments. Despite the slight differences though, the TouchFLO does well to make WinMo more responsive to touch.
The absence of a capacitive touchscreen on the HTC Touch2 is barely noticeable. The TouchFLO is highly touch-optimized and responds admirably. Of course, when you eventually hit the underlying Windows Mobile, you’ll meet some of the not so thumbable parts of the interface.
The TouchFLO Home screen, as usual, offers a choice of full-screen tabs, decked out with some impressive graphics. You can no longer skip through the tabs with a single finger sweep across the screen – instead you have to side scroll the tab thumbnails at the bottom of the screen until you find the one you need.
The available tabs include the home screen itself (with a large clock), favorite contacts, text messages, email, Internet, photos and video, music, weather, map search, settings, and programs.
Now, let’s have a closer look at those tabs. A nice thing is that each tab comes with its own set of context keys, but the downside is that those are not customizable to suit your needs. With that TouchFLO homescreen at hand, you’d rarely have to resort to the standard Windows menu.
Other than showing the clock, the Home tab gives you access to the HTC Call log, the calendar, world clock and alarms. The context keys are assigned to the dialpad and the camera.
The Home tab
The second TouchFLO tab is called People and that’s where you can set favorite contacts with an assigned image or, in the absence of that, a generic one provided by the software.
The People tab
The Email tab shows your emails and, again, you can finger-flip through them one by one.
The email tab looks nice
The Internet tab launches the Opera 9.5 web browser or the slick preinstalled YouTube video client. You can also scroll your bookmarks and launch a webpage directly from there.
Opera mini is the default browser in the Internet tab and that’s non-negotiable. Now, that’s limiting – even if we like the Opera very much. But the bigger problem of the Internet tab is the Search bar, which we saw in the Touch Pro2, has gone missing.
The Internet tab
Windows Mobile 6.5
Pressing the Start button on the Touch2 opens something similar to the menus found in non-smartphones. In the new main menu you’ve got all the installed programs plus shortcuts to the settings menu.
And of course, as of Windows Mobile 6.5 the Main menu comes in a honeycomb pattern, which is supposed to make touch control even more comfortable.
The perfectly flat structure of the Main menu can surely get a bit clumsy in time due to the huge number of icons piling up, but still we’d prefer that over the confusing experience that so many Widows Mobile new adopters have had in the past.
Icons within the main menu are easy to rearrange: a press and hold is enough to move the frequently used icons to the top.
The customizable Start menu
Without doubt, Windows Mobile 6.5 is the user-friendliest WinMo ever made. Unfortunately the improvements over its predecessor 6.1 aren’t big enough to make it able to compete with the other contemporary platforms in terms of usability. Of course there is some touch optimization but the truth is a complete overhaul is needed rather than a facelift.
6.5 has brought little changes to the deeper levels of the WinMo interface
We recently published a dedicated article on the new Windows Mobile 6.5. Feel free to take a closer look and see how far WinMo has gone.
The contact manager is a winner
Contact management is usually considered one of the strongest points of Windows Mobile. You have an unlimited contact list, unlimited info fields for each contact and brilliant synchronization options.
Since the Diamond2, HTC have added a new interface which uses a small thumb icon for a person’s picture, set against a gray background with nice font. You can pick a letter of the alphabet by using the letter column placed on the right.
Searching by gradual typing is also available.
Phonebook with thumb scrolling • searching by typing or via the alphabetical list
The standard editing is OK, but unfortunately the advanced editing of a contact throws you back into the old WinMo depths. But hey, you still have a plethora of available info fields – and if by any rare chance those are not enough, you can always rename some of the existing ones and use them instead.
Editing a contact
Viewing a contact is a whole new experience. HTC have done a great job again redesigning the whole interface into something quite stylish and visually attractive.
The contact’s information is divided into groups – names, communication and information. There are four different icons at the bottom – the current info, all SMS with this contact, all emails and call history.
Viewing contact details
Good telephony, no perks
The Touch2 has no troubles during calls but skimps on some of the nice little perks that we liked in the Touch Diamond2 for example. The lack of an accelerometer leaves the Touch2 without turn-to-mute. Another omission is the active stylus. On the Diamond2 and the Touch Pro2, pulling the stylus out automatically launches the Notes application and even puts down the call details (the caller’s name and the time of call) on the note for you.
Smart dialing is enabled though, so you hardly ever need to go to the Contacts list in order to dial a number.
Calling Dee Dee
The Call log on Windows Mobile devices offers practically unlimited entries. HTC have pimped the look of the regular WinMo call log and have added thumb scrolling.
Call Log
We also conducted our traditional speakerphone test and the Touch2 scored an Excellent mark, ranking pretty high on our list of tested devices. You can find more details about our test, as well as the results of all other tested handsets here.
| Speakerphone test | Voice, dB | Pink noise/ Music, dB | Ringing phone, dB | Overall score |
| Apple iPhone 3G | 66.1 | 62.1 | 71.7 | Below Average |
| LG KC910 Renoir | 69.7 | 64.7 | 70.9 | Average |
| Samsung i900 Omnia | 70,2 | 64,8 | 75,2 | Good |
| HTC Touch Pro | 74,9 | 69,7 | 73,7 | Good |
| Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1 | 75.5 | 66.6 | 82.7 | Very Good |
| HTC Touch Diamond2 | 74.6 | 70.0 | 78.1 | Very Good |
| HTC Touch2 | 75.7 | 75.7 | 82.7 | Excellent |
Messaging: all the usual skill but no landscape QWERTY
The HTC Touch2 supports SMS, MMS and email. SMS and MMS share an inbox and a message editor and thanks to TouchFLO, you can enjoy thumb scrolling in the inboxes and in longer messages.
The Message tab offers a great interface for managing messages. With the nice interface and touch-optimization it’s highly unlikely you will ever switch back to the standard Windows SMS inbox.
Threaded SMS is also available on the Touch2, just as it is across all Windows Mobile 6.1 and 6.5 devices.
Typing SMS on the Touch2
The email inbox is also available as a homescreen tab with eye-catching finish. The email editor will hold no surprises for experienced WinMo users.
Setting up your email is easy as it is on most of the latest mid or high range phones. You type your email and password and all the other fiddly options are configured automatically.
Browsing the email inbox • reading an email
Perhaps now is a good time to mention input options on the Touch2. Since the device lacks any form of keypad you get a set of home-grown thumbable virtual keyboards. You can choose between a full QWERTY keyboard, a half QWERTY one, and an alphanumeric keypad displayed in portrait mode on the touchscreen.
Handwriting is not supported this time. But the bigger issue is all the keyboards – including the full QWERTY – are only available in portrait mode. That and the small Touch2 screen don’t exactly suggest comfortable typing. Unless stylus is your game.
The touch-optimized keyboards on the Touch2
GPS does matter
The HTC Touch2 features a built-in GPS receiver – it’s the Qualcomm gpsOne chipset, which comes along with the Qualcomm MSM7225 platform.
The HTC Touch2 supports the A-GPS so you can download current satellite data over Wi-Fi or the 2G/3G network for a much faster GPS satellite lock.
The Touch2 A-GPS data download manager
The HTC Touch2 comes with a trial version of CoPilot Live 7 and the free Google Maps. The 2.8″ touchscreen of the Touch2 is hardly enough to rival dedicated GPS units. Anyway, you have 14 days to test the CoPilot Live and decide if you can cope with a screen of this size.
Chipset sensitivity of the HTC Touch2 seems to be quite decent for a reasonably fast initial satellite lock.
Final words
The HTC Touch2 makes a small point but makes it right for the most part. To begin with, it looks sharp enough to get you interested but won’t intimidate first-time PocketPC users. It has a solid enough spec sheet with a few nice bonuses like a 3.5 mm audio jack and the zoom bar.
However, some of the things it lacks cannot go unnoticed. The essentials are well covered of course – and in PocketPC terms essentials imply quite an all-round set of connectivity and office features. But the Touch2 tries to be a budget balancer which makes compromises inevitable.
It becomes all too obvious in direct comparison with the most important rival – Samsung B7300 OmniaLITE. Between the two, the Touch2 looks by far the more credible PocketPC but that impression won’t hold upon closer inspection. Screen size and resolution, auto focus camera and the accelerometer are the key points in favor of the Samsung – not to mention the multimedia capabilities (losing in 3.5mm audio output bug gaining back in DivX and XviD video support). And what is even more important, the OmniaLITE keeps the asking price lower than that of the Touch2.
Samsung B7300 OmniaLITE
And that’s hardly the only source of pressure on the Touch2. The Symbian powered Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is a year old already but packs a good enough punch and costs way less. The recent HTC Tattoo and the Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica go around at nearly the same price as the Touch2. They offer similar capabilities but have one major advantage (well, some would call it a disadvantage – a matter of taste): Android OS.
Nokia 5800 XpressMusic • Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica • HTC Tattoo
It looks like the HTC Touch2 has more responsibility than its rank suggests. While the whole place is abuzz with Android, HTC are quite reasonably trying to update their midrange and respond to the competition, while in the same time they try to reshape the company and brand image from the ground up.
The Touch2 has another important role as the first HTC handset running the updated Windows Mobile 6.5. For a company that does PocketPC for a living, it’s quite an important role. But then, WinMo 6.5 turned out not much of a big deal – so that’s why the Touch2 is just another sequel – quite in line with the company’s recent naming pattern. Maybe it will take Windows 7 for HTC to display the depth of their vocabulary.
3 megapixels worth of disappointment
The HTC Touch2 has a 3 megapixel fixed-focus camera producing photos with a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels. The camera offers an intuitive user interface and shoots in landscape mode.
It lacks a dedicated camera key so the only way to capture is the virtual shutter key on the screen.
The Touch2 camera lacks a flash whatsoever.
Interface and features
The Touch2 viewfinder is free of any overlaying controls by default but you can display those by touching the dedicated key under the “capture” button.
In terms of camera features, the HTC Touch2 has the usual: self-timer, white balance presets, light sensitivity settings (up to ISO800), color effects and viewfinder gridline.
The HTC Touch2 camera options
There is no geotagging (strange, but not unseen), but this time the biggest letdown is the lack of autofocus. This means you have no macro mode and you can’t focus either on a preferred object.
There is also a panorama mode that offers on-screen framing guidance. After all the individual shots for the panorama are taken, the Touch2 stitches the images together automatically.
When it comes to image quality, we have to admit that the Touch2 camera is generally not as good as we would have liked.
Noise suppression is too aggressive at times, eradicating all fine detail (notice that the building facades lack any kind of texture). Worse yet, noise is still an issue – especially in the shadows – and color rendering is inaccurate on many occasions.
There is some red tint in many of the images too (take a closer look at the clouds, for example).
Sample images of HTC Touch2 camera
Synthetic resolution
We also snapped our resolution chart with the HTC Touch2. You can check out what that test is all about here.
HTC Touch2 resolution chart photo • 100% crops
Video
The Touch2 video capturing capabilities are rather basic – CIF recording at 30fps. It takes a lot more to be impressed these days and given the reasonably powerful CPU on the Touch2, we probably expected more.
But what we didn’t expect at all is the actual video quality – it’s well below the decent line, the detail is way below normal, the colors are not accurate at some places and at times the picture is simply blurred.
The interface of the camcorder resembles the one of the still camera. You can only adjust the white balance, resolution, brightness and finally add some color effects.
The Touch2 camcorder interface
Here is a sample CIF video (0.5MB) produced by the Touch2.
Full pack connectivity
When it comes to connectivity the HTC Touch2 has it all – HSDPA 7.2Mbps, Wi-Fi, stereo Bluetooth + EDR.
The Touch2 has quad-band GSM support and dual-band 3G – 900 and 2100 MHz are the compatible bands (that’s Europe and the like). You can check out our Worldwide Network Bands distribution database.
USB 2.0 is supported as well through a miniUSB adaptor. Actually it’s extUSB, but miniUSB cables fit just fine, and the port also serves audio input and output. When paired with a computer, the Touch2 prompts you to select among ActiveSync, Mass Storage or Modem modes.
In Mass Storage mode, the memory card is handled as a removable drive on the computer for faster file transfers. The only downside is in this mode you have no access to the memory card from the handset UI itself.
Web browsing is a single landscape-mode short of top-notch
The HTC Touch2 as usual comes with the Opera v9.5 browser. There’s IE Mobile if you really want it, but the default browser launched from the homescreen is Opera. And with good reason, since it puts IE Mobile to shame.
The Opera browser is extensively touch-optimized and draws inspiration from the iPhone’s Safari. The browser has matured since its inclusion in the Touch HD and now suffers no rendering bugs.
GSMArena.com on HTC Touch2 (Opera 9.5)
The browser is heavily optimized towards vertical scrolling – it rolls complex pages without missing a beat. Panning sideways is a little slower – a checkerboard pattern appears for a moment before the content is drawn, but this lasts for no more than a second so it’s no big issue.
Zooming in and out is also very fast. Here the Zoom bar can be used or you could opt for the regular double-tap zoom. Double tapping is more accurate as it zooms in to where you tapped, eliminating the need for much panning. On the other hand, the Zoom bar gives you finer control over the zoom level.
Landscape mode is not supported though and that’s a major downside. The on-screen QWERTY keyboard is also portrait only.
And a few words about the Opera 9.5 interface. By default web pages are opened fullscreen free of any overlaying controls. A tap on the bottom right corner, however, brings up the available controls. When entering a URL there’s a special ‘.com’ button on the keypad, saving a few presses.
First, you’ve got the address bar at the very top. At the bottom of the screen there is a row of icons that can take you back, take you to bookmarks, bring up the tab switcher (you can open up to two tabs), the home page or the browser settings.
Opera 9.5 has a handy download manager which tracks the progress of the files you’re downloading.
Shoot, why do so few good blogs have left? This is competition.
تعليق بواسطة aidelmAmisa — 2011/02/28 في 12:24 AM
Faced with the problem of choice (whether we are making a major purchase, or buying a nice trinket), it is important to know about the quality of goods. Understand all the variety of goods or services to help expert advice that can be found in every article posted on this site.
تعليق بواسطة aidelmAmisa — 2011/02/28 في 5:25 AM