Camera Phone Reviews

HTC Touch

"With the HTC Touch™, access to your most commonly used content, contacts and features is only a simple finger flick away," said Peter Chou, chief executive officer of HTC. "Mobile phone makers have done a great job of cramming ever-more exciting features into ever-smaller phones. But the way in which one accesses these increasingly sophisticated features has not kept pace. That ends today with the HTC Touch."

Smart, stylish and versatile, the HTC Touch™ brings together a wide variety of communication, entertainment and professional capabilities that enable mobile consumers to balance work and play. The new HTC-designed homescreen provides one-touch access to emails, text messages, calendar appointments and contacts, as well as current weather conditions and forecasts for hundreds of cities around the world.

The HTC Touch is the first device to feature TouchFLO™, the new underlying touch screen technology developed by HTC. Consumers simply sweep their finger up the display to launch an animated, three-dimensional interface comprising three screens: Contacts, Media and Applications. The interface can be spun by swiping a finger right or left across the display, providing efficient access to the features consumers use most. TouchFLO™ also enhances finger touch scrolling and browsing of Web pages, documents, messages and contact lists.

Leveraging the broad functionality of Windows Mobile® 6 Professional, the HTC Touch™ includes Outlook Mobile, Office Mobile, Windows Live™ and the capabilities to run thousands of third-party applications. Users can surf the web with Internet Explorer®, send and receive emails, chat on Messenger and send files to their own web space through Windows Live™. Other HTC Touch™ details include:

* Dimensions: 99.9mm (L) x 58mm (W) x 13.9mm (T)
* Weight: 112g with battery
* 1GB microSD storage card included / 64MB RAM, 128MB ROM
* 2.8" LCD touch screen with backlight, 240 x 320 dots resolution with 65,536 colours
* Battery Life: Rechargeable Li-Ion battery with a capacity of 1100 mAh
* Standby time: Up to 200 / Talk time: Up to 5 hours
* Camera: 2.0 mega-pixel CMOS colour camera
* Windows Mobile 6® Professional with Direct Push Email and HTML email support
* Wireless Connectivity: GSM/GPRS/EDGE Tri-band: 900, 1800,1900, Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth® 2.0
* Choice of two colors at launch - elegant soft black or alluring wasabi green

Availability

The HTC Touch™ is now available in the United Kingdom and will be released later this month in Asia and throughout Europe. The North and Latin American version of the HTC Touch™ will be available in the second half of 2007.

HTC Touch Reviews

LaptopMag has a review of the HTC Touch and writes, "The Touch also supports stereo Bluetooth for jamming to your favorite MP3, AAC, and WMA files, but it took several pairing attempts with a variety of headsets before we were able to listen to Aerosmith and RUN-DMC's "Walk This Way" through the iLuv i202. The two-megapixel camera delivered adequate still-image and video quality, and we easily navigated the camera's various settings, which include white balance, resolution, and up to 10X zoom, depending on the photo size. Our only gripe is the lack of flash."

RegHardware reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "The trouble with all this TouchFlo stuff is that it's only skin deep. Even LG's Prada phone has a UI that feels designed for touch control and not tacked on to another OS. Too soon you drop into the standard, ugly-by-comparison Windows Mobile 6 look and feel. ... And the camera's rubbish. It may have a two-megapixel resolution, but shots are full of colour artefacts and look like they've undergone far too high a level of JPEG compression, so much so that they look like they were taken on a lower-resolution camera."

PCMag reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "Although the Touch can play video in full-screen landscape mode, results syncing video were mixed: Some of my files synced over beautifully, while others were jaggy with frequent frame dropouts. That's a problem we've had on other 200-MHz Windows Mobile devices, too. Photos from the Touch's 2MP camera could be sharper, and I saw some shutter-speed blur in low-light conditions. The video mode is also disappointingly jerky and low-res, at 176-by-144 and 10 frames per second. But HTC deserves props for at least including a camera interface that you can work with your finger."

PCPro reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "The areas of the Touch that TouchFLO extends to are little short of brilliant and a great advertisement for a future where all phones might have stylus-free touchscreens, but the Windows Mobile 6 aspects are a distinct disappointment. ... you'll find a decent two megapixel camera. It might not be the last word in resolution, but it captures colours accurately, and holding the Touch sideways means you've got a lot of screen space to accurately frame a shot."

MobileBurn has a review of the HTC Touch and writes, "the HTC touch comes reasonably equipped for general multimedia tasks. For starters, its 2 megapixel fixed-focus camera takes nice photos in most situations with at least half decent lighting. The automatic white balance system it uses is pretty accurate, and the finger based user interface is very easy to use. The only real problem is that the camera's UI and the orientation of the photos the camera takes are usually not in sync. What I mean is that when you hold the phone horizontally so that the shutter button is positioned under the user's right index finger and the UI is readable, the photos the camera takes are rotated 90 degrees (portrait mode). The only case where this works is when shooting in the contact photo mode, which is supposed to be in portrait mode. You can easily edit, crop, and rotate an image with the Touch itself, but you shouldn't have to. This is obviously a bug. Luckily recorded video clips don't have the same problem."

CNET reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "the HTC Touch is equipped with a 2-megapixel camera with 8x zoom and video-recording capabilities. The options are pretty standard for a camera phone. ... There are only two resolution choices, but you get the same white balance and color effect settings from the still camera. ... Picture quality was OK. Overall, objects had good definition, and colors were mostly bright. However, there was some blurring in the middle and a hint of a yellow overtone. We also found that you had to hold the phone really still to get a decent shot. Video quality was subpar, as clips look extra pixelated."

CrunchGear reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "You can access your media via the aforementioned interface and playback music and video you’ve recorded with the flick of a finger. Included are USB headphones, a data cable, and a carrying case to make your experience a little more enjoyable. Nothing fancy, but it’s always nice to get included earbuds for rocking out. It’s a shame that the Touch’s “2-megapixel” camera acts more like a glorified 1-megapixel camera. Don’t even try using this thing in low light or darkness. No flash is included and the CMOS sensor is downright terrible. One of the more disappointing cameras I’ve seen on a phone lately."

Trusted Reviews reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "HTC says that the Touch “is a product with something to offer everybody”, but I disagree. I think that the Touch falls between two stools, it’s not feature rich enough to satisfy the power user and it’s not simple and intuitive enough to win over the average consumer. If there were custom applications that made use of the thumb friendly TouchFLO skin, this would be a far better product, but as it stands it’s a feature light Windows Mobile smartphone in a nice case."

MobileTechReview reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "The 2 megapixel CMOS camera with fixed focus lens takes acceptable photos, though not as good as the HTC TyTN (Cingular 8525) 2 MP camera. Given how little room there is inside the phone for camera hardware, we're not surprised that image quality took a hit compared to its much bigger brother. Images suffer from excessive foreground sharpening (so much so that detail is actually obliterated) that jars with un-sharpened background areas and creates a sense of limited focus. When resized down to VGA or 800 x 600, photos look decent but they still lack natural detail and contrast and white out add harshness to the images. Images sometimes have a purple color cast ..."

PocketNow has a review of the HTC Touch and writes, " The 2 megapixel built-in camera has a slightly different interface than previous HTC Camera applications. The camera interface is full of cryptic icons, but you should recognize most of them from using other cameras. It also tends to be quite slow, but this is to be expected. ... Photo quality is average for HTC phones these days."

Pocket-lint reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "This is a smartphone that will let you reply to messages, but to be honest is more of a check to see what messages have come through rather than suggesting you write lengthy replies - that's what HTC's Ameo is for. ... So should you invest? Well if you really like the idea of the iPhone but either can't wait or would prefer a Windows Mobile 6 interface instead, this is going to be the phone for you."

Infosync reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "The HTC Touch is not a bad phone for calling and viewing. While using the multimedia functions with the included remote, or for basic information gathering, the Touch offers a new look at Windows Mobile 6. It isn't fully cooked yet. The touch screen lags behind, and the new TouchFlo features are hardly skin deep. Still, it feels like a good start getting WM6 to be more touch sensitive. Unfortunately, users who need a keyboard for any reason beyond dialing will be frustrated by the onscreen, pop-up keyboard on Windows Mobile."

ITReviews reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "While it is pretty clever and has a certain 'wow' factor, the interface isn't really a giant leap forward. Add into the mix the fact that this is a tri-band handset rather than quad, and that it has 128MB of ROM and 64MB of RAM and the full picture becomes clear. The HTC Touch is a very neatly designed device with a software front-end layered on top of Windows Mobile 6 rather than fully integrated into it, and it has far from leading-edge general specifications, although it does also sport a 2-megapixel camera and Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth."

Brighthand reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "HTC has never come right out and admitted it, but it's obvious that the Touch was created to compete with Apple's iPhone. So how does it stack up? The competition is pretty close, but I think the Touch comes out ahead, especially for appearance-conscious executives. ... The Touch's 2.0 megapixel camera is a step above the 1.3 megapixel one you typically find in mobile phones these days. It handles still images quite well, but movement in videos tends to be a touch blurry. Both of these can be sent as MMS messages."

PCPro reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "The hardware itself is a beautiful piece of design. The Touch weighs just 112g and is only 14mm thick, which means you'll hardly notice it in a pocket. And the screen is excellent - the only time we had trouble was in direct sunlight. Flip it over and you'll find a 2-megapixel camera - not the last word in resolution, but it captures colours accurately, and holding the Touch sideways means you have a lot of screen space available to accurately frame a shot. HTC also includes a 1GB microSD card, which is ample for a few short films or a mid-sized music collection."

LetsGoMobile reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "The HTC Touch is equipped with a 2 Megapixel digital camera. The camera is activated through the camera button on the site of the handset and also through the menu. The camera lens is situated on the back of the cell phone. Above the camera lens a mirror is placed enabling to shoot a self-portrait. The camera offers various setting possibilities thus the image can be adjusted to the photographic circumstances and a nice quality picture can be taken. Surprisingly enough HTC decided once again not to offer flash possibilities on the digital camera. Therefore it is almost impossible to shoot a decent picture in less sunny situations."

PC Mag reviews the HTC Touch (Sprint) and writes, "The 2-megapixel camera takes somewhat underexposed photos, which is mostly a problem in low light—a slow shutter speed means you could experience some blurring. Videos are smooth, if a bit blurry. There's no GPS on the device, but Sprint is developing its own navigation application, which will be available for download in the future."

Laptop Mag reviews the HTC Touch (Sprint) and writes, "The phone feature is fairly utilitarian. While the keypad dominates the screen, we experienced no instances of cheek-taps during testing. The calls we placed were very clear and went through swiftly. Pictures taken with the two-megapixel camera were average but easy to view, delete, and send by using the large onscreen thumbnails and pop-up icon menu."

InfoSync reviews the HTC Touch (Sprint) and writres, "We're not surprised that the TouchFLO interface doesn't work properly on this device, since it didn't work properly on the GSM version we reviewed back in July. We're disappointed that the touch screen technology wasn't improved since then, and we had such difficulties with this phone that we would discourage anyone from considering it without giving it a proper hands-on test. If TouchFLO worked flawlessly, the Touch might have been an easy-to-use Windows Mobile phone, but even then it would have suffered from input issues that limit the usability of WM6's most powerful features, the calendar and productivity apps. Yet, on the horizon there is hope, as a few updates to the Touch have already been announced. If these issues were fixed, we would love to take another look."

GeekZone reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "Camera is decent, Takes reasonably good pictures as to be expexted from the better end of mobiles and it's well positioned in the case. The interface offers a wide range of user options inclusing sharpness and saturation.. Though being able to save in Bitmap format would have been nice (it seems to have been removed from the release) The start up time is about 2 seconds and shutter lag about 1 second which is average for a mobile phone...Records rather choppy "mobile format" videos at 15FPS just like any mobile phone would. It does however support Motion JPEG video recording which looks much nicer than the usual h.263, or mpeg-4."

PC World reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "The Touch's camera was a tad slow to snap photos--I noted a 4.5-second shutter lag per shot at the high-resolution (2-megapixel) quality setting--but I appreciated being able to change the camera settings (resolution, effects, and so on) via the touch screen. Call volume and sound quality on the Touch were adequate, though I (and the people I called) noticed slight background noise through both the earpiece and the speakerphone. In our lab tests the Touch's talk-time battery life was a poor 5 hours."

Gadgetnutz reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "The biggest "black mark" against this phone is not the fault of HTC or Sprint - it is Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile is in need of an upgrade, it generally takes two to three times as many clicks to perform simple tasks and it can be "clunky." While the HTC Touch Flo is essentially a "shell" that functions on top of Windows Mobile, you won't be able to escape the Windows Mobile screens...The other thing this phone needs is a full keyboard in order to be a full functioning messaging and email device. HTC has already announced a version of the Touch with a slide out Keyboard - that could be a killer device and compete nicely with the LG Voyager and other phones."

PC Mag reviews the HTC Touch and writes, "The only physical controls are a cursor pad, phone pick-up and hang-up, camera buttons, and a volume rocker. A stylus tucks into the upper right-hand corner, and there's a 2-megapixel camera on the back of the handset...The 2MP camera could be a lot sharper. Daylight photos looked soft, and low-light pictures were quite blurry. The Touch also takes 176-by-144 videos at 15 frames per second."