Jenneth Orantia12 December 2008, 9:52 AM
HTC has hatched yet another Touch smartphone that's easier on the wallet without skimping on the good stuff.
If you liked the Touch Diamond but found it a tad too rich for your blood, the Touch 3G is worth a look as a cheaper alternative. It’s got most of the features of the Diamond, like Wi-Fi, GPS, 7.2Mbit/s HSDPA and a 3.2-megapixel camera, but the $799 pricetag brings it within closer reach for penny-pinching smartphone buyers.
So what doesn’t the 3G have that the Diamond does? The screen is probably the biggest divider. The Touch 3G has the same 2.8in display, but its QVGA 240 x 320-pixel resolution is four times smaller than the Diamond’s. It’s mainly an aesthetic difference – text and graphics are a lot sharper and clearer at the high resolution - but when you’re web browsing and zoomed out to page view, text on the Touch 3G is impossible to read, whereas you can just make it out on the Diamond.
Internal storage is the other main feature difference – the Touch Diamond comes with 4GB of flash memory while the Touch 3G only has 256MB on-board. That said, the latter also has a microSD expansion slot built-in while the Diamond doesn’t, and given how cheap microSD cards are these days – under fifty bucks for an 8GB card – we actually prefer the Touch 3G’s configuration.
Design
The Touch 3G’s design hasn’t changed much from the original Touch, and it’s a form factor that should resonate well with those that like small and light smartphones. The tapered corners and tiny footprint make it a perfect fit for cupping in the palm of your hand, and it feels nice to hold because of the rubberised finish on the matte black casing.
Inputs are all pretty standard: a toothpick-sized stylus is on board for interacting with the touchscreen, and there’s a five-way controller for flicking through menu options and selecting items. Unlike some Windows Mobile smartphones, there aren’t any dedicated buttons for the start menu, OK button and soft keys – nor is there a hardware keyboard – so you’ll be doing a lot of tapping on the touchscreen.
One of our biggest peeves with the Touch 3G is how tedious it is to enter text. With no hardware keyboard in sight, you have to use the stylus, and we weren’t too impressed with any of the software input panels on offer. The default Windows Mobile keyboard is too small to write on any faster than a snail’s pace, but HTC’s custom keyboards are also flawed. Not only do they take up just over half the screen – making it difficult to see more than a couple of lines at a time when you’re writing an email or text message – but the predictive text feature is intrusive and replaces the word you’re writing with the word it thinks you want to write (although you can turn this off in the settings).
The ExtUSB port that we all love to hate on HTC smartphones makes an appearance on the bottom edge; for the uninitiated, it’s a single port used for connecting the headset, sync cable and charger. Charging and syncing from the same port is standard, but lumping the headset connector in there too means you can’t use your own headphones for listening to music without a converter – and one doesn’t come in the box.
Features
The Touch 3G runs Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional, and as is tradition with HTC’s smartphones, there’s a customised front-end on the Today screen to make it easier to access all the main functions. It’s not the same TouchFLO 3D interface we saw on the Touch Diamond and the Touch Pro though – it’s a new, slightly-tweaked version called TouchFLO 2D. If the 2D part of its name makes it sound like a step backwards, that’s because it is – all of the animations and transitions that made TouchFLO 3D stand out are no longer present.
Functionally, TouchFLO 2D actually offers more features, although we’re told that the 3D version will be updated in the near future to add the missing pieces. The photo speed dials section now lets you specify the communication method - phone, text message or email - you want to use when tapping on each contact, the weather tab shows a four-day forecast below the current day’s weather, and there’s a new maps search tab for looking up locations in Google Maps.
We found the latter feature extremely handy when out and about – you can enter queries in plain English like “Thai restaurant in Hurstville, and it returns search results in Google Maps with hot links to phone numbers, websites, directions and the option to save each result as a contact or favourite - or send it as a text message.
All the stock Windows Mobile apps are present for accessing email, organising your calendar, working with Microsoft Office files, surfing the web and playing multimedia, but it’s really the third party programs that stand out. Opera Mobile 9.5 is the closest you’ll get to iPhone-style web browsing on a Windows Mobile device, with support for panning, zooming, full-screen browsing and multiple tabs, while YouTube Mobile offers an optimised front-end for streaming short video clips.
There’s no turn-by-turn navigation software preloaded to utilise the Touch 3G’s built-in A-GPS, but it comes with the free Google Maps for looking up addresses and points of interest. Unfortunately, the Windows Mobile client hasn’t been updated for the Street View feature yet (which lets you see street-level imagery of the area you’re navigating through), but we’re hoping this will be rolled into a future update of the application.
The rear-mounted 3.2-megapixel camera is basic as far as camera phones go, with a fixed focus lens and no flash for shooting in dim lighting conditions. You don’t even get a hardware button for launching the camera – you’ve got to go through the start menu and select the Camera application to activate it. It can also record videos in MPEG-4 or H.263.
Performance
One of the perks of getting rid of all the animation eye candy in TouchFLO is that performance gets a boost. Compared to the Touch Diamond, which has the same 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7225 processor and 192MB of RAM, the Touch 3G is definitely zippier and more responsive. Flicking through the tabs on the Today screen is silky smooth, and we found little to no lag when moving between different programs.
This also translates to a great experience when playing video. The Touch 3G only ships with the default Windows Media Player 10 Mobile program for playing videos encoded in WMV, but running the third party program CorePlayer, it played our XviD episodes of Heroes flawlessly. But the external speaker is underpowered – at maximum volume, you’ll have trouble hearing the audio in anything other than a quiet room.
The Touch 3G has a medium-sized 1,100mAh replaceable battery, and its run-time is impressive: with moderate use, we were able to get a full three days out of the battery before it needed a recharge.
Conclusion
Amidst all the latest flashy and high-end smartphones on the market, it’s nice to see some solid offerings coming out in the mid-range. The Touch 3G should appeal to those that want all of the latest smartphone features but don’t want to pay top dollar or be weighed down with a brick-like handset.
It’s mainly the cumbersome text entry that gives us pause for thought with the Touch 3G – even writing the occasional text message will have you cursing the phone’s predictive text software and limited viewing area on the screen.
If HTC’s track record is anything to go by, though, we wouldn’t be surprised to see an upgraded handset after the new year with a keypad that either slides out vertically like the Touch Dual or horizontally like the Touch Pro.