Sumeet Singh

The last couple of weeks saw me reading extensively about PDAs given that my much loved E61 was not keeping well. E61 was a good choice but then it was a bit bulky, little too wide and Symbian was not too fast. After a bit of research and playing around with various PDA models such as HTC, iPAQ, O2 and iMate, I picked up a sleek black HTC Touch. With just under $475, it is definitely value for money.What I Needed I needed a PDA that can remind me of tasks, shows appointments, stores emails and syncs well with Windows based laptop that I use for work. And if it enables me to read RSS and plays Tetris, nothing like it. Well most PDA or handhelds serve these functionalities (including E61) but very few work as seamlessly as ActiveSync. ActiveSync is a one click install on Windows machine and provides synchronization options for both MS Exchange server and local Outlook instance. My needs were pretty clear when I started looking for a new phone: the phone should not be too bulky, should be affordable (under 20K) given the fact that technology doesn’t last in my hands for over a year, should be Windows Mobile and should have descent hardware. The brand really did not matter because almost all of them end up displaying “Made in China” or “Made in Taiwan”.After shortlisting various models, HTC Touch emerged a clear winner with TI OMAP 850 Processor 201 MHz, 1GB Card and 64 MB RAM running Windows Mobile 6. iMate and O2 Atom came close but both ran Windows Mobile 5 and had no style in hardware. HTC Touch is sleek, compact and very lightweight.What’s in the Box The black box with stylish HTC logo reminds you of classy Apple product boxes. Simple design, yet very attractive and elegant. Unlike others, HTC provides everything you will need for your Touch phone within the box. In other words, 1 GB memory card, scratch guard for screen, cover, sync cables, charger and handsfree. While most companies provide charger and handsfree, they cut short on things like scratch guard and high capacity memory card.Finer DetailsAt the first look of the tech specifications, TI OMAP 850 201 MHz processor seems to be too slow compared to various phones sporting Intel 400MHz+ processors. However the two processors are two completely different architectures- former being a single chip and the other being dual chip. A single chip processor is low on power consumption and clock speed therefore provides better battery life. Windows Mobile OS if optimized for TI architecture performs quite well despite its considerably less clock speed. Having said that, many applications that were typically written for Intel platforms requiring multiple step-by-step commands will work slowly. After thinking for about 5 mins, I was clear that I would hardly require any third party applications, and the primary applications built into WM6 were sufficient. So going with TI processor over a descent Intel processor saved me almost another $250.What’s in the BoxIn addition to black matte finish HTC Touch, the box includes an extra stylus, handsfree, charger, data cable, cover, screen-guard and a high capacity (1GB) data card. While its common for companies to offer various cables with PDAs, offering a data card and a cover is uncommon for a low cost phone.The phone has a nice dark interface compensated well by its bright screen, more like Spb Shell theme, that displays time, temperature and a launcher on the Today screen. The much hyped TouchFlow technology can be used to slide fingers down-to-up and left-to-right to access major applications, favorite contacts and multimedia menu. The icons for TouchFlow are large and clear. Overall, the interface is good to look at, fairly usable and clean.Pros/ConsAfter playing around and configuring the phone for few days, I can confidently say that phone is worth its cost and a little less on hype. Its definitely not a replacement for iPhone but can compete well with the likes of O2 and HP iPAQ. The interface seems clunky if you run too many applications at once but that’s just Windows. Be it on desktop or mobile, you can’t change it. What’s more surprising is that closing an application does not remove it from the memory and hence you need to manually kill the processes from time to time. This was also a problem with WM5 and has still not been fixed.