HTC’s original Touch phone offered its intriguing TouchFLO interface on top of Windows Mobile 6 Professional. The quad-band Touch Dual adds a faster 400-MHz processor, HSDPA 3.5G connectivity, a slide-out alphanumeric keyboard, and the same interface but this time, on top of Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional. The phone is available for $549 from Best Buy’s Web site, which makes it an attractive option for AT&T and T-Mobile customers looking for an unlocked 3G phone.
HTC Touch Dual Design and Interface
The matte black HTC Touch Dual looks very similar to the original Touch, but at 4.2 x 2.2 x 0.6 inches it’s slightly narrower and shorter. It’s just 0.1 inches thicker, adding a large 20-key slide-out alphanumeric keyboard. In our hands, the phone felt like we were holding a large, smooth stone. Its silver border and central directional button are classy accents to an already beautiful handset. On both sides of the central five-way button are Send and End call buttons. Volume controls are on the left side of the unit, and a power and camera quick-launch button are on the right side, just above the stylus slot.
The Touch Dual’s 2.6-inch display is 0.2 inches smaller than on the original Touch but still leaves plenty of room for comfortable navigation. The LED backlights brighten the display brilliantly at full power, but it’s just as easy to read with the screen dimmed to save battery life. The touchscreen is easy to use and responsive enough with either a stylus or your finger.
Keyboard
The slide-out keyboard is reminiscent of the BlackBerry Pearl, in that there are two letters per key. It slides out smoothly and steadily, and a gentle push snaps it back under the display. Users will find the 20-key hardware QWERTY to be just as convenient and easy to use as the keys on the BlackBerry Pearl; the keys have a soft bounce to them and are comfortable to use, but after using the phone for a few days, we missed having a full QWERTY.
We had the option of choosing among three different kinds of on-screen keyboards: a full QWERTY, a modified 20-key QWERTY (à la the BlackBerry Pearl), and a 12-key touch keypad (as on a traditional cell phone). The virtual 20-key QWERTY, with predictive text, proved to be the easiest to use with our thumb, as the keys of the full QWERTY were too small for anything but a stylus, and typing using the 12-key screen was more tedious than a regular cell phone.
User Interface
Perhaps the most notable feature of the Touch Dual is its continued use of the TouchFLO interface that HTC puts on top of Windows Mobile 6.1. Even with a 400-MHz processor, twice that of the 201-MHz processor found in the original HTC Touch, the TouchFLO interface was super-smooth.
A finger swipe from the HTC logo at the bottom of the screen upward brings up the “cube” interface. Right-to-left finger swipes move the cube around in a circle, but surprisingly, this cube only has three sides: One for your contacts (you can add a picture for each and display them in a mosaic of sorts); one for quick access to applications such as IE, messaging, or e-mail; and one for accessing your photos, music, and videos.
The home screen gives you access to your e-mail, messages, missed calls, and other data such as weather. Each of these options sits below a large digital-style clock, and the whole display is black and white. Navigating around it can be slow, however, and we were disappointed with the wait times to access our e-mail or messages: you can watch the screen slowly return to the home screen after closing your message inbox. Sometimes the display froze altogether for seconds at a time, and we had to wait for the handset to catch up before we began using it again.
We appreciated that we could click the top right corner of the home screen to view and end current tasks. Closing unused programs helped the phone run better than with a number of apps running at once in the background.
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