HTC Touch Dual smartphone

The folks at HTC must still wonder how they got the original HTC Touch so wrong. Luckily since then they've staged a comeback. The TyTn II was nothing short of superb and now we have the Touch Dual. In the hand the Dual is similar but not identical to the original Touch. At 107 x 55 x 16 it is just a shade taller, narrower and …

[Stu]

640x480 or even 480x320? When?

This is a little silly now - HTC are stuck in this '320x240' camp.

It seems every other new mobile device screen now, has at least a smaller 'pixel per inch' than all HTCs I think.

If HTC would at least acknowledge the whole higher resolution and/or PPI thing, AND implement proper acceleration - the chipset that's been present physically in their devices for years now, then I might be interested in upgrading from my TyTn v1.

-Also, no WiFi? Thats a killer for me. So they put something good in, take something good out . . .

[Nick Palmer]

I have the 20-key Touch Dual...

...and I am absolutely WELDED to it; 320x240 may not be ideal, but I use Opera Mini anyway, and the excellently handled zoom on that deals very well with browsing and page navigation. I've used VGA resolution phones (we just had an Eten Glofiish M800 arrive at work) and bluntly it's just NOT that much (if at all) better than the TD or the TyTN II. WiFi's just a needless ball-ache when you have HSDPA and a decent browsing add-on to your mobile tariff. The TouchFLO UI and Cube are superb, and the keypad (especially the 20 key version) makes email/text composition superbly easy. OK, not as easy as with the TyTN II's or S730's full QWERTY keyboard, but I'm happy to give that up for the reduced bulk. An absolute essential, IMO, however, is SlideActions, available at http://puna.net.nz/wm6/ - it's freely downloadable, but bung the fella a few quid, it's a very useful utility. Personally, I think this phone's a winner.

[Anonymous Coward]

wifi

A more likely explanation for why they dropped wifi is that they are hoping to get the carriers to pick up the phone.

After all, there is no need to choose between WiFi and 3G - you can have them both. WiFi is extremely useful when your 3G plan is not unlimited, or when you need greater speed or less lag.

The extra cost of WiFi is minimal now that the hardware for 11g is so cheap and they already done the engineering to integrated it into the touch phones.

[JohnG]

WiFi essential

3G costs money, WiFi at work or home does not - and I make and receive most of my calls in those locations. With a Cisco VOIP setup recently installed at work, my Nokia E65 can act as my office extension whenever it is in range of the WLAN.

[Scott]

Battery life

Battery life issues are known and already taken care of.

The guys over at xdadevelopers have found a nifty registry hack that dramatically increases battery life without sacrificing anything.

I hear that even WiFi is a possibility as apparently the chip required is still in the phone - just not activated (possibly to do with the reasons tom just mentioned) - that's being worked on too.

Mines the dirty oil stained one with the handyman belt...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Beat like a red-headed stepson"

A needlessly cruel metaphor.

Superb.

[Anonymous Coward]

GPS?

None, unfortunately.

But I'm sure HTC won't miss little old me.

[Ben Bufton]

Hmm...

No wi-fi, so-so battery life, so-so screen and Windows Mobile = 85%?

It sounds borderline unusable to me.

[Tom]

I have this phone!

I have had this phone for 3 weeks now, after upgrading from my Tytn. Its got a much nicer interface but this is only due to HTC's Today Screen.

The real hardship is no wi-fi, but I rarely used it on my Tytn so no big loss. A very nice phone, small and usable, a nice choice for anyone.

[Julian]

No SDHC?

Your review says "Again as per the Touch you get a MicroSD slot good for cards up to 4GB". Is this really correct? If so then HTC must be insane to release a new phone that doesn't support the newer SDHC interface that let MicroSD cards get up to 32GB of addressable storage (although 8GB is currently the biggest with 16GB months away).

I have an HTC Touch Cruise and have an 8GB SDHC card in it. As soon as 16GB are affordable then I plan to get one of those and relegate my iPod to a cupboard (one less thing to carry around). Surely HTC can't be ignoring this usage for a mobile phone?

- Julian

[Anonymous Coward]

You sure?

"The folks at HTC must still wonder how they got the original HTC Touch so wrong". Er wasn't it one of their most sucessful devices ever, selling millions of units worldwide?!

[James Bassett]

Re: No SDHC?

Julian. It does, of course, support SDHC - as did the original Touch. You often find the manual quotes out of date info.

When the touch came out, 4GB was the largest card available so that was what was quoted in the manual (stupid, I know). Someone then copies and pastes that into the TD manual "because it's the same reader".

[Al Taylor]

SD Card

Apologies to all, that was a typo on my part. The Dual does indeed support SDHC / SD 2.0 cards, mine has a 8GB card in it at the moment!

[Robert Hill]

Original TOUCH rocked...for the day

Wow, El Reg manages to say that a Version 2.0 phone that was introduced nearly a year ago is BETTER than the original, and therefore the original sucked?

Wasn't the Touch the phone that LAUNCHED HTC as an independant vendor of phones, rather than an OEM-only provider? A phone so cutting edge at the time that it frankly had no competitors in the small, like, sexy, touch-oriented camp but the iPhone?

I've had my Touch since the first week it came out, and I can only say that I will be happy to upgrade it for newer features and HSDA (probably to a HTC Polaris or a 3G iPhone), but am in no rush to do so...

And for the person saying no GPS is a loser, the HTC Polaris is essentially a Touch+ with a GPS, but no sliding keyboard...

[robin thakur]

Go away you retards

Oh dear an HTC review brings all the Windows mobile turds out of the woodwork doesn't it :) The original touch was a hideously unusable device that people presumably only bought by mistake, thinking it was an iphone and certainly without having tried one first. It completely seemed to miss the point of the Apple device, namely that the usability through the GUI was revolutionary, instead opting to try and abstract the fiddly Windows Mobile operating system into something usable and instead ending up with a buggy, unresponsive, fiddly mish mash which nobody understood wrapped in what looked like a 1st year undergraduate's design for the phone itself. You don't see many people still using them now as I guess they've binned them and bought the device they should have got in the beginning. I don't fully appreciate the iphone until I think back on the horror of my previous windows mobiles. FOR SHAME!

[Richard]

For me

The real killer is the lack of a 3.5mm earphone socket.

I mean why, oh why, oh why, oh why, oh why, oh why would you make a phone that was good at playing music and video, and then cripple the sound by forcing the owner use the God-awful supplied earbuds?

Why do you do that, HTC? Is it stupidity or sadism?

[Nicholas Wright]

WiFi much more important

McDonalds do free WiFi, pubs do free WiFi. If I want to surf the net, I'd much rather pop into McDonalds, spend a couple of quid on a burger and search for maps/websites, than spend £4 on a 3G connection which may be only 128kb/s (blinking O2).

I wish more mobiles had WiFi :(

And goddamit - why can't you turn these blinking devices off! I've been stranded in London and unable to ring home, all because I can't turn my XDA IIs off and save charge.

[Jeff Dickey]

I'm trying really, REALLY hard...

to want to be an HTC user. On pixels, they have fantastic stuff until you look at the fine print (what's 'acceleration'? or this 'Wi-Fi' thingie that we've *already got hardware support for*'? No standard headphone jack? What are you supposed to use, a Bluetooth stereo headset? There goes the battery life downwards, never to come within hailing distance of 'adequate' again...)

When I'd started looking at them after deciding to ditch my (original) Nokia N70, they looked good...but having been burnt by too-new, unreliable crap-mislabeled-as-software, I decided to wait. Now, one of the (apparently few) happy Motorola customers thinking about a more bling-y set, I'm left scratching my head. Prices here in Singapore - compared to the Moto V9 or even the Nokia latest - are high enough that you really wonder what you're getting for the money. A better 3G experience? Doubtful. More capable/stable software? It's Windows Mobile (né WinCE; correctly pronounced 'wince' after the most common user action). 'Nuff said about that...

Mine's the one with the 'I just want to get stuff *DONE*' button on the lapel...