Only a few days ago Judie posted her first impressions of HTC’s hottest new devices, the Touch HD, and I am lucky enough to be able to follow that up with my own!
For several weeks I have had my cursor hovering over a Touch HD in Hong Kong on eBay, but I wanted to try it out before I committed over $1000 to purchasing one. At last, the Touch HD was released here in Australia, and HTC’s local PR agency received their review units! Having gotten my name on the list some time ago, I was set to receive one of these units straight away! It arrived two days ago, and has displaced my E71 for the time being.
Unlike the Touch Diamond and Touch Pro, the Touch HD comes in a normal box, no odd angles to be seen. Flip open the lid and you are immediately greeted by the Touch HD. It truly is a good looking phone, the best HTC has produced. Unlike the Touch Diamond, the buttons along the bottom aren’t separate from the screen layer, which means the whole front in a single flowing piece that looks a lot nicer than it’s carved up cousin. The back isn’t outlandish either, with a flat, rubberised battery cover and a slight, brushed metal bulge for the flashless 5MP camera.
What most impresses, however, is the display. With it’s slim bezel and dominating size it reminds me a lot of the old Toshiba Genio e550. At 3.8″ it’s doesn’t have quite the diagonal size of the 4″ Toshiba, but it fills it up with a whopping five times the pixels. Once the standard for UMPCs, the 800×480 (though it’s really 480×800 most of the time) resolution is simply outstanding for a phone. I happen to have one such UMPC here, and the WVGA is more impressive on the HD 😀
Higher resolutions make almost everything better. The UI is super smooth and sharp, pictures are detailed and beautiful, and web surfing is an absolute joy with the brilliant Opera Mobile browser. The Nokia E71 has been my main phone for the last few months, and after experiencing the resolution on the Touch HD it’s going to be hard to go back. Question is, will I?
When I say almost everything, I’m referring to performance. Having tested HTC’s latest VGA devices, then trying out the HTC Touch 3G which is QVGA, I was blown away how fast the lower resolution device with the same CPU was. I’m sure there were other factors involved, but the simple fact was the QVGA device was so smooth and snappy, the VGA resolution didn’t feel worth the performance hit. It’s early days, but the Touch HD feels somewhere in between the performance of the Touch Pro (only ok) and the Touch 3G (very snappy).
Sony Ericsson C905, LG Renoir, HTC Touch HD, iPod Touch, Nokia E71, Nokia N96
It’s too soon to tell, but so far I’m really liking the HD. It’s faster than the Diamond I tested several months ago, its battery life is excellent, easily lasting a day of heavy use, and signal strength is right up there with the best of them. Throwing in a 3.5mm jack potentially makes it the perfect multimedia device, as long as it has the performance to back it up.
Judie and I will be back with our combined review in a couple of weeks, and so far I’m very impressed with what I see 😀
I thought you were ditching your E71 for a Bold Mitchell? And also, please review how textual input is inside it… If only WM were stable, or had capacitive touchscreens… this might actually be an option for me… Not to mention WM doesn't play well with OS X… I'll stick with my MBP and iPhone 3G…
Will the HTC Touch HD work in North America?
@Kyle: The Touch HD I have will, supports both 850 and 2100Mhz UMTS bands 😉
@Raymond: I seriously considered it, but I just couldn't justify the cost of moving to BlackBerry, and when testing phones I would have to use a different SIM and have a separate data plan, so it was all too expensive to make the move.
I will be addressing the text input, as it is a big factor for me when choosing a device. That is why I liked the Bold and the E71 so much, they have outstanding keyboards.
I'm finding the latest WM devices to be quite stable, though not as stable as my Nokia's or the Bold it has to be said.
I'm a Mac user myself and have been using an Exchange account for keeping my devices in sync, works brilliantly for me.