HTC Touch 3G (HTC Touch 3G)

Member Name: Brewski47

Product:	HTC Touch 3G
Date:	14/11/09 (28 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: easy-to-use, good screen quality and response, quite alot of features

Disadvantages: liable to crash, can slow down, not easy to use just a wifi connection, battery life can be low

Had this phone now for over 6 months after upgrading from the HTC Touch, and so far I have been impressed. The phone itself is quite sheek and fits perfectly in your hand, however it is a bit smaller both phone and screen wise from the old HTC Touch. The touch screen is pretty responsive (i can use every feature of the phone without using the stylus) and is of good quality. I would say it is slightly better than a standard LCD screen, but not quite HD.

The phone comes with HTC's touch-flo system installed, which is a great improvement over the HTC touch. The basis of the phone is now built around this feature which makes it so easy to use just your fingers to access your mail, texts, internet browsing, photos etc. Its not up there with the iphone, but is responsive and intuitive to use.

As a phone it works as well as any other ive had or tried. The sound quality is good and clear. However, when moving to speaker phone the sound quality drops significantly and the mic doesn't pick up your words as well either. The in built opera browser is brilliant for surfing, especially with the inclusion of tabbed browsing. Opera renders web pages well to fit the screen allowing easy reading of news and sports sites. Scrolling is made easy by running your fingers down or up the screen (i.e. You don't need to use the scroll bars). There is also the option of windows internet explorer which comes with the phone. However this is vastly inferior to the Opera Browser. e.g. Rendering is not of good quality, and you really need to use the stylus in order to browse.

In terms of text input into the phone this can be done a number of ways. There is a full qwerty keyboard which takes up roughly 1/3 of the screen (which is what I currently use), a compact-qwerty (which has 2 letters assigned to each key), Normal phone button layout and also a transcriber. I found the transcriber options not that useful, they often transcribe letters incorrectly, although this may just be down to my writing ability with the stylus.

The phone also comes pre-installed with windows media player, which i find is great to use as an MP3 player using either the speaker phone or the supplied headphones.

As this is a windows Mobile device, it comes pre-installed with the Windows OS and basic mobile office applications, including outlook, windows live messenger, Word, Excel & Powerpoint. Which are all used in a very similar way as you would on your PC. As with other Windows mobile 6 phones, other applications can be installed simply with the same method as you would your home windows pc.

Email is easy to set-up too. I have both my Hotmail, and Gmail set up with synchronization. Setting up your Hotmail, or any windows live email, is easy and straight forward and uses Microsoft direct push so you get your emails instantly as they arrive to your inbox. You can also set-up other email servers such as Gmail, however push email is not supported but the synchronization mode can be set to as low as 5 minutes.

The camera on the phone is really your bog-standard 3.2mp camera. There's a few options, such as single shot, multi shot & video as well as some gimicky frames. I personally find multi-shot to be the best. This takes 3 shots straight after the other. Which I find great when try to take moving objects as the auto-focus isn't the best around.

The internal storage of the phone is far greater than the HTC touch and comes in very handy if you ownload alot of content. Especially as the phone likes to download to the phone RAM before moving it to a micro-sd card (which is inserted in the back of the phone under the battery, not in the side like the HTC touch).

The phone comes with bluetooth and wifi (as well as upto HSDPA phone connection) however the wifi can no longer be used seperatly from the phone connection, they are merged together in a 'unique' connection, which uses both wifi and phone connection to connect to the internet. This works well if you move in and out of wifi and good phone coverage as you don;t have to manually switch between, but I found it quite annoying whilst having a bandwidth limit on my contract. I can never be sure if the data is coming from my phones bandwidth, or through the wifi. The only way to be sure (that i have found) that the phone is using wifi is to turn off the phone connection then turn on the unique connection. Thus only allowing wifi. The battery life on this phone is pretty good.

When using it as a bog-standard phone it will last well over a week. However, if you browse the internet alot (espeically with wifi turned on) it uses juice very quickly. I currently have bluetooth on constantly and have 30 min updates on emails and browse for about 30 mins a day and it rarely lasts more than 2 days without need recharging. The phone does have one glaring weakness, and that is the tendency to crash and run slow. If you are running alot of simultanous features the phone does grind down to a halt, also messaging can be slow if you have a lot of text's or emails stored on the phone. Also the phone does randomly crash. Either by restarting itself spontaneously, or by beomcing unresponsive. This is more liekly to do with the Windows operating system rather than the phone, as I have had similar issues with other windows phones. But, as their is no way to change the OS on the phone, this must be taken as a Reliability problem wiht the phone itself.

Overall I would say this phone is easy to use, has a lot of features with a good quality touch-screen (both in terms of responsiveness and picture quality) and is a great low price option if you want a mobile PDA. But it does have a low battery life when using it as a one and has a tendency to crash.

Summary: easy to use, good touch screen but tendency to crash & low battery life when using all features