HTC Touch Dual - Cool Looking Phone (HTC Touch Dual)

Member Name: Machair1

Product:	HTC Touch Dual
Date:	05/10/08 (147 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very powerful set of features, compact, looks cool

Disadvantages: Poor battery life

The HTC Touch Dual is a sophisticated piece of kit. Essentially a touch screen phone and a very nice looking one at that. My phone came from Orange and the package comes with the phone, headphones, set up CD, spare stylus, carry case and a 1Gb memory card.

The phone itself is not huge - 11cm x 5.5cm which is good and only 1.5cm thick. It weighs less than the iPhone so having tried both in my hands, this is nice if you want something not too weighty.

The 240x320 pixel display is pretty standard for this sort of PDA/phone, but seems clear and bright.

You can do everything you'd expect with a high-end phone: set ring tones, surf the internet, play music, access emails and so forth. It has a powerful processor so seems quite fast. It has two built-in music players - one from HTC itself as well as Windows Media Player. It comes with Pocket Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF viewer) already loaded - though viewing a powerpoint presentation on the tiny screen is a challenge and there seems to be no way of zooming into the page.

The phone has a slide out conventional keypad which is handy when you want to do a quick text or actually use it as a phone. The keys are responsive. The case is slightly rubberised and has a nice feel - it won't slip out of your hand. It comes in black and if you set the screen to be the HTC screen rather than the Orange one it looks very cool.

Another selling point is the 'Touch Flo' technology. This is a way of navigating round commonly used features using your finger, reducing the need to get the stylus out or use the navigation buttons. An upwards sweep from the main screen gets you to what feels like a three dimensional interface with sideways sweeps moving from one screen to another. The Touch Flo technology also helps when scrolling through emails or web pages. A sideways sweep in Outlook will take you to the text message folder. A sideways sweep from an email will take you to the next email, and so on. Again, that looks cool too! The management of pictures using Touch Flo is awesome.

The phone comes with two cameras: one for video calls and one to use as a camera - quality of photos seems OK, but it is a little underpowered compared to other phones.

It runs on 2G and 3G networks, including HSDPA for fast data downloads.

On the negative side, there is no wi-fi access, no built-in GPS, no infrared port (there is, of course Bluetooth). Getting the memory card in and out can be fiddly (having said that, once in it isn't going to pop out easily).

Sometimes when using the phone my ear touches the touch screen and will trigger some action or other. The screen fades to black very quickly which needs either the keypad sliding out or the power button to be pressed to reactivate the phone. This is a bit irritating. However, if the screen were left on longer I suspect it would impact battery life a lot.

Most worryingly, battery performance seems poor if you have push email turned on (i.e. your phone looks for email every so often). This takes stand-by times down enormously. Reasonable usage of email, a few calls a day and a couple of hours of music play and the battery struggles to last two days. Having said that, it is probably a problem with most phones that do so much.

Overall a pretty impressive package and certainly a cool phone but with some weaknesses around battery life.

Summary: Nice looking phone with powerful features but let down by the poor battery life