HTC Touch 3G

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The biggest difference from the original Touch is the inclusion of 3G. The dual-band (900/2100MHz) WCDMA radio supports HSDPA up to 7.2Mbps but does not support HSUPA, so uploading goes as fast as only 384kbps. Its GSM radio is a quad-band one, which means those who travel often shouldn't have any trouble making voice calls when roaming. Other wireless options include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS for satellite navigation. Take note that GPS software is not provided so you'll need to buy that separately if turn-by-turn navigation is required.

	Web pages optimized for mobile devices, ironically, didn't render well on the Touch 3G's Opera Mobile browser.

With a keypad, having effective onscreen text input options is important. The default Windows Mobile options are all stylus-based--almost impossible to use with the fingertips. Thankfully, HTC has included its custom text input methods, the three that are found on most of its other Touch devices. As we've mentioned previously, the one that looks like a mobile phone numeric keypad became our input method of choice because it allows one-handed operation. It has a few quirks, like how you can't add custom smilies to the dictionary, but overall it works well with the built-in T9 predictive text software. The other two custom onscreen keyboards are full and compact QWERTY options which are more suited for typing with both thumbs.

With the Touch 3G, HTC has revamped its TouchFLO interface completely so it looks more like the TouchFLO 3D interface found on the Touch Diamond, Pro and HD devices. So what you get is a default screen with a large analog clock and a dock below which lets you quickly access essential things like your music, messages and settings, among others.

One criticism that has been leveled against the TouchFLO 3D in the Touch Diamond is that this interface is sluggish because of all the processing power needed. Well, there's no such problem in the version found on the Touch 3G. Stripped of all the fancy animation, TouchFLO here is blazingly fast. There were absolutely no slowdowns in the week that we were using it. What's more, it didn't crash even once. It was only when we had a few memory-intensive applications running in the background (YouTube app, one browser, messaging app, contacts and photo album) that we experienced a slowdown in performance. It's the way TouchFLO should have been right from the start and it would be great if HTC could make TouchFLO as responsive on all its other devices, too.

Of course, once you go a few levels down the menu, you will still end up with the default Windows Mobile 6.1 interface. It also means you get all the features that come with Microsoft OS, such as Office Mobile and a very tight Outlook integration.

As with many of the other Touch devices, the Touch 3G comes with the Opera Mobile 9.5 browser. In this iteration, instead of just tapping on one part of the screen to zoom in, you can also tap on a small magnifying glass to bring up a zoom scrollbar. This worked well for us and was very flexible in bringing the Web page up to a size which we were comfortable with. It's almost every way better than the default Internet Explorer, except in one aspect. Some Web sites (like Soccernet and Google search) have special mobile versions specially catered for mobile devices. These render on the Touch 3G with fonts that are way too large for its QVGA screen and are completely unviewable. It gets very irritating because Google, for example, will automatically redirect your search to its mobile version when it detects that you are on Opera Mobile. We ended up having to manually navigate to the standard desktop page just to see our search results. The worst thing is that Opera Mobile doesn't allow you to adjust the zoom level on a page optimized for mobile browsers, so we had to fire up Internet Explorer for those pages.

Tags: HTC Touch, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Adapter, High Tech Computer Corp., mini-USB

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