Even though there are many products in the HTC Touch series of handhelds, the original version is probably one of the most recognizable with its simple design and rounded edges. It therefore makes perfect sense to keep that look going and that's what HTC has done with the new Touch 3G. Not only has the company retained the attractive design of the first Touch, it has gone one up by making it slightly smaller even though more features have been introduced.

Design

As mentioned, the Touch 3G looks very much like the Touch. At 102 x 53.6 x 14.5mm, it is just a touch longer and thicker but quite a bit narrower than its predecessor. The Touch 3G is also quite a bit lighter, weighing at 96g compared with the HTC Touch's 112g. The general look and feel remains very similar--a screen flush with the chassis, very few physical keys and a soft-touch finish throughout. A silver strip runs around the edge and that's where the power button is found along the top, with volume control on the left and a mini-USB connector below.

Though HTC provided us an image showing four color variations, only the black is available for now.
(Click for larger image)

Like many other HTC PDA-phones, the single mini-USB port is for charging, syncing and connecting a wired headset. This means you need an adapter to connect your favorite headphones, not something we like to see in a handset.

The screen on the Touch 3G is a 2.8-inch QVGA one, pretty standard fare among Windows Mobile (WM) devices. We found it to be sufficiently bright and sharp and had no problems with its responsiveness doing touch commands.

On the rear is a 3.2-megapixel camera. This is a rudimentary one with no autofocus, no self-protrait mirror and no LED for lighting up subjects in dark situations. The entire back cover comes off to reveal the battery and microSD card slot. Fortunately, you do not need to remove the battery to access the memory card slot, so switching cards with the phone turned on is possible.

Features

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.

Performance

As mentioned earlier, the TouchFLO interface is a joy to use because of the speed. The generous 192MB of RAM and fast 528MHz processor definitely had something to do with that. Its 1,100mAh battery resulted in about two days of use for us. Your mileage may vary, but those who make lots of calls a day will definitely have to charge daily and/or carry an extra battery. Call quality was good, but take note that because there is no front camera, you cannot make or receive video calls.

Conclusion

A comparable model is the S$669 Asus P552w, but that one is neither as responsive nor as attractive. The Touch 3G costs quite a bit more at S$798, though given the superior design and TouchFLO interface it's well worth the extra S$129. That said, if HTC had managed to price it closer to the low-S$700 region, the Touch 3G would be absolutely irresistible.

If what you want are high-end features like a VGA display and accelerometer, the Touch 3G will not be your cup of tea. For those who need a Windows Mobile PDA-phone but are frustrated with slow custom interfaces, this handheld is a breath of fresh air.