HTC Touch Dual review (Unlocked)

Features
One of the most notable things about the HTC Touch Dual is that it's the first smartphone to ship with Windows Mobile 6.1 (Professional Edition) in the United States. We touched on some of the interface differences in the Design section, but you also get some enhancements to Internet Explorer Mobile. The Web browser now has pan in/out functionality, so you can zoom out of a page, find the spot you want, and then zoom in, saving you the trouble of having to scroll all over the site.

As for the rest, you still get the Microsoft Office Mobile Suite for editing and creating Word and Excel documents and viewing PowerPoint presentations. There's a PDF reader as well as other productivity tools, including a task manager, a voice recorder, a Zip manager, and a calculator. For e-mail, the Touch Dual offers Microsoft's Direct Push Technology for real-time e-mail delivery and automatic synchronization with your Outlook calendar, tasks, and contacts via Exchange Server. As usual, POP3 and IMAP accounts along with HTML format are supported. Using the Getting Started menu, we configured the Touch Dual to access our Yahoo account, and after inputting our login name and password, we were good to go.

Voice features on the HTC Touch Dual include a speakerphone, voice dialing and commands, and text and multimedia messaging. The address book is only limited by the available memory (the SIM card holds an additional 250 contacts) and you can store up to 12 numbers for a single entry, as well as home and work addresses, e-mail, IM screen name, birthday, spouse's name, and more. For caller ID purposes, you can pair a contact with a photo, a caller group, or one of 40 polyphonic ringtones. The smartphone also has Bluetooth 2.0 that supports mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets, hands-free kits, file sharing, dial-up networking, and more.

The quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) world phone also supports U.S. 3G bands, specifically the 850/1900MHz bands. This means that in order to take advantage of the HSDPA/UMTS speeds, you're going to need an AT&T SIM card and not T-Mobile, whose 3G network runs on the 1700/2100MHz bands. With the 3G, you can get upload speeds of up to 384Kpbs and download speeds of up to 3.6Mbps. It's the boost you need if you want to do some serious Web surfing on your phone, especially since the Touch Dual lacks Wi-Fi. There's also no assisted GPS, so you'll need a Bluetooth GPS receiver to get any type of real-time tracking.

On back, you'll find the Touch Dual's 2-megapixel camera and self-portrait mirror.

Moving onto some of the multimedia capabilities, the Touch Dual is equipped with a 2-megapixel camera with up to 8x zoom and video recording. The editing features and settings are on par with other camera-equipped smartphones. You can choose from five resolutions and four quality settings, while in video mode, you only have a choice of four resolutions. White balance and brightness controls are available to get the best image. Other tools include a self-timer, flicker adjustment, various effects, and a photo counter.

The Dual's camera produced good quality photos, but there's bit of shutter lag.

Picture quality was decent. Objects were clearly defined and though we wished there was a bit more warmth to the colors, they were more accurate and brighter than some of the images we've seen from other camera phones. Unfortunately, we didn't have quite the same praises for videos as the quality was pretty grainy. We also noticed there's a bit of shutter lag.

You can still enjoy your personal multimedia library with Windows Media Player 10 Mobile. There's support for AAC, MP3, WAV, WMA, MPEG-4, and WMV files, to name a few. Plus, if you have TV shows recorded on your Windows Media Center PC, you can transfer them to your device for on-the-go viewing or stream your home's TV programming right to your device with a Slingbox and SlingPlayer Mobile. The Touch Dual features 256MG ROM and 128MB DDR RAM.

Performance
We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900; GPRS; EDGE; HSDPA) HTC Touch Dual in San Francisco using AT&T service, and call quality was OK. We thought there was a bit of hollowness to the audio quality when talking to friends, but we were still able to carry on conversations and use an airline's voice-automated system. There weren't too many complaints on the other end, though a couple of callers reported the occasional echo. The speakerphone had plenty of volume, and while mostly clear, voices sounded a bit tinny. Using the Getting Started menu, the Touch Dual was able to automatically connect to the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset and the Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active Headphones without us having to enter any passcodes.

The Touch Dual is powered by a 400MHz Qualcomm MSM 7201 processor and with about 97MB of free storage and 55MB of available program memory, general performance was pretty snappy. However, some operations, particularly multimedia, could get really sluggish when we had a number of applications running in the background. Surfing the Net was pretty swift, though not particularly blazingly fast. Some graphic-intensive sites still took a little while to load. Multimedia performance was a bit lacking. Song playback through the phone's speaker sounded tinny and and unfortunately, the Touch Dual requires you use the included headset, which connects via the mini USB port--not even a 2.5mm headset jack. We also checked out a WMV clip, which was watchable but still had a bit of pixelation.

The HTC Touch Dual's 1,350mAh lithium ion battery is rated for up to 5 hours of continuous talk time for GSM and 3 hours for UMTS and up to 15 days of standby time. In our battery drain tests, we were able to get 3.2 hours of continuous talk time on 3G. According to FCC radiation tests, the Touch Dual has a digital SAR rating of 1.42 watts per kilogram.