- Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 17 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
5.0 stars
"Best Multimedia Communicator. Ever."
Pros: gorgeous screen; astounding multimedia capabilities; HSDPA support; surprisingly light and compact for its screen size; good battery life for given size, weight and screen
Cons: lack of hardware joystick; lack of programmable buttons; glossy front-side finish collects fingerprints; weird-ish screen resolution; rather uninspiring holding bag instead of a sturdier case
Summary: Let me just say it up front: this... thing is absolutely insane. I think I just turned into a rabid fan. Or worse.
Ever since I became a gadget junkie, I wanted a communicator like this. The centre of attention is, of course, its magnificent screen. It is simply huge, and the high resolution makes it uniquely sharp. The colours are vibrant, and it's equally good for watching movies and reading (e-book readers? if you have a Touch HD - forget about 'em!) The touch part is well done, too. It takes some pressure for the clicks to register, but I found that I liked it: you can just put your finger on the screen, move it around, and click controls as needed. Accidentally clicking something is nigh impossible.
Now, I didn't really like how the gestures work, but I'm not a fan of those. I'll defer judgement to someone who's into that stuff.
Next stop is performance. I didn't really expect much out of a communicator with a 800x480 display, but it seems that the built-in gfx accelerator a) works b) helps. My tests using TCPMP demonstrated that it was perfectly capable of playing unconverted clip in full screen, which surprised me to no end. There was an occasional stutter now and then, but I barely even noticed. Needless to say, SD movies look wonderful on Touch HD's huge screen.
The rest of the package works adequately, without any particular ups or downs (although I should mention that HSDPA is bliss, but that's nothing new for me, since I've been using a 3G modem with my Eee for quite some time now), but instead of covering it in detail I'd like to concenrate on the Touch HD's drawbacks.
First of all, the lack of hardware joystick is really annoying, and believe me, it does affect usability negatively if you're using any software not in the default package, no matter how much HTC would like you to believe that WM touch interface is fully mature. Truth is, it isn't.
My second gripe with HD is that there's only one assignable button. And it's not even a button per se. It's a 'push and hold Answer Call button'. This is absolutely inadequate and is easily one of the HD's worst problems.
Now, both of these problems could be easily solved through emulation: we'd just need a virtual 'keyboard' with directional keys and a few programmable buttons, and it would be 80% as good as the same thing done in hardware. Unfortunately, at the moment there's no such thing, and frankly, I don't see it coming as a WM update. Oh well, we can hope.
The final problem (of sorts) is that the 800x480 screen resolution stumped a few software packages I tried. Some simply refused to work, others suffered from gfx corruption or incorrect touch recognition. I suppose this is a problem inherent in this screen resolution and there's little HTC could possibly do about this. But it is still an annoyance.
Fortunately for HD, all of these small gripes are easily outweighed by its awesome screen and high-performance hardware. So unless you need a hardware qwerty keyboard or run into problems with your fave software package failing to work in 800x480, there's absolutely no match for Touch HD on the market right now.
Where to buy
HTC Touch HD (Unlocked):
$589.99 - $611.36
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$589.99 | Yes |
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$589.99 | Yes |
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Amazon.com Marketplace
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$611.36 | Yes |
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